Technology Day 1996—"Miracle or Mirage: Technology at the Horizon"

BILL HECHT: For the handful of you who are not people I know, my name is Bill Hecht. I'm a member of the class of 1961. And I'm here not as a member of that class, but as your Executive Vice President. As Executive Vice President, one of the things I've come to learn is that all alumni are created equal. MIT does an evenhanded job on all of us-- hard maybe, but evenhanded. On the other hand, one of the things I say is a member of the class of '61 is that sixes and ones are a little more equal than the rest of us.

For those of you who are my age and older, welcome back to Saturday class. We actually have never tried to do commencement and reunions this closely together. And the fact that we've survived so far means it's done OK. We hope that you'll give us your feedback about this event, and we expect that we will try it again next year, unless the feedback is really terrible. And if it's a workable pattern, we'll keep going.

In order to run something like this, there are huge numbers of people involved, lots of volunteers, many of you in the audience who did that, physical plant, housing and dining, all of the campus activities people-- lots and lots of people. It's like a great big orchestra. But an orchestra needs a leader, and I want to pay credit to our two leader, and their Susan Thomases and Beth Garvin of my staff. I hope they're out there, and if not, let's give them a round of applause anyway.

[APPLAUSE]

My principal job, in addition to getting you to sit down and stop milling, which I've done, is to introduce one of my favorite honorary alumni, MIT's 15th President Chuck Vest. Chuck, to those of us on the campus, has become an extraordinary leader not only on the campus, but all of you should know an extraordinary leader of the research university community in America. He really has become the spokesman in Washington for this treasure we have in the United States, a treasure that every other national country would pay dearly to have to have-- this precious group of research universities, who've led to accomplishments and achievements. And we're at a very interesting watershed.

The federal government is changing. That's probably a good thing; it should. But the question is, how should it change, and how will it continue to support this great effort? Chuck has literally become, initially single-handedly and now, thank goodness, with a reasonable amount of help from industrial colleagues and other university leaders, the person who's led the charge for the value and the extraordinary importance to our society, both in terms of economics, in terms of human resources, in terms of education, of the research university complex. So join me in welcoming Chuck Vest, 15th President of MIT.

[APPLAUSE]

CHARLES M. VEST: Thank you very much, Bill, and good morning, everybody. I understand that we have around 2,500 alumni, alumnae family and friends who have come back for our reunion and especially for Technology Day activities this year. And I think that is really just a terrific. Beyond that, this is a very special Technology Day, in that it comes just one day after commencement.

Ordinarily, as you know, a week elapses between commencement and the beginning of our alumni and alumnae week activities. So this year as provided a wonderful opportunity for you to mingle with those are just beginning their post-baccalaureate journey. It's an experiment, as Bill has said. We intend to repeat it, unless we hear something different from you, but we are interested in your reactions to this new format.

Now, we have a really exciting day ahead of us. The speakers for today's program are truly a stellar group of men and women, who are going to talk to us about the future. And Bill was mentioning getting messages out to the government, to the public, and one of the important messages, of course, is that the blessings of technology that we benefit from today, in terms of quality of life, in terms of health care, of security, of the economy, and so forth, are purely and simply the result of past investments in fundamental scientific and technological research. Similarly, the quality of life tomorrow is going to depend on the investments that we make today. And that's something that I hope all of you will keep in mind as we wend our way through this remarkable program.

I want to take just a moment to indicate some special thanks. They go to Ron Fergle, who has served as the chair of this year's Technology Day Committee, and to the rest of the committee for putting together such an excellent program. Now, knowing that this is MIT, I'm not going to ask you to applaud yet because I know you want to see the product of their work. But I can guarantee it's going to be good.

Now, two years ago, we were sitting around in a meeting talking about messages and how to communicate the importance of MIT to our nation and to our world. And with all due respect in my voice, so don't misunderstand that, I sort of thumped down on the table, and I said, well, one thing we've got to stop doing is spending all of our time talking about how we won World War II. We've got to talk a little bit about the future.

Whereupon Paul Gray leaned over and whispered in my ear and said, guess what the theme for this year's Technology Day is going to be? It's going to be MIT'S Role in World War II. Well, we gad that last year. And, of course, it really was very, very wonderful and did remind us about where we have come, what we have meant to this nation and world in the past. And so I think it's fitting that today we, with that as our background, turn now to look toward the future, the thing that MIT really, in my view, specializes in.

