The Gilder Friday Newsletter [ Uncut - This Time For Real! And try to visualize a "-" where you see a "?" ;) ]
? THE FRIDAY LETTER ?
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| gilder.com | Issue 222.0/October 21, 2005
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HEADLINES:
? The Week / The March of Moore (Nov. 2005 GTR Excerpt)
? Friday Feature / The Silicon Eye (Book Excerpt)
? Friday Bonus / Microvision: Heads Up!
? Readings /
The Week / The March of Moore (November 2005 GTR excerpt)
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George Gilder (10/17/05): Introducing his dazzling new best seller, The Singularity is Near, and generously giving a copy to each of the attendees last month at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference, Ray Kurzweil acknowledged that macro-futurism, projecting Moores law in all directions, is much easier than micro, predicting what will happen to specific companies and technologies. Nonetheless, on stage the first night of Telecosm, Ray faced a skeptical micro question from yours truly on the dismal failure of several teams of robotic engineers last year to create a device that could negotiate a DARPA course through the Mojave desert without plunging off the road into a ditch or an infinite loop. In response, Ray confidently asserted that teams from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford would succeed in this task in October. Sure enough, he was on the button with this prophecy. So far, so good.
At the heart of his larger prophecies is the continued exponential progress of all the arts and sciences of information technology on beyond machines into a biological Singularity. Rays intriguing argument is that todays exponential curves merely follow in the train of the original evolutionary curve, which also reveals an ever accelerating pace of advancesome 13 billion years from the exquisitely calibrated bang to the biosphere, with DNA processing in the eukaryotic (nucleated) cell, then the Cambrian explosion of life forms some 3 billion years ago, and then the rushed ascent of punctuated equilibrium to the emergence of man and Ray and the Telecosm list, after which things really start popping.
Discerned in all this heroic ascent is scant intelligence at all until the arrival of human technology, though the information processing underway in the some 300 trillions of cells in your body, each with some 6 billion base pairs of DNA programming, excels the output of all the worlds supercomputers with all their intricate software and firmware. As Ray points out (The Singularity is Near, p. 209), the ribosomes that translate DNA into amino acids accomplish 250 million billion read operations every second just in manufacturing the hemoglobin that carries oxygen from the lungs to body tissues. While the genes are digital, much of the biocomputing is inscrutably analog. But in another four decades, so Kurzweil calculates, digital machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence, precipitating the Singularity.
Humans, he predicts, will use the machines massively to extend our lifespans and to project the reach of our learning both into our own brains, mastering the mysteries of consciousness, and out into space, with an imperial march of human intelligence incarnate in our machines and in our newly bionic bodies. It is a grand and triumphant trajectory of thought on which Kurzweil is launched, and his argument is finely mounted and gracefully written, with much self-deprecating humor in artfully shaped dialogs at the end of each chapter. But as some attendees groused, it would be nice if by the time of the Singularity, or even before, Microsoft (MSFT) could get Windows to boot in less than four seconds and could avoid the darkened event horizons of its chronic blue screens. And after many projects at Caltech attempting to use neuromorphic models as the basis of electronic simulations of brain functions, Carver Mead observed that we still have no idea of the workings of the brain and nervous systems of a common housefly. As I describe in The Silicon Eye, it goes about its business, eluding the swatter and garnering chemical sustenance in the air, all on microwatts of power using means that remain beyond the grasp of our most sophisticated neuroscience.
Read the complete November issue, including updates on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Amedia Networks (AANI.OB); Equinix (EQIX), and EZchip (LNOP), by logging in with your subscriber ID on gildertech.com.
Related Reading:
Ray Kurzweil: Treating Machines As Living Entities
informationweek.com
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Friday Feature / The Silicon Eye (Book Excerpt)
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Death Valley Nuts and Sweets, beckons the neon sign. Amid the lunar desert rimmed with remote mountains, in a little shop claiming to be the most beautiful gas station in the world, a 69 year-old man named Carver Mead assumes the iconic pose of the 21st century pilgrim. A trim bearded figure, he is hunched prayerfully among the gas pumps trying to get reception on his cell phone.
