re: Who's smarter...Bush or Gore?
Here is an interview Gore gave to the staff of a computer geek magazine called Red Herring... Read it and see if there is any way you can envision W in Gore's chair during the interview....
Gore presents an understanding of computer hierarchy on par with most hi techies.....
freerepublic.com
The Red Herring interview: E-Gore
It's all true: In person, he is unbelievably stiff. His clothes are too tight. He is a little too perfect -- too monotonously didactic, too insistently righteous -- to be immediately likable. But in conversation, Al Gore is also thoughtful, informed, inquisitive, and technologically literate. He is sincerely interested in how business, globalization, and the Internet are changing the world. He is capable of moments of genuinely inspired synthesis, as when he told us that, "the American democratic system was an early political version of Napster."
For while the vice president can be punishingly specific about public policy -- see his 191-page economic plan, or his proposed tax reform -- during our two lengthy interviews he was unapologetically intellectual. His answers to our questions were discursive and abstract. To explain his ideas, he spoke not just in paragraphs, but in entire chapters. He drew inspiration from management theory, computer architecture, and thermodynamics.
All this makes him unlike any other politician in America. Readers must decide for themselves whether this degree of abstraction is a necessary or even useful foundation for leadership and the American presidency, or whether a theoretical understanding of the growing importance of business and "distributed intelligence" translates into practical proposals that would help entrepreneurs.
A note: readers of our interview with George Bush will remember that we grilled the governor on his positions on a number of policy issues (see "What George W. Bush believes"). Although we asked the vice president similar questions, we chose not to publish them in print. Mr. Gore's views are well known, and his other remarks were unlike any other interview he has given. And finally, for the record, he is not the father of the Internet. It was all a big misunderstanding. He wants to make that perfectly clear at the start.
JP: Within the technology industry, your remarks about the Internet have been widely ridiculed --
And what were those remarks? [Smiles] I said, "I took the initiative in Congress." It was lampooned as a statement that I invented the Internet. I never said that. What I did say was characterized as an effort to get more credit than I deserved. I regret that. But I am proud of the role that I did play.
PH: And that role was what, exactly?
Twenty-four years ago I began to proselytize for the creation of high-capacity broadband networks. I assure you, at that time there was no one else in Congress even talking about it. I pressed for the idea of an "information superhighway," a metaphor based on what I had learned as a child watching my father author the legislation that created the interstate highway system in America. I remember them debating how wide the lanes should be, that the signs should be green.
After the Apollo program, computing began to spread far and wide, and data traffic began to completely overwhelm twisted copper pairs. Copper had become the equivalent of the old two-lane roads. So I sponsored legislation to push funding for research into new switches, new algorithms, advances in supercomputing, and the establishment of the National Research and Education Network, which took the small ARPAnet and vastly expanded it by hooking up university computing centers.
PH: Common wisdom suggests that you dislike the muck of politics, but love policy. If you don't truly love politics, why have you stuck with it for so long? Why do you want to be president?
[Laughs] I'm not a natural backslapper. But once I get over the hump and get fully immersed in the process, I actually do love it. I don't take to it naturally. But I thoroughly love public policy because it is a way to make life better for people who can't do it alone.
I grew up in two places: in Carthage, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. And when I was growing up I saw the gap that opened up between my friends who were from well-to-do families in Washington and my friends who were from not so well-to-do families in Tennessee. And my friends in Tennessee were just as bright, and had just as much potential, but ended up with much less opportunity because the educational system and the economy did not allow them as much of a chance to develop their potential. I think that's wrong. I think the future of the United States, whether you're in high technology or an older industry, depends on our ability to develop the talents of all our people.
The secret of America's success is to be found in our revolutionary decision to place our bets on the abilities inherent in all of the individuals who make up our country. Our democracy, our constitutional framework, is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.
JP and PH [Excitedly]: Napster! This is good, this is good. Keep going.
And distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, Communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information and creativity to the places where it was needed.
Just as you saw the progressive switch from central processing units to massively parallel supercomputing, our democratic system made it possible for the average citizen to participate in the decision-making of this nation by processing the decision-making directly relevant to him or her in an individual congressional district or state. Then, in the process of biennial or quadrennial elections, our process harvests the sum total of those decisions and uses it as a basis for guiding the nation.
Now, the capacity for each individual to process a lot more information and take much more responsibility for shaping the future is greatly enhanced by the incredible increase in information and processing power available.