This morning's session will give us both a broad view of the future and a look at new developments in biology, in materials and recycling thereof, in communications and information technology-- three very important themes. This afternoon, following our traditional luncheon, there will be panel discussions that we'll look at the changes that technology is likely to have on emerging businesses, culture, on education, and the economy. Now, I say "likely to have" because we can never know with absolute certainty, of course, just where our science and indeed our technology will lead us.

But with a firm result to act responsibly, we must press ahead, as our Vice President reminded us yesterday. We must press ahead into the realm of the unknown simply because there is so much to be explored and to be known. Earlier in this year, in the annual President's Report, I touched on this them, and it was astounding the instant interest that the media had not only in the United States, but in countries all over the world.

What they found newsworthy, I suppose, was that the president of MIT had actually publicly acknowledged that there's still a few things that our faculty actually don't know. Indeed, when the Washington Post reprinted a portion of these thoughts on its op-ed page. The Post headline writer described the list of unknowns as, quote, "an agenda of ignorance for the next generation of geniuses to chew on." I really like that.

In this annual report, which, I in fact, wrote with the help of quite a few faculty members here at the Institute, I noted that unanswered questions are the single most valuable thing that we lay before our students, and that we must remind ourselves and we must remind the public that our value to practical concerns, like health, productivity, the economy, and national security, accrues ultimately from our enthusiasm for mysteries, our readiness and the readiness of our students to explore the truly unknown.

To come up with just a tiny sampling of the many puzzles that MIT is trying to solve, I turn to our faculty, as I said, for suggestions, and they had no difficulty in naming numerous areas of research, replete with very, very basic unknowns-- the mind, energy, health, climate, the cosmos, economics, information technology, and so forth. In the category of mind, for instance, we do not really know how we learn or remember, how we think, how we communicate.

In terms of energy, we do not really know how to convert solar energy into practical cost-efficient fuels for a wide variety of applications. Nor do we know how to create advanced fuels for nuclear fission reactors. In the field of health, we do not know all the details of each specific gene and the mutations thereof, how exactly how they contribute to the development of cancer, but we're learning. Nor do we understand all of the mechanisms that underlie it.

As far as climate, we do not know, even in principle, what aspects of climate are, in fact, fundamentally predictable. And we find that even the most elaborate climate models, running on the most powerful computers, cannot reproduce today's climate without introducing truly uncomfortable levels of artificiality. The cosmos-- we still do not really know how old the universe is, what it is made of, or what its fate will be. We do not know of stars, other than our own sun, have Earth-like planets capable of sustaining life.

In economics, we do not know why national economies grow at such different rates, either at a particular moment in time or over the long sweep of history. And in the area of information, and you'll be hearing a lot about this this morning, we really don't know what the consequences will be for the future the nation-state, of the explosion in networked electronic communication. The internet, the world wide web, these are things truly quite unlike typical telephone communications, and they have the potential to create new societies that are entities, in and of themselves.

So "we do not know" is the operative phrase. We do not know, but, of course, at an institution like this, we must ever strive to learn. So the search and the thirst for knowledge continues. Many of the people you will hear from today, and those whose work propels him forward toward the seemingly ever-receding horizons of knowledge, they are energized, rather than daunted, by the challenges of the unknown. And now it's my distinct pleasure to introduce several of these people, those who will be our speakers on this morning's program. Following their talks, there will be an opportunity to ask some questions of them.

Known to all of us is Institute Professor David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate, who also has served as President of the Rockefeller University. David first came to MIT for graduate studies in the early 1960s, has gone on to become a leader in modern biological sciences and a spokesman nationally and internationally on scientific issues.

David joined the MIT faculty in 1968 and was the founding director of the Whitehead Institute in 1982. And I can tell you that in addition to his absolute world-class scientific capabilities, I think David has the greatest nose for scientific talent in young people that has ever existed on the face of the Earth, and that has been the reason that the Whitehead has grown so fantastically in its short history. Current research in David's laboratory covers three areas-- cancer-inducing viruses, the immune system, and infectious diseases. Professor Baltimore's topic will be "The Next Gene."

Another of our speakers this morning is John Preston, Co-director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and President and CEO of Quantum Energy Technologies. John's affiliation with MIT began in 1977, when he worked for the Industrial Liaison Program. He became Associate Director of the ILP, before leaving in 1980 to become President of Visual Communications Network, the pioneer of presentation graphics on personal computers.