The glow from the sign falls on the back seat of his rental car. It is full of arcane century-old technologyan array of apparently random electrical devices that might intrigue a teenaged tinker or strike terror in the mind of an airport security guard. A small middle-aged blonde woman sits patiently in the car in front of the electrical debris. She has been through this before.
Who is this Carver Mead, collector of electrical relics? And what is he doing at a dive in the midst of Death Valley in early October 2003, haplessly trying to catch up with the world?
Following his own visions and disciplines, whims and raptorial will, Mead has always managed to remain ahead. Although little known outside the silicon valleys of America, he has been the leading intellectual figure in four decades of American electronics, through three generations of the fastest advancing gauntlet of world technology. Crucial to his lead has been his intuitive sense of phase, his special feel for the timing of the crests and troughs of opportunity in life and electricity, science and history.
The waves of influence from his classes at Caltech often impelled Mead North to Silicon Valley. From his early years advising Moore at Intel, where Mead wore the seventh badge, he spent much of his career commuting to the Bay Area to consult with his students and guide their endeavors. His quiet voice, steady gray eyes, trim goatee, and swirly colored open necked shirts became familiar in the high councils of the industry. When he says something you listen. As if to await an alignment of the phases of his thought with yours, he pauses. He thinks before he speaks, and as he thinks he radiates, and the radiation reaches the listener and opens his mind for the impending idea. During the course of his career, many have listened attentively enough to act on his concepts. He has served as a founder of twenty companies.
Prominent among the twenty is a photographic imager company off Zanker Road in Santa Clara named Foveon, where Mead serves as Chairman of the Board. Imagers take light from a lens and transform it into electrical signals containing an image. Until early in the new century, nearly all cameras were analog, using film that directly transcribed the image into a visible pictorial pattern. But this is a digital age. In digital you dont make direct chemical analogies of a scene; you translate it into a set of numerical values of the light colors and intensities, which can be processed by computer into the desired picture that you choose to print out.
In September 2003, one month before Meads stop in Death Valley, digital imagers that converted the picture into a pattern of bits and bytes to be stored on a computer memory exceeded the unit sales of the usual analog film imagers for the first time. Sold in 2003 were close to 35 million digital cameras. Incorporated in cellphones were a rapidly growing additional ten million digital imagers soon to pass beyond a hundred million in subsequent years.
Seven years before, in 1996, Mead founded Foveon to launch an imager for this new era. He devoutly believes that Foveons imager chip is far superior to any other imager in the world. Among many experts in agreement are analysts at several leading photography magazines in Japan and the U.S., John Markoff of the New York Times, futurist John Dvorak of PC Magazine and the photography team at Consumer Reports.
Yet here it was seven years after the companys founding, with the market for new imagers exploding, and something at Foveon was way out of phase. Of the nearly 50 million microchip imagers sold in 2003, the Foveon device commanded a share of the market less than one tenth of one percent. One wondered why the Chairman chose this moment to exhume the residual devices from the original American power grid.
The future after Foveon will confine the old paradigm of vaulted cameras chiefly to images that cannot be seen. Still needing a curved protective chamber rather than a mostly bare microchip will be tools for semiconductor photolithography and etching, scanning electron tunneling microscopes, nuclear resonance imagers, Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) scanners, x-rays, and inspection machines for baggage and shipping containers. But even in these applications, the chip itself will increasingly bear lenses and other apparatus required for capturing high-resolution images wherever they are needed. Already available from National Semiconductor are chips in the form of pellets that are consumed orally by the user and which take a series of photographs of the esophagus, stomach, and intestines, and then are unceremoniously extruded and flushed along with other offal, having wirelessly transmitted their report.