That makes it all the more important that we trust individuals and invest heavily in the productivity revolution we need in our educational system.
Gore on corporate management and government
JP: If distributed intelligence is the dominant metaphor of our era, when is centralized processing the most efficient means to effect change in the body politic? To use your metaphor, what is the role of government in an era of distributed intelligence?
I understand what you're asking, but I don't agree with your terms of reference because you assume that government in the metaphor is the central processing unit. In a distributed intelligence model, or a massively parallel model, there is still a center, but it is a place where the processing work done by all of the distributed processors is collected and assembled.
You could look at the transformation in the role of government as being similar to what has happened in the management of companies over the last 20 years. Starting a few decades ago we began to hear a whole slew of theories emerge that went under the name of participatory management theory.
They all had the same basic elements in common. The recognition that the most valuable asset in a company is the unused brainpower and creative energy of the men and women who work in the company. If you can find a way to focus their attention on the task they're performing, and give them an ability and an incentive to see the relationship between their task and the overall effort of the company, then regularly harvest the ideas they have, sort through them, select the ones that are valuable, and then finally enlist their assistance in implementing the best of their ideas, then the organization becomes a learning organization.
The new role of the CEO is first of all to establish a vision that is sufficiently compelling to enlist the creative energy of all of the individuals. Second, the role of a CEO is to establish goals which, if attained, would further the vision. Third, it is the establishment of a set of values and the maintenance of constant awareness of those values, so that decisions made by any individual, whether the CEO or a clerk behind a word processor, will be made according to the same set of values, in pursuit of the same goals, in furtherance of the same vision.
JP: But individual employees are left free to make decisions --
That's correct. Now, what's the role of government in this new era? In a communist system, or a monarchy, or some other system that relies ultimately on a single decision maker, the role of government is to make all of the decisions. But in a representative democracy, a self-government, the role is to facilitate the collective decision-making capacity of all the people.
Now let me take the metaphor to a slightly higher level. Look at how this transformation played out in history in relationship to new iterations of commonly available technology. The print revolution -- or, as Marshall McLuhan called it, "the Gutenberg Galaxy" -- distributed an enormous amount of civic information widely throughout national language groups and helped to focus the definition of the nation-state. And over two or three centuries it empowered enough people with enough information to make possible the version of democracy that accompanied at first the U.S. revolution, and then less successfully the French revolution. Now, computer networks multiply by manyfold the amount of information available to the average citizen, thereby empowering the average citizen to play a larger role still --
JP: By this line of reasoning, why do we need representatives at all? If information is so empowering, why not govern by Web ballots or cellular phone referenda?
Good question. The selection of representative democracy as our model, rather than pure democracy, was a choice driven by two factors, not one. It was physically and practically impossible for all the people to participate in real time in the making of a group decision. But often overlooked but clearly evident in the Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention is the second reason why representative democracy was preferred. Good decisions do not result from simply consuming data and spitting out conclusions. Reflection and judgment are required.
And reflection and judgment do not take place on demand. They don't take place according to a punch clock. And therefore if you had a completely wired nation, you still would not want pure democracy. You would still want representatives to be chosen who have the time to reflect and make considered judgments.
Gore on computer architecture and government
PH: What's the balance, then, between a pure democracy of ballots and representative democracy in an era of distributed intelligence?
Well, it's changing somewhat. I think we're almost always better off with more information. But information is not the same as wisdom, and we have to create opportunities for the intentional transformation of data into wisdom.
Look at the three successive generations of computer architecture. The first was the central processing unit, surrounded by fields of data. Can I draw this? [Grabs our notebook and draws a diagram] The initiation of a task required a trip from the CPU out to the field of memory, the collection of data, the transport of the information back to the CPU, the processing of the information, and then the re-storage of the information in the same memory field.
[Draws another diagram] Second generation: IBM's (NYSE: IBM) real advantage as a company was in something called vector processing, which meant you use the same model, but while one of these processing trips was in process, another one could be initiated, and you could have multiple circuits going on simultaneously. But the work orders associated with each trip still had to be stacked up in the center to be processed sequentially. Are you with me?
PH and JP [Cautiously]: We're with you.
[Draws another diagram] Then, massive parallelism broke it all apart, and the processing power that used to be in the CPU was broken up, and processors were colocated within each sector of the memory field. And then when work had to be performed, the task order would simultaneously initiate processing in all the relevant sectors, and the finished product of each part of the task would be assembled at the center. Instead of three trips, one trip.