He returned to the Institute in '86 to become Director of Technology Development. While he was in that post until 1995, MIT led all other universities in the number of patents, licenses, and spin-off companies. John Preston's topic this morning is "Materials-- something old, something new."

Professor Michael L. Dertouzos, Director of the Laboratory for Computer Science, the home base of the worldwide web, is the author or co-author of six books. One of them I think is familiar to all of you-- Made in America-- Regaining the Competitive Edge. This resulted from a study conducted by the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, which Michael chaired.

Professor Dertouzos is an adviser to US and European governments and to several high tech companies, focusing his efforts on architecture, uses, and impact of tomorrow's information infrastructures. Professor Dertouzos joined the faculty after receiving his PhD here in 1964. In 1968, he was the co-founder of Computek, Inc., a manufacturer of computer terminals, and was chairman of its board until 1974. I always like to kid Michael that it's well known that MIT has a provost and a president, but it also has an emperor. That's Michael. Mike's topic this morning is "The Information Age."

And finally, in keeping with the injunction that the last shall be first, our keynote speaker today will be Bran Ferren. Bran Ferren is Executive Vice President for Creative Technology and research and development with Walt Disney Imagineering. Mr. Ferren, who attended MIT in the early '70s, is a nationally recognized award-winning designer and technologist. He works in the theater, in film, special effects, product design, architecture, and the sciences.

Bran began working at Imagineering, which is the subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, in 1993, after running his own firm since 1978. At Imagineering, he heads the Creative Technology Group. An inventor and implementer, Mr. Ferren has received multiple awards, including several from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Now, you will notice this morning that I very carefully avoided all attempts at humor because I don't like to be upstaged. And I think when you hear Bran talk, you'll know why I have said that. You're in for a real treat. Ladies and gentlemen, we now began the morning with Bran Ferren.

[APPLAUSE]

BRAN FERREN: OK, brace yourselves. You're going to find this is a very leading-edge sort of talk. It's completely non-linear. There's no point. There's no particular rhythm to it. And what I'm going to do is just talk a little bit about the things that I care about, relative to this world and the intersection of technology and the arts, which is where I spent a fair amount of time playing. And it's interesting to me to see how new professions are being spawned on a daily basis.

Last time I was here in Boston, it was for the Worldwide Web Conference. And I found myself in the situation, which often happens, of can you do a technology demonstration? And that's always kind of an interesting question-- can you do it? And they said, well, we'd really like to see something because the theme of all of this is interactivity. And some people, such as myself, get kind of a sinking feeling when you hear the theme is interactivity. And the idea was just let's show what the real state of the art is.

I agreed, and what I agree to do was a show system that combines vision, machine vision, the capability of not just seeing and identifying and avoiding colliding with objects, but understanding expressions, gestures of human beings, combining continuous speech recognition, the ability to work, to some extent, in about 2 and 1/2 languages and to be able to do this and derive emotional content from the speech train. Effectors, sensors, coupled to this so that you have a fully closed loop system, pretty state-of-the-art technology in neural nets, which tie it all together-- fuzzy logic, that sort of thing.

What I demonstrated was me. And I think it's important that we remember that I and you are the state-of-the-art in interactive technology, because all of this other junk we have, like computers, is really pretty primitive. And why does this matter to us in the world that I'm in? Because it's the thing called our audience or our guests. And understanding that is pretty fundamentally important.

The first kind of interactive consulting job I had when I left school was with the Canadian government. This was a big job. I'd been working in film and theater before that as well as doing some consumer product work. And the Canadian government called up and said, gee, we're doing this World's Fair. This phone call came in '85. The World's Far was called Expo 86, which gives you an idea of the planning horizon for these things. And they were looking for an interactivity consultant. I was recommended.

I arrived. I sat down in a meeting, where they explained to me that they were designing and building a "future choice" theater. This was a space where you would sit down. There would be a bunch of push buttons in front of you. You would see a film. You would press a button or two and select the ending of the future that the will of the room thought was appropriate.

