IP: Gores speech at Penn (the big audience one

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
February 14, 1996




The Technology Challenge:
How Can America Spark Private Innovation?


        This week, I am delivering three speeches about America's technology
challenges.  On Monday, in Baltimore, I spoke to a collection of scientists,
and asked: What is the role of science in American society?  Yesterday, in
Virginia, I asked: How must we update our notions of self-government to bring
them into harmony with the Information Age?


        And today, Valentines Day, here on the glorious Penn campus, I will
complete this technology trilogy, and ask: How do we spark the innovation
that creates jobs, builds businesses, and lifts lives?


        To answer that question, I'll draw on a time-worn technique of your
most annoying professors.  I'll answer this question with  another question.


        Here it is: How did this happen? (Vice President displays
Valentine's card)


        Now, don't laugh.  I'm going to give this to my wife Tipper when
I get
back to Washington. 
        But it's special for another reason, too.  Later this morning, I will
walk across campus to the Moore Building and turn the key on the Electronic
Numerical Integrator And Computer -- the ENIAC, the world's first
programmable computer, which is celebrating its 50th birthday.


        That computer -- which stood ten feet tall, stretched 80 feet
wide, and tipped the scales at 30 tons -- contains about as much computing
power as my
Valentine's Day card.


        You know that  powerful parallel computer that's playing chess
against Gary Kasparov about 20 blocks from here?  It can evaluate 40,000 chess
moves in the same time it took ENIAC to add two numbers.  Anybody here have
a laptop
computer?  Your computer has more power than the combined power of all the
computers in the world 50 years ago.


        So again the question: How did this happen?  How did the power that
once spanned an entire room migrate to this tiny card you can buy for a few
dollars at the stationery store?


        There are several answers.  The most important one perhaps is that
we've got a lot of smart people in this country  -- a lot of people like the
ones who've graduated from Penn.  They've sweated long nights in the
laboratory -- repeating experiments, testing assumptions, collecting data
-- and
eventually they opened breathtaking avenues of possibility.


        And these software writers and computer engineers joined up with the
marketers and financiers to create real products that have made a
difference in people's lives.  Together, this duo propelled ideas out of the
basement
computer lab and into the living rooms and offices of America.


        But there's another explanation for this extraordinary development --
this explosion of computing power and its migration to all corners of our
life.


        It's an explanation that may surprise you . . . an explanation
not even computer science professors comprehend . . .  an explanation  some
of you
might never have heard before.


Bruce Springsteen.


        Remember that song, "Dancin' in the Dark"?  There are lines in that
song that contain part of the answer to the puzzle of this card.  The
lines go like this: "You can't start a fire . . . You can't start a fire
without a
spark."


        A key explanation for this Valentine's Day Card, for my cool
wristwatch, for your red-hot laptops is that the federal government provided
the initial spark that eventually flickered into these extraordinary
products.


        Back in 1943, the federal government provided a small amount of money
to some of Penn's best engineers so they could develop an electronic machine
that could perform a rather narrow task:  calculating firing tables for
artillery weapons.  That was the birth of the ENIAC.


        After the ENIAC was built, it was put to use performing millions of
discrete calculations that were part of top-secret research on the hydrogen
bomb.  The ENIAC did that well, but before long the war ended.


        At the time, there were some people who thought that the ENIAC and
other computers could be used for other things -- maybe even for business.


        The chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, gushed: "I think there is a world
market for maybe five computers."


        Popular Mechanics, in a 1949 issue dedicated to the inexorable
march of scientific progress, made an ever bolder prediction: "Computers in the
future," the magazine said, "may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."


        And so it went.  Talented people gradually improved on what the ENIAC
began. Computers got smaller, faster, smarter.  And slowly but surely, fifty
years later, I can display this card on a campus where a group of
undergraduates have etched the ENIAC's instructions on a tiny sliver of
silicon.


        In the early days of the ENIAC, nobody knew where it would all lead.
But these pioneers -- and this nation -- were committed to an idea that
transcended any single destination: knowledge matters for its own sake;
pursuing knowledge is something that America must do.


        They heard the music, even if they didn't know the lyrics. You can't
start a fire.  You can't start a fire without a spark.


        It's a similar tale with the Internet.  Look at the cover of this
week's Time Magazine.  "The Golden Geeks.  They invent.  They start
companies. And the stock market has made them instanaires."