Foveon will do for the camera what Intel did for the computer: reduce it to a chip and make it ubiquitous. Dismantle it and disperse it across the network. Render it wireless, wanton, and waste-able. Then, as Moores law shrinks the actual imager to an ever-smaller portion of the chipjust as it relegated the CPU to an ever-smaller corner of the modern single chip systemthe Foveon device will assume ever more functions. No longer merely a sensor, it will aim toward intelligence. It will evolve into a vision system. It will become something of an eye, something of a brain.
That is, it will no longer serve merely to reflect the visible aspects of the world. Attaining powers of recognition and pattern matching, it will identify movements, threats, anomalies, fingerprints, faces, scenarios, poisons, weapons. It will find defects in manufacturing processes and descry trends in ambient traffic. It will prevent automobile accidents by recognizing dangerous patterns. It will help the ornithologist find his rare bird, the hunter his dangerous beast, and the rescuer her lost child. It will baby sit and house sit.
It will be described as an enemy of privacy. But it will enable us to defend privacy against the muggers, rapists and terrorists who would most brutally rend it. It will eliminate most false charges that rip open the privacy and smear the reputation of non-muggers and non-rapists. It will allow us to take more risks in the knowledge that our fate can be observedthat doctors and police will more often be in reach and informed.
Buy The Silicon Eye:
gildertech.com
The final quarter of the year is a profitable one for the Gilder Technology Report!
Fourth quarter returns for the Gilder Technology Report tech portfolio for last four calendar years have been 21%, 20%, 28%, and 47%, with a total portfolio gain of 155.8% over the past three years.
In 2005 alone, investors following the GTRs top-performing technology investment advise gained 78% on Corning (added 3/25/05), 77% on NetLogic (added 1/28/05), 46% on National Semiconductor, 45% on Broadcom, 38% on TI, and 26% on Agilent, as of October 1.
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Friday Bonus / Microvision: Heads Up!
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"I have been visiting for five years and each time I become enthusiastic about its opportunities," notes technology visionary George Gilder.
"Based on MEMS (micro electronic machines) technology, Microvision (MVIS) makes head-up displays (HUD) that provide the teleputer with a screen-free visual image. It currently supplies heads-up displays and helmet-mounted monitors for the military. Its near-term opportunities now include a range of commercial and even consumer applications. The market for solid-state displays is growing rapidly. Solid-state displays are everywhere: cell phones, cameras, lap top computers, signs, and home-entertainment systems. There are so many different applications that the market almost defies classification.
"In September, Microvision signed a letter of intent with Bosch, one of the world's largest automotive suppliers, to jointly develop heads-up displays for cars. With GPS navigation now becoming more widespread, more advanced HUDs are needed to display high resolution, multi-color graphics on the windshield. We note Audi's statement that it will begin installing laser-based HUDs in its cars, and we believe Microvision is a key technology player.
Read the Complete Article:
moneyshowdigest.com
Gilders October Book of the Month
Born out of a controversial panel with Bill Joy at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference in 1998, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweils latest book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, envisions an eventthe "singularity"when technological change will become so rapid and profound that intelligence will become non-biological and trillions of times more powerful.
Buy Your Copy Today!
Readings /
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Bret Swanson: Buying Time in China
disco-tech.org
Does the Video iPod Make the Case for Tiny Screens?
alwayson-network.com
Tomorrows Operating Room To Harness Net, RFID
news.com.com
Eyes On The Prize
technologyreview.com
The Future of the Web
informationweek.com
Google Beats Again, Confirming Strength of Online Ad Market
investors.com
Suns Changing Business: Maintenance, Grids, and Commoditization
alwayson-network.com
Digitize This
technologyreview.com
Netflix Profits Fall On Suit Settlement; No Downloads
investors.com
Global Warming, Avian Flu, And Other Risks
alwayson-network.com
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FRIDAY LETTER STAFF
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Editor: Mary Collins / mcollins@gilder.com
Research: Sandy Fleischmann / sfleischmann@gilder.com
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