They wanted for me-- and I was expecting that they wanted my deep philosophical insight into the humanistic values and the vision of the future. What they actually wanted from me was to know how to wire up all the boxes. And I thought about it carefully, proposed to them that what they do is install all the boxes, don't connect them to anything, ask a question, flash a few numbers on the screen, and then just run a different ending every so often.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

They accused me of having a bad attitude. But I maintained that there was no difference whether you connected them or disconnected them. It's a sort of a Turing test for the value of interactivity. If you can't tell whether the boxes are connected or not, in that sort of situation, if you've got the ending you picked, it's because all of the insightful, clever people surrounding you joined you in your button-pushing quest. And if you didn't get the ending, it's because all of the morons that they let in during this show clearly just don't know where it's at.

So part of the problem with this is you have to understand the people like me believe that story is everything, and the act of storytelling, which I would argue that storytelling is probably the world's oldest profession, contrary to what you've heard, and that you don't get misled in all of this by hearing about interactive movies. Interactive movies is a dumb idea. The reason you go to a movie is because you want the point of view of the director, the writers, the other people that were assembled to present this film to you.

If you went to see Schindler's List, and you had a knob installed that let you dial in "happy Nazis" or some other set of phenomena, I guarantee you it wouldn't be a better film. You go there because you want someone else to tell you a story, because presumably, they're good at it. And simply saying, well, gee, we'll let you pick the ending or direct the film, the reason Steven Spielberg gets paid $10 million to direct a film is he's better at it than you are. And for sort of the same reason you don't want an interactive medical experience, where basically--

[LAUGHTER]

I would argue that the same thing pertains to storytelling. It's interesting because if you go to a typical multimedia conference, and at the moment, there seem to be one-- they're happening at about the same rate that McDonald's are being built, about one every 11 hours, I think, in the world. And at some point, someone will announce that they understand the killer app, and the room gets very quiet, the sort of shuffling stops. Japanese tape recorders are thrust into the air in the general direction of the speaker. And what we then hear is generally sort of a breathless word, "content," and there's a stunned silence of the room.

Everyone breaks into a round of applause, and it is acknowledged that the future of multimedia technology will be content-based. Now, if you went to a booksellers conference and said. I finally figured it out. It's content. It's not the bindings. It's not--

[LAUGHTER]

It's not the slope of your serif. It's not a bunch of other things. They would throw you off the stage. You do this at a multimedia conference, and somehow or other when it comes to areas of technology, everybody lose their minds, and you get great rounds of applause. I think part of the challenge in all of this is understanding what is real. And when you're looking into the future, it's difficult because there is no simple answer.

And, in fact, if you're doing something new, generally speaking, I found that, as a designer, if people came to you and said, we have a really challenging project for you, it meant three things were consistent. It meant one, they had no money. It meant, two, there was no time to do an adequate job. And they would usually say, and we want something completely unique and different that nobody has ever seen before. This meant that they wanted to see three examples exactly like it, so they could be sure that it was going to work.

Now, part of the challenge is how do you, in fact, make decisions about the future, when you're in a job, such as what a lot of us do, which is guiding the future, what horse do you bet on? And it's an interesting challenge because what we constantly are presented with, with technology, is solutions often in search of problems.

HDTV, High Definition Television, is a good example of that. Remember HDTV? HDTV was kind of an interesting phenomena because it was proposed as being the solution to the problem of television as we know it. Now, anyone who thinks that the problem with television is the number of horizontal scanning lines, rather than the lines of dialogue spoken by the people on screen, are watching a different type of television than I am. And how many times have you watched TV show and said, gee, that was really spectacular, but if it only had another 622 horizontal scanning lines, it really would have changed my life?

[LAUGHTER]

Part of the problem here is that people miss the point about when you take an advanced interactive system, like a human being, and put them in a storytelling mode, what you are actually doing. And this is where, often, the storyteller's role and the artist's role and the scientist's role are sometimes in conflict and speaking different languages. For example, there is a type of resolution that goes well beyond technical resolution and is critically important when you are communicating ideas to people.

By technical resolution, I mean, if we talk about, let's say, an imaging problem, it is common to have the scientist, now that we're talking about digital imaging, say, well, what are the requirements of this system? What's the resolution? How many pixels are there going to be? Spatial resolution-- how sharp do we want the image to be. Chromatic resolution-- what's the color depth, what's the grayscale. How often do we update it-- temporal resolution.

