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DOUBLE TROUBLE

Technology has come a long way, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Text: DON TAPSCOTT

JAN

We’ll see all sorts of dazzling new technology in 2004, but it’s the next year – 2005 – that will see Intel’s truly incredible achievement, a microprocessor containing almost a billion transistors.

Think about that number.

After decades of doubling and redoubling, we’re now achieving gargantuan leaps in all facets of information technologies, such as processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth. Want a good example? When the MP3 player debuted in 1998, it stored less than a dozen songs. Now 30-gigabyte iPods store thousands of songs, and soon it will be tens of thousands.

Computing technology is moving onto "the second half of the chessboard," a phrase coined by American inventor and author Ray Kurzweil. He recounted the story of how the emperor of China was so delighted with the game of chess that he offered its inventor any reward he desired. The inventor asked for rice.

"I would like one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of rice on the third square, and so on, all the way to the last square," he said. Thinking this wouldn’t add up to much, the emperor happily agreed.

He should have done the math. While small at the beginning, the amount of rice per square grows to more than 2 billion grains for half the chessboard. The final square would require 9 billion billion grains – enough to cover Earth.

Technologically speaking, we’re at the halfway point. When the first microprocessor, Intel, was built in 1971, it contained 2,300 transistors. About every 18 months since then, a new chip has doubled the number of transistors. Last year, the company rolled out a chip with 500 million transistors. Next year, a billion.

So get ready for interesting times. In 1982, Time magazine named the computer its "Man of the Year," citing the technology’s enormous impact on society. But the sweeping changes we’ve seen in the 22 years since Time’s pronouncement pale in comparison with what will happen in just the next five.

Many of the biggest changes will stem from the Internet’s extension into every facet of our lives. While Intel makes its chips more powerful, smaller manufacturers are making tiny chips that cost pennies. Soon these chips will be built into almost everything we see or touch, and they’ll communicate with each another via the Net. Call it The Everywhere Network, and it will fuel unprecedented productivity boosts in manufacturing, transportation, communication, health care and other sectors.

Custodians of the Internet are scrambling to upgrade the underlying technology to cope with the trillions of objects that will soon be on-line. Just as phone companies are running out of available telephone numbers in North America, the current Internet has a theoretical limit of 4.7 billion different on-line objects. The new system, called IPv6, has 340 billion, billion, billion, billion addresses available. That should do us for a while.

One of the best insights to come from the many essays published to mark the beginning of this millennium is that progress is a relatively new idea; 100 years ago, people had no expectation that society would change during their lifetimes.

My parents understood the idea of progress, but for them it happened at a glacial pace. I remember as a kid going to the Canadian National Exhibition to learn about the amazing new developments in technology, like avocado-coloured refrigerators with built-in icemakers. Back then, progress was something reported yearly – a rather quaint notion when seen in hindsight.

But as progress reaches breakneck speed, our new world doesn’t come without its critics. In April 2000, Bill Joy, then chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, published an essay in Wired magazine entitled "Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us." He foresaw great danger ahead, with our technologies becoming so powerful that they would become our masters rather than servants. I don’t share his pessimism, but we certainly need to be vigilant to the threats that these powerful technologies pose in such areas as privacy.

Moreover, as we hurtle forward, we should acknowledge that much of the world’s population isn’t along for the ride. Billions of the world’s citizens have never made a phone call, let alone used a computer. They can’t even count on clean water from one day to the next. As our technologies double and redouble, so too should our commitment to ensure that these technologies are harnessed for the benefit of all rather than just a select few.

Nevertheless, I’m optimistic. The new technologies bring huge benefits to society, and as we can see from the chessboard, we’ve only just begun. [ ]

Don Tapscott’s new book (co-author David Ticoll) is The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business.

ADD YOUR COMMENTS > dtapscott@enroutemag.net

JAN