[Mb-civic] Ready for High-Tech Progress? - Sebastian Mallaby - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Ready for High-Tech Progress?

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, October 17, 2005; Page A15

It feels like the 1990s minus the good parts: There's a sickly buzz of 
scandal emanating from the political establishment, but there's no 
carefree ignorance of al Qaeda and avian viruses; no exhilarating diet 
of falling poverty statistics and rising stock prices; no escaping the 
unnerving prospect of the Fed minus Alan Greenspan. So it was nice last 
week to hear Bill Gates channeling the spirit of the 1990s -- and 
declaring that the next 10 years of techno-wizardry will bring more 
breakthroughs than the last.

Gates was addressing a crowd at Howard University, the last stop on a 
tour of six campuses. His mission was to inspire students to pursue 
careers in software, so he appeared on the stage after a few minutes of 
heart-accelerating rock music and painted the future in enticing colors. 
The forces that brought past progress in computing -- the doubling every 
18 months in the power of microprocessors, the declining price of 
computer memory -- continue unabated. Meanwhile, new forces -- 
ubiquitous wireless connections, speech recognition, the digitization of 
photography -- add juice to the party. If programmers can make all these 
forces vibe together, the world will be a lot more fun.

What sort of fun? In place of the personal computer, there'll be a full 
hierarchy of gadgets. Smart watches will download weather forecasts and 
news headlines over wireless connections. Smart phones will scan 
products in department stores to check where better prices can be found. 
Notebook computers will be portable libraries with the weight of just 
one novel -- libraries that allow you to scribble in the margins and 
share your witty insights wirelessly with friends. Your home computer 
will respond to instructions both written and vocal, and it won't be a 
computer so much as a network. Music, videos, games, photographs -- oh, 
yes, and all your lofty intellectual outpourings -- will be beamed 
around the house to a variety of screens and speakers. The tablet on the 
kitchen counter will display recipes and shopping lists. The plasma 
screen on the wall will be for family photos.

In most fields of human endeavor, you hope for gradual improvements: an 
engine that's somewhat more efficient, a medicine that improves life 
expectancy by a few months. But computer power progresses exponentially, 
warping social life, intellectual horizons and the business playing 
field. You can chat and play and work with people half a world away, 
producing miracles of unplanned teamwork like the Wikipedia.

Right now, millions sit through office meetings they don't need to be 
part of, and millions more sit through sessions that prove pointless 
because a key person isn't there. But once all meetings are online, 
thousands of hours of wasted energy will be gloriously liberated. Rather 
than attend that marginal meeting, you will watch it on your laptop, 
fast-forwarding through the dull bits and messaging the interesting 
speakers by clicking on their heads. In the place of some meetings, 
companies will convene Wiki-style message boards on which people edit 
and re-edit one another's proposals until the best one prevails.

You don't have to buy these specific predictions to accept that progress 
is at hand. Nobody knows its shape, precisely: The other day Google 
proposed to offer free phone service in San Francisco, thereby casually 
announcing the death of an entire industry; the good change will come 
with a fair amount of bad change, such as ID theft and spam. But if you 
believe even half of the Gates prophecy, you quickly realize the 
lopsidedness of most debates in Washington.

A lot of Washington debates are about managing bad stuff: war, 
terrorism, natural disasters, killer viruses, budget deficits, trade 
deficits, medical inflation, airline bankruptcies, imploding corporate 
pension plans. But policy also needs to focus on the good stuff: To 
figure out how we can accelerate progress. If we don't fix the budget 
deficit, we will be setting ourselves up for economic punishment. But if 
we don't position ourselves to take advantage of technology, we will be 
setting ourselves up to miss a huge economic prize.

What must we do to remain prize-worthy? The good news is that, in 
Gates's estimation, between 17 and 19 of the world's top 20 computer 
science faculties are American, and Microsoft hasn't yet moved many 
software jobs offshore. But to keep things that way we need to step up 
federal research funding and relax post-Sept. 11 visa rules, so that the 
United States remains what Gates calls "an IQ magnet." And because smart 
Indians, Chinese and others are more likely to return home as their 
countries grow freer and more prosperous, the United States must focus 
on growing its own talent. Last year two respected global surveys of 
math skills in eighth and ninth grades put the United States in 15th and 
24th place, respectively. That isn't good enough.

It would take fairly little to address these problems. Last week a panel 
convened by the National Academies proposed a package of measures that 
ranged from math prizes for high schoolers to pay raises for math 
teachers, along with a program to boost federal research funding by 10 
percent annually for seven years. The total price tag comes to $10 
billion annually, but the nation spends nearly twice that amount on 
absurd farm subsidies. What kind of priorities are those?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/16/AR2005101600798.html?nav=hcmodule
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