Using this metaphor, this is a dictatorship [points to first diagram of CPU], this is a representative democracy [points to second diagram]. But now, with networks, every PC is a server, and soon, as Moore's law continues, every device will be a server.
JP: The network really does become a computer.
Yes. Or to go farther back to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 150 years ago: "The world is a great vibrating brain." What we're witnessing now is a process of dynamic change that's faster and more powerful than anything in the history of humankind. Actually, can I shift metaphors briefly?
PH: We love your metaphors.
Around 25 years ago, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to a Belgian named Ilya Prigogine. [PH and JP look confused] This is not an arcane fact. He discovered what was in essence a new law of thermodynamics, and here's how it operates [draws another diagram]. He studied what are called open systems, in which there is energy flowing in and energy flowing out, and the energy swirls in a recognizable pattern while inside the system. What he found was that when the flow of energy is increased, and increased again, at some point it crosses a threshold beyond which two things happen sequentially. No. 1, the pattern of the system breaks down.
JP: And becomes unpredictable?
No, let me finish. The second consequence is that the energy spontaneously reorganizes itself at a higher level of complexity, and something new emerges, with a different persistent pattern. In some ways that was the birth of complexity theory. Now, if you look at political systems around the world, you can see this phenomenon taking place. You have patterns dramatically in flux because of the emergence of the Internet and networking. In many of the more brittle of the nation-states, you're seeing an emotional and spiritual rejection of the nation-state and a simultaneous reinvestment into smaller regional identities, even tribal and ethnic identities. At the same time we are seeing a reinvestment in supranational identities, like the European Union.
Now, the United States is unique in its ability to absorb this creative dynamic because we were the first nation to adapt to distributed intelligence. Because of our trust in the people, our trust in representative democracy, our trust in distributed intelligence if you will, we have an inherent capacity to absorb and draw out the energy from these kinds of revolutions. In the United States we are the only nation bound together not by some common ethnicity or national heritage, but by a unifying vision, a set of goals, a set of values. "We believe these truths to be self-evident."
This form of national identity is the seed for new national aspirations everywhere on the globe. So we are extremely fortunate at this moment of globalization to be living in the one nation that is seen by most as the model for the future.
PH: But what does this mean for how you will actually act as president? Are you saying you want to be a new type of CEO for a new type of government organization?
I think the role of president can best be defined in the year 2001 in precisely the way I defined the role of a modern CEO in a high-performing learning organization: the CEO imparts vision, goals, values.
The CEO of an organization stands at the center of an organization, yet an organization encounters change at the edge. [Draws "bagel" diagram] In a two-dimensional model, if you have an organization moving along a plane and encountering change, the point of contact with change is typically at the edge, and in that metaphor, the CEO would be equidistant from all types of change. Now if, on the other hand, this information processing sector [of the organization] has been preëmpowered with the organization's vision, the shared set of goals, and shared values, and asked to make a decision in real time, the decision is likely to be the same decision the CEO would make.
Gore on policy
PH: We recently interviewed Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers (see "Charles Darwin, Meet Adam Smith"). To quote from him directly, "It is not an accident that Silicon Valley happened in the United States or that the venture capital boom happened in the 1990s...both were a direct result of U.S. public policy under the Clinton administration." As a key member of the Clinton administration, would you also take credit for the economic boom?
I'm now a little skittish about taking too much credit. However, I think that our economic policies have restored the world markets' confidence in America's economy, have kept interest rates much lower than they would otherwise be, and have drawn investment capital into higher-risk undertakings that might otherwise not have drawn as much investment.
I think our stewardship of the Internet policy issues has been quite sound. I think our Telecommunications Reform Act, for which I was the point person in the administration, unleashed new forms of competition in virtually all areas of computing, software, telecommunications, telephony, et cetera. That gave a surge of new energy to the technology fields at just the right time. But there's no doubt that the American people and American entrepreneurs deserve the credit. They were working just as hard in the 1980s when they didn't have as much to show for it.
JP: You disagree with increasing the allotment of H-1B visas [the visas that allow foreign technology workers to work in the United States], which the technology industry has said is essential to its continued prosperity.