        Now, the Internet "instanaires" got where they are mainly through
talent and tenacity.  But it's unlikely they could have set the world ablaze
had government not provided the initial spark.


        In 1969, the federal government -- through the Defense Department's
Advanced Research Project Agency  -- created something called ARPANET.  The
Pentagon's goal was to develop a computer network that would allow military
scientists and engineers to share expensive computers -- and to do it on a
network that could withstand a nuclear attack.  E-mail was a quirky -- but
eventually useful -- afterthought.


        Over the next decade, computer scientists at universities and federal
labs began connecting to the ARPANET.  A few thousand more people began using
this new tool, but to the larger population it remained unknown.


        Then in 1986, the National Science Foundation -- again, an agency of
the federal government -- began what was called the NSFNET to expand the
ARPANET to include not simply computer nerds, but  all researchers at
American universities. That led to the National Research and Education
Network, or
NREN, which I helped get off the ground.  And that eventually led to the
Internet -- the organic network of networks that today is bursting with new
users,
creating entirely new industries, and reshaping how we work and how we
communicate.


        The ARPANET creators could not have predicted what would happen to
their brainchild.  But, as always, they heard the music -- and now we all
know the lyrics.  You can't start a fire.  You can't start a fire without a
spark.


        One more example.  Time's poster boy is Marc Andreesen, a top
official at Netscape.  He's 24 years old.  He's worth about $130 million
dollars.  Not
bad.  That's roughly $14,000 for every day he's been alive.


        Marc got his start just a few years ago as part of the team that
developed Mosaic, the first sophisticated browser for the World Wide Web
-- and the breakthrough application that made the Web accessible to ordinary
computer users.


        Marc performed his work on Mosaic at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, a supercomputing
center funded by . . . yes, the National Science Foundation.


        And the funding for Mosaic itself came from the High-Performance
Computing and Communications Initiative, a federal research and development
program I helped pass into law while I was a Senator.


        Of course, I had no idea at the time that this investment would
lead to hundreds of thousands of home pages on everything from smashing
atoms to the
Smashing Pumpkins    . . . from Albert Einstein to Jennifer Aniston.  Nobody
had any idea this investment would uncork an amazing fizz of T-shirt-to-riches
stories.  But that wasn't the point.


        The point, as I'm sure you're understanding by now was this:  You
can't start a fire.  You can't start a fire without a spark.


        That's how it has worked in America.  Government has supplied the
initial flicker -- and individuals and companies have provided the creativity
and innovation that kindled that spark into a blaze of progress and
productivity that's the envy of the world.


        For much of this century, Americans have benefited from this
process -- this virtuous circle of science and success.  As the nation generated
wealth, a portion of that wealth was invested in research, science, and
technology.
Those investments helped solve tough problems -- and eventually spawned still
greater wealth, which was then invested in still more research.  On and on it
went.  Prosperity generated investment, investment generated answers, and
answers generated further prosperity.


        But now there are some in Washington who seem intent on snuffing out
this spark with the largest cuts in science and technology and education in a
generation.


        In their most recent budget, the Congressional leadership proposed
reducing federal funding for science and technology by one-third by the year
2002, adjusted for inflation.  And get this:  several years after the
Cold War ended, defense R & D is going up, while civilian R&D is going down.
More for
Star Wars, less for environmental research.  At the very moment global
economic competition and global environmental degradation demand civilian
research and
the technologies it often produces, this Congress is proposing the sharpest
cuts in nondefense research since America was fighting World War II.


        The only investment the Congress wants to increase was in health
sciences.  And that's great.  But in almost every other realm, they're
approaching technology with all the wisdom of a potted plant.


        This crowd talks like George Jetson.  But they support policies more
appropriate for Fred Flintstone.  They promise to boldly go where no Congress
has gone before.  But their flight plan will take us straight into the
ground. They sing tunes about moving America into a sunny future.  But
really . . .
they're just dancing in the dark.


        We can do better than that.


        We can invest in new technologies -- not suffocate the fires of
creativity in a crazy quilt of misguided savings.


        We can invest in education technology and link our schools to the
information superhighway -- not pull the plug on our classrooms and
disconnect them from the world.


        We can invest in student loans to open the doors of college to
all our young people -- not shut the university gates to all but America's
wealthiest
families.