The fact is there's this really important thing called emotional resolution. Now, it's difficult to talk about emotional resolution because it is a purely qualitative idea, and often the people that have to hear about most are purely quantitative people. And you'll say, you know, this is a completely qualitative idea. You just have to get the feel for it. At which point, they'll listen to it and say, yes, but can we have like an ETF, an Emotional Transfer Function, that lets us assign a number to this that we can understand?

Let me tell me a little but what I mean by it. Think back at what you remember for your entire life that you saw on television, for example, just picking one communication channel. I can think back when I was a child, I was in Norway with my parents. I'm not Norwegian. I was on vacation in Norway. And we were sitting in a pub or a bar or the equivalent having lunch, and up in the corner of the bar on the screen, was a blurry image, light blob moving diagonally across the screen, a lot of static. And I watched this and heard words that I will never forget till the day I die. And they were, "one small step for [STATIC SOUND] one [? stict ?] kind." I will never forget these words.

The mere fact that they were inaudible and incomprehensible didn't matter because Walter Cronkite came on shortly thereafter and explained what Neil Armstrong and the boys had basically said. And the entire planet was transfixed watching this. And even though the resolution of the image was such that I probably could have done a more credible job with a sheet and a flashlight in my bedroom, the fact is that it didn't matter because while the technical resolution of the data link was quite low. The emotional resolution of what was going on was extraordinarily high.

I remember when the President of the United States John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot. And I was a child, and I was in school. I didn't really know what was going on. I'd never heard the word "assassination" before. But I knew from that moment on everything had changed. Everything about our country, about our class, about the people had changed. I didn't understand or begin to understand-- I'm not sure I still understand it-- till much later. But my sense was that something happened, and something profound happened. And again, technical resolution was not high of what was going. And the fact is it doesn't matter because the emotional resolution was high And you say, well, this is all well and good, but you're just talking about these kind of dramatic things. Well, dramatic things are an important part of our lives.

But more to the point, if you look at what a cinematographer does in this day and age-- cinematographer, a cameraman and a film-- he's charged with taking $50 to $100 million and telling stories with beautiful images. He will go get the best technical equipment that captures images on the face of the Earth. And he and she will take this, have their assistant test it, verify its performance, color match it, calibrate it, take lenses costing $50 to $100,000 on a camera costing a half million to a million dollars. By the time they're done with testing, this is the state-of-the-art technology for capturing images.

You bring it to the set. You put an actor in front of it. This is usually the way it's done. And the actor can be making, typically, now the high watermark is $20 million plus a participation in the profits, which is usually when most people in the audience say, engineering? Anyway-- and an interesting thing takes place; this director making $10 million, this actor making $20 million, a few other actors, all of these professionals come together. Just before you're ready to shoot the first scene, an interesting phenomena takes place.

The director of photography whispers to their first assistant, who comes over with a little box. The box is opened up. They take out a diffusion filter. They put it on the front of the lens. They take out a clear piece of glass, take some nose grease and start rubbing it into the edge of the-- if you have a dry nose, Vaseline will suffice, but usually nose grease. You'll take a lady's stocking. You'll stretch it over it. You'll throw a few pink lights over here. You'll put an amber gel over here.

By the time you're ready to shoot, you have lowered the technical performance of the system to the equivalent of a disposable $5 camera or worse. And why have you done this? Very simply because increasing the resolution photographing a movie star, doesn't help tell stories. And 11-foot diameter nostril, by the time it appears on the screen, showing every pore and every hair, showing the color difference where the makeup comes around the side of the face doesn't make for good storytelling. And, in fact, there's a range over which you increase the resolution of the system and you decrease the ability to tell effective stories. And part of what we do in our side of the business is learn how to balance these things.

We are living at an amazing time in history. After coming through a pretty boring time in history, the '80s, not very much happened in the '80s. It was a difficult period. It was a period of time where children were taught to look up to Donald Trump-- go figure. There are two technologies on the horizon, wide band networks and virtual reality, which are going to change the world. And they're going to do it in a permanent and profound way.

How can I say this? How many of you are on the worldwide web out there? Pretty fair bunch. The rest of you should get with the program. But why do we think that this world wide web is anything more than citizens band radio? Why do we think that this isn't going to be something which is a flash-in-the-pan, which disappears? Why isn't it going to be quadraphonic sound or eight-track tape?