No, that's not true. I do support increasing them. I've called for it to go up to 200,000, in fact. [It is capped at 107,500 for fiscal 2001.] What's obvious to me is that the bargain we've tried to strike with the industry is in their interest as well as everyone else's. Namely, let's increase the number of visas, and at the same time let's increase the amount of commitment we make to bringing revolutionary improvements in our schools. We're on the cutting edge of a productivity revolution in education. And new ideas may be more important than new resources, but we can't take advantage of the new ideas without new resources.
PH: What are the new ideas in education that interest you most? Why are you so opposed to school vouchers?
My opponent wants to drain money away from the public schools in the form of private school vouchers, just at the time when we need to boost investment in public schools. Teachers are now the lowest-paid men and women in our society, given their education.
JP: How would you capitalize education so that teachers are paid a reasonable salary?
By having the federal government play a much larger role. The decisions still have to be made at the local level -- 90 percent of the funding is state and local. However, we have a national challenge that must be addressed. Let me outline a couple of parameters of that challenge. No. 1, we have the largest generation of students in history; No. 2, 60 percent of CEOs say the principal obstacle to their expansion and growth is a shortage of well-educated, well-trained job applicants; and No. 3, the information revolution is replacing solid materials with knowledge and ingenuity.
I have proposed a 21st-century teacher corps; $10,000 hiring bonuses for teachers who have become certified to teach in the areas where they are most needed; class-size reductions; school building modernization, with a federal program to make the income from school bonds tax-free so that the local authorities can issue bonds without having to pay interest on them. We're in a knowledge economy; we need to be a learning nation.
PH: Are the two mutually exclusive? Why couldn't a Bush presidency invest in education and also support vouchers? If you drain away money from public schools into private schools, you start a downward spiral. These voucher proposals do not give enough money to parents to pay for private school tuition. They just give a down payment on the tuition. It's an illusion.
JP: Internet taxation is extraordinarily important to the technology community. State and local governments believe the current moratorium on Internet taxes will eventually gut their tax revenue [which largely derives from sales taxes]. They also feel the Internet tax moratorium unfairly favors international e-commerce retailers over local merchants. Do you support a continued Internet tax moratorium? And if not, how would you begin to tax things more fairly?
Well, I favor a continued moratorium.
PH: For how long exactly?
[Asking an aide] How long is the continued tax moratorium? Three to five years, isn't it? I believe that during the moratorium there must be efforts to bridge the gaps between the two sides because each has a legitimate point to make. I see the emergence of leadership in both communities to move the sides toward more constructive discussions, and I welcome it.
JP: Do you have any concrete proposals?
No.
PH [Stunned]: That's very honest.
Because I think it ought to emerge from the dialogue between the two sides.
PH: But if you were still at the state level, representing the state of Tennessee, would you feel the same way?
[Grins slyly] Yes. I'd feel the same way.
JP: Under the Clinton-Gore administration, the Democratic party succeeded by moving toward the center and becoming pro-business. And yet at the Democratic Convention you said you were standing against the powerful and for ordinary Americans. It sounds a little like an old Democratic party. It's a class warfare ticket.
I didn't say "I'm standing against...," I said that "I'm standing for the people." Even if on specific issues that means having a willingness to fight against the point of view of those who might have too much power. But that's in the interest of business as well. Competition is in the best interest of the business community. I consider myself extremely pro-business.
PH: That's why your speech at the convention was so odd, Mr. Vice President. It sounded like a return to the populist politics of the '50s and '60s.
No. I would encourage you to reframe that. I'm not trying to move to the left or the right; I'm trying to move forward. No matter what your family income, you have an interest in seeing that your medical decisions are made by doctors instead of by HMOs. No matter what business you're in, if you are not a company that controls 70 percent of the market share, you have an interest in seeing the enforcement of reasonable antitrust standards that prevent unfair leveraging of an advantage in one sphere to stifle competition in another sphere.
JP [Smiles at the clear reference to the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) antitrust case]: Did you think Microsoft did that?
No! I had no specific example in mind. I have no comment on any ongoing case.
But there are examples across the board in every industry. Sometimes companies have concentrated power to the disadvantage of the rest of the business community and the rest of the country; sometimes they will find ways to influence the political system to get outcomes that are favorable to them and against everyone else. I am against that. But that is pro-business. In the long run, I cast my lot with the entrepreneurs, with the small business operators, with the up-and-coming companies that are breaking into the big time on the sheer guts and energy that their innovators have shown. |