        That's what President Clinton has been fighting for.  Because he
understands that the ENIAC changed not only how send valentines, but how we
think about our world.


        For years, much of our thinking was shaped by the metaphor of the
factory.  Our elementary schools were built according to the principles
of the assembly line.  Government's approach to the economy was to "tinker," to
"shift gears," or to "step on the gas. And most of our businesses pursued
the same
Holy Grail: cranking out more and more of the same thing at lower and lower
costs.


        But the ENIAC -- and the revolution it ignited -- altered that. It
changed our world, and demanded a new vocabulary to describe it.


        Yet years after the change began, we're still standing on the
floorboards of Industrial Age metaphors that are creaking with age, groaning
under the weight of a new reality.


        I think there's a better metaphor . . . a sturdier metaphor, more
appropriate to our times.  It's the metaphor of distributed intelligence.


        In the beginning of the mainframe computer era, computers relied
almost totally on huge central processing units surrounded by large fields of
memory. The CPU would send out to the field of memory for raw information
that needed
to be processed, bring it back to the center, do the work, and then distribute
the answer back into the field of memory.  This technique performed certain
tasks well -- especially those that benefited from a rigid hierarchy or that
depended on the outer reaches only for rote tasks.


        Then along came a new architecture called massive parallelism.  This
broke up the processing power into lots of tiny processors that were then
distributed throughout the field of memory.  When a problem was
presented, all of the processors would begin working simultaneously, each
performing its
small part of the task, and sending its portion of the answer to be collated
with the rest of the work that was going on.  It turns out that for most
problems,
this approach -- the distributed intelligence approach -- is more effective.


        But somehow this metaphor, and the idea it contains, never migrated
into our public conversation or our common vocabulary -- even though it's
profoundly re-ordered our lives.


        Distributed intelligence offers a pretty coherent explanation for why
democracy triumphed over governments that depended on all-powerful central
processing units.  And it helps explain why American businesses are pushing
power, responsibility, and information away from the center -- and out to the
salespeople, engineers, and suppliers who know the product best.


        Here's a question that might prove my point.  It's for the Penn
students in the audience.  How many of you, when you graduate, hope to climb
the corporate ladder . . . rung after rung . . . same company . . . for the
next 40 years?  Let's see your hands.   Or how many of you hope to maybe
start your own business, move from project to project, or navigate whatever
exciting webs of commerce present themselves?


        The ladder is a factory metaphor -- one path, one destination,
step by step.  But the web is a distributed intelligence metaphor -- innumerable
paths, unimaginable destinations, any route you choose.


        Just look at the changes in our economy and our culture.  Your
parents probably read Life Magazine.  So did the rest of the country.  But
now almost
anyone can publish a magazine, and many are.  At last count, there were
as many as 50,000 'zines in America.  Distributed intelligence.


        Investment advice used to come from the gray-suited Wall Street
expert -- font of all wisdom, source of all information.  Now, investors are
going
online with services like the Motley Fool, comparing notes with thousands of
other investors, building a pool of information far deeper than any experts
have.  And in the process, they're beating the pants off the big money
crowd. Distributed intelligence.


        So let me bring this full circle.  Because of that clunky old machine
in the Moore Building -- which required more than 17,000 vacuum tubes and
drained enough electricity to light three houses for an entire year -- how we
work has changed, how we organize ourselves has changed, how we think has
changed.  The ENIAC didn't accomplish that directly.  And if all its
inventors were here today, they would probably be astonished by what they
wrought.


        But the ENIAC -- funded by a small investment from Washington  --
provided the spark  . . .  just as ARPANET helped sparked the Internet,
and the High Performance Computing Initiative helped spark the World Wide Web.


        Two days ago, Iowans cast their votes in party caucuses that
signal the beginning of the 1996 elections.  This is the last presidential
election
of the 20th century -- and the first presidential election of the distributed
intelligence era.


        Our choice is pretty clear.  Do we snuff the spark that helps ignite
innovation, new businesses, and better jobs?  Or do we keep providing that
spark -- and rely on the brains and sweat and vision of people like you
to keep America's fires blazing?


        You don't have to rely on distributed intelligence for that one,
do you?


        So, Happy Birthday, ENIAC.  Happy Valentine's Day, Penn.  Let's
get to work.