Bush did virtually everything that Clinton promises to do, and because Bush has done it already it doesn’t leave Clinton much room except to play cock-a-doodle-do. He’ll get up on the post and crow as the marvelous sunrise technologies come blindingly to the fore during his administration. They’re going to have 50,000 technology programs and lo and behold, a million technologies will bloom and they will take credit for it all.
There are going to be a lot of big fiber projects in the next decade. They’re already coming right now. I’m sort of worried that they’re going to think too small … The fibersphere is a big project, and it will take scores of thousands of small companies to do it.
The real miracle of micro-electronics is that these extraordinarily complex hierarchies can be incorporated into individual silicon chips, with virtual supercomputer capabilities. This fabulous supercomputer power can be ubiquitously distributed in the fibersphere … When everybody commands a supercomputer, you give the average owner of a work station the power that an industrial tycoon commanded in the industrial era.
There are all these wise-asses in Washington who really think that they can choose technologies. They think they know better … It’s always going to be that way. It’s not going to change with Clinton and Gore. The dog technologies run to Washington, decked out like poodles. The politician is always the dog’s best friend.
There’s no excuse not to do ISDN today. It won’t detract from the fibersphere. But while they do ISDN, all-optical networks are going to be launched all over the place by different companies … My belief is that fiber network is going to get rapidly cheaper, so that we’re going to be able to do both it and ISDN perfectly well.
For computing functions … electronics will prevail; but for communications, photonics will prevail … Opto-electronics is very important. However, opto-electronics should not be in the middle of the network, it should be on the edges of the network where it links the computing functions to the communications functions.
There’s smartness all around the network, but the actual network should be essentially dumb glass. The fibersphere, as I call it … what you really want is dumb networks where all intelligence is on the fringes. You’ll have intelligent devices of various sorts that are easily reachable from the network but aren’t part of the actual fabric of the network.
The chief effect of these technologies is to put you in command again. The trouble with top-down centralized technologies, which the telephone and television represent, is that they’re dumb equipment attached to complex switching systems and broadcasting technologies. On the other hand, the chief virtue of distributed intelligence is that the network can be dumb and the control of it can be distributed to smart users. That means that technologies are much more servants than rulers of your life … The future is dumb networks.
The scarce resource is the human mind. People will be more valuable. People will get paid better … It’s utter garbage to say that our grandchildren won’t live as well as we do. People who say this just don’t see the technology.
It seems to me that we’re going to start using fiber the way we currently address air. Instead of switching, we’ll broadcast on fiber optic. We’ll be tuning in rather than processing all the bits. And instead of using a lot of switching intelligence in order to economize on bandwidth, we’re going to use bandwidth in order to economize on intelligence.