I think to answer these questions and understanding that for something to become important, you are competing for the two most valuable things that a person has. And those two most valuable things are time and money. When you're young, money is where it's at. That is the most valuable thing. About five minutes before you drop dead, time seems like a pretty important quantity. And so there's this sort of sliding scale between time and money. But that's what you compete for, if you're going to add value to people's lives. And to look at this, how do you determine which is going to be citizens band and which is going to be something that is deeply profound?

I think to do this, you have to look back in history. And I'm going to take you on a very brief historical tour. You have to understand that evangelizing about how this technology is going to change the world, it's a little like trying to talk to the Wright brothers about the advantage mileage program and why it would be a sound strategy for their future business. It's just hard to get the context going.

Let's look into history. What, since the beginning of our specie, human beings, what were the really important things that changed our way of doing everything? What would you say is the first big invention? This is the interactive part.

AUDIENCE: Fire.

BRAN FERREN: Fire.

AUDIENCE: Wheel.

BRAN FERREN: Wheel.

AUDIENCE: Writing.

BRAN FERREN: A lot of technologists here. Writing. Earlier? Language-- language was a very useful invention. Before language, we did a lot of grunting and groaning. And while that is useful and effective for a certain range of things we have to accomplish in our lives, to build a society, you need more. And language-- and shortly following language, storytelling, and you could argue which came first, meaning the notion of how you organize ideas in such a way that you can communicate them to people.

Language was the first big protocol debate. It was the first big standards war. Because people will learn to communicate if they just grow up together. The fact is they don't interoperate terribly well that way with other people. And so language was pretty important. It clearly started people coming together and being able to work cooperatively.

What was the next big one?

AUDIENCE: [INTERPOSING VOICES].

BRAN FERREN: Writing-- writing was important. Clearly, before writing, anytime someone dropped dead, a lot of information was lost. This gets a little old. You have to wait another 300 years to find fire again. And there was a lot of protectionism, even then. And so we basically needed writing in order to help transport and move ideas forward. I don't think anyone would argue that really changed things.

What was the next big one-- really changed the world?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BRAN FERREN: Printing-- who invented printing?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BRAN FERREN: Louder.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BRAN FERREN: Chinese, right. I'm glad I didn't--

[LAUGHTER]

You keep hearing this Gutenberg stuff. I guess it helps to be male and white and European to be remembered for inventing something. But clearly, the Chinese work predated. And no one would argue this changed the world. Gutenberg, thought this was the killer app. You know, everybody's got to have a Bible. We can drop the cost of it. We're going to make a killing.

[LAUGHTER]

Immediately had terrible union problems. The monks were up at arms, you know. This is the work of the devil. It'll never catch on. The quality isn't there, et cetera, et cetera. But the fact is it did change the world. Gutenberg died penniless, had no clue as to why this technology would have been useful and valuable. Certainly, didn't help him a lot and the whole Bible, and it didn't actually change the proliferation rate of Bibles significantly, apparently. But it certainly changed the world.

What's the next big one?

AUDIENCE: Cellphone.

BRAN FERREN: Cellphone?

[LAUGHTER]

I think you can make an argument that that's the case. Some people might argue that the telephone was actually predating the cellphone. I'm not sure if that's true. But the inventor of the telephone, which, as who know, is Elisha Gray. And due to some patent procedural things, Mr. Bell was credited. Mr. Bell, who was awarded the most valuable patent in history, thought this was about helping the hard of hearing. He was funded by an institute to do that.

He developed the technology the probably single-handedly was most alienating to people who are hard of hearing ever developed, that up until recently, completely took them out of the mainstream of what was going on. And terrible times again-- there were other sort of standards and protocol issues. You'd install a phone in someone's house. The phone would ring. They would pick the phone up, hear nothing, and hang up because the word "hello" had not been introduced into the transaction process. And a significant training program ensued to teach people how to say "hello," which is not a normal act when you pick up a Bakelite device and so forth.

He also had to wait till people got phones. Having "a" telephone is a little like having "a" tube of epoxy. It amusing perhaps, but not, ultimately, terribly useful. Certainly changed the world. Certainly didn't have the sort of positive impact on the hard-of-hearing the inventor developed.

Next big one?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BRAN FERREN: Nothing like a group that can work as a united team. Anyway--

[LAUGHTER]

--in fact, nothing like a group. I heard in there somewhere electricity. Certainly, that had a dramatic impact. I also in overheard the idea of broadcasting. Broadcasting and radio certainly worked. It was certainly a dramatic change in pulling the planet together and getting communications going. Who invented broadcasting? Who invented radio?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BRAN FERREN: Marconi-- Tesla certainly predated Marconi in his work. Of course, he thought it was a way to get power from one place to another, that you'd put in a broadcasting station, and then plug your light bulb into an antenna. And it's kind of interesting because he eventually got around to using it to control model boats. He was apparently funded by the government to steer torpedoes. If you want to get anything funded in the long run, you have to steer a torpedo with it. And--

[LAUGHTER]

Interestingly enough, the entertainment industry developed-- as soon as the steerable torpedo came into being, we had a new big problem, and that is the enemy discovered that if you had a bigger transmitter, you could take that torpedo and steer it around back to where it came from. This is not good. And so we needed to develop the first sort of big information security solution, which is how do you control a torpedo by radio, without, in fact, having it steered back in your direction.

And the first method of secure communications is a subset of spread spectrum called frequency hopping, where you synchronously change the frequency of the receiver and the transmitter together. First one's used 88 frequencies in the torpedoes, and 88 because it was based upon a piano roll, which was punched with the two, and it changed the frequencies together. This topology was patented by Hedy Lamar.

[LAUGHTER]

True-- and was awarded to the US government and solved a big problem with it, and it's a technology which is still used-- without piano rolls-- today. And you know it's interesting that solutions come from unusual directions. Have you all heard the, perhaps, apocryphal story of why there's no Nobel Prize in mathematics? And I don't know if this is true, but I prefer to think it is, and that is because Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician, and therefore it was decreed there will never be a prize in mathematics. Good enough reason for me.

But, at any rate, when you look at these things, look at some of these big inventions, and not all, but a significant number of these inventions had one thing in common; they increased the bandwidth of interpersonal communications. They allowed people to tell stories to other people, one or more. Now, again, Tesla's work in transmission basically waited for Marconi to improve upon it. Initially this was thought of just a way of ship-to-shore or boats or trains talking to each other.

It was a significant period of time before someone said, you know, let's make this asymmetrical. Let's put one big transmitter on the top of a hill, put receivers all over the place, and now we have broadcasting. This wasn't obvious to the pioneers. And I find it interesting that virtually all of the inventors of key technologies are clueless. Many of the great intentions that have changed our world have this sort of common factor that they increase the richness, the bandwidth of interpersonal communication, the ability to take storytelling and leverage it to more people.

If you believe that, and I do, then these broadband networks that are rolling out today and virtual reality-- and not virtual reality in the sense of gaming platforms, but in the sense of the widest bandwidth technology to get information in or out of a human being-- ultimately are going to make all of these other inventions pale in importance. And I think that it's actually an extraordinary time to be alive because this stuff is really happening around us. Now, we have to do much better than the technologies we have now. Contemporary computer technology is really awful. It's not going to be about keyboards and about CRTs and other things like that.

I think, ultimately, probably VR is going to wait for implants to be a really effective technology. How many of you, do you think, would sign up for the VR implant, the high resolution direct pipe? Five. Well, I'll bet you're wrong, and a lot more of you will. And why will you? If you went back 30 years, 35 years ago, and went into your doctor's office, and the doctor said, I have good news, and I have bad news. And you said, well, what's the bad news? Well, you have heart disease, and you have a problem called arrhythmia, AND what happens is your heart stops beating rhythmically, and if we happen to be around when this happens, we can bring you back. If we're not around when this happens, you will die. And you say, well, what's the good news? Well, we have an experimental new technology. And your ears perk. Hope is always a good thing.

The doctor explains they're going to saw your chest open. They're going to implant a computer. Now, 30 years ago, you're thinking mainframe.

[LAUGHTER]

They're going to attach to this computer a stethoscope to monitor your heart. They're going to throw in a cattle prod to get it going again, if things aren't going well. They're going to need to power it, and battery technology wasn't all that great then. So let's go nuclear-- a little plutonium wouldn't hurt anything in there to sort of power the thing up. Odds are, you would think this is a pretty horrific concept.

Now implanting a pacemaker in someone is a routine check on a hospital form. People adopt this quickly. How is it going to work on the sort of high-fidelity imaging implants? Probably what's going to happen is one of you, or more, in the audience statistically is going to lose your vision during your adult life. You're going to be in a car accident. Something's going to happen. You can have an industrial accident. And at some point, the doctor's going to say, look, I've got good news, and I've got bad news. And the good news in this case is going to be a technology, sort of like television, which isn't going to restore your vision 100%, but it's going to let you see moving light, and it's going to let you function again.

How many of you think you'd go for that? Well, a lot more of the audience does. And how many of you think that once you put it in, you would follow the upgrade path, whereas it went from television to HDTV, you would increase the fidelity and resolution? Most people still on board with that?

Well, about the time it's going to go to HDTV, the doctor's going to say, nice to see you again. We're going to give you your new chip now. It's great. And by the way, would you like the fax option?

[LAUGHTER]

And you're going to say, why not? I mean, you know-- and the fact is these things happen in a way that usually are an indirect route. What seems horrific to you today, will seem pretty straightforward. As we look at this new world and as it's changing, you hear about the 1,000 channels of television. Well, you're not going to see 1,000 channels of television. First of all, organizing television by channels for 1,000 channels makes about as much sense, one to 1,000, as organizing a large library, like the Library of Congress, alphabetically by publisher. It's just not a terribly effective way to find the information you need.

I've seen commercials recently. Have you ever send a fax from the beach? You will. Have you ever read a book from your bed? You will. Well, I have read a book from my bed. And in terms sending a fax from the beach, I haven't felt any compelling need to. And if I had the capability, I probably wouldn't. I think the telephone company in question probably is trying to say, have you ever received a $175,000 phone bill? You will.

[LAUGHTER]

The telecommunications industry smells blood. The sense is that all of these people want to communicate with each other, and we're going to find a way to do it. If you're in the pipe business, the business of connecting people to other people with information, this is a very exciting time. In fact, it gives them a mission-- getting you to leave the phone off the hook as long as possible. It gives paying the "piper" a whole new meaning, which, I think, is significant.

[LAUGHTER AND CHEERING]

It gives people who have brands some hope. Because the only way you're going to find things out of this sea of information, ultimately, is by having a variety of brands that you depend upon, because they come to you with a point of view. I got a great lesson in branding the other day. I was in the-- it was two years ago. I was in Death Valley in the summertime. Why, you might ask? Because I wanted to see what it looks like when it's really hot and take some pictures. It was 127 degrees, which qualifies as really hot. And somewhere about halfway through the day I decided to obtain the two fluids necessary for life in the desert-- gasoline and water.

Turns out there's a place that sells both of them at Stovepipe Wells. I went there. I had kind of an interesting experience because as I'm filling up, and as I'm buying some brand of water that shall remain nameless-- Evian-- I noticed that I was paying five times as much per fluid measure for the water as I was for the gasoline. And you do the same thing. This is called effective brand management.

You have been convinced that it is worth paying much more for water than it is for gasoline, and that's brand management. It's convincing you that there is value in that. It's convincing you that something is being brought to you that's important. This notion of branding, this notion of, well, what is the future? What's after television? Everybody thinks, when they're in the communications medium or an art form, that basically it's as good as it gets. 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago-- street theater. This is the state-of-the-art in communication. Someone invented theater-in-the-round. My god, this is the state-of-the-art in communications. The proscenium theater, indoors, lighting-- at every point, some new form evolved. Someone thought this is great. But couldn't imagine it getting any better.

The people in theater never anticipated motion pictures, and when motion pictures arrived, what the impact would be. The people in motion pictures never anticipated television. The people in television now think television is it, that there is nothing after it because they can't imagine it. Others are saying, well, maybe it's a hybrid form of the computer-- computer and television together. They call this convergence.

You have to be a little cautious with this because while, for example, you could make a combination word processor/food processor into one household appliance, it's not necessarily clear that most people would find this a valuable convergence. And I think we have to understand that while there is something after, and it is going to take this notion, I maintain, of connectivity and computation and storytelling and bring it together, we have to have much better interface technology.

The display technology we have today is just awful. I gave a speech at a display conference about a year ago. And I saw one-after-the-other, every presenter get up and do a pitch on the latest, newest display technology, using an overhead projector and a view graphs. What does this tell you? We have a long ways to go.

At the same time, once we have something like electronic paper, once we have something which has the contrast ratio of this, the convenience of it, but is networked, and as you flip it over you get the next page or what you want, but it's convenient to read, it has resolution, it has some of the attributes of mature technologies, like books, it'll change the world.