This is the Word. It is Truth. Gospel. Yeah, I went there. Faith.
Sit back and enjoy the ride folks!
From 1/1/2000 WSJ-
The Faith of a Futurist
In the future, as in the past, religious faith is central to the
process of innovation
By GEORGE GILDER
Every year I host a conference on the future of the Internet in a world of
bandwidth abundance. On the last day, I hold a debate or panel on the
religious significance of the technological disputes. Every year, some
attendees object to this insertion of theology into the midst of a meeting
otherwise devoted to the higher vocations of microelectronics and money.
Predicting the post millennial future, so they say, is an intensely practical
pursuit, with an unimpeachable test of investment results. Technologies will
win or lose on the basis of their performance in the marketplace. All other
disputes are merely "religious wars" that will distract the investor from his
rapt contemplation of the objective facts.
With any technology that will change the world so radically as the Internet,
however, religious wars are important and inescapable. Although no guns
will be fired, or armies deployed, net conflicts so engage the deepest
beliefs and loyalties of the combatants that they can be defined as religious.
Whether the role of the state in an age of strong encryption or the control
of speech in a global communications medium, the issues are not merely
practical. By dissolving the inhibitions and obstacles, the blinders and
ballasts of economic locality, the Internet will essentially make the globe
transparent. In much the way Albert Einstein's theory of relativity
transformed the time-space grid of classical physics at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the Einsteins of Internet communications are now
transforming the time-space grid of the global economy.
After Matter's Overthrow
The essence of the change is the overthrow of matter. One manifestation of
it, stressed by Alan Greenspan in recent speeches, is falling commodity
prices and other trends signifying the declining contribution of material
resources to global added value. We have soared higher and, literally,
become lighter. The weight in tons of U.S. gross domestic product has
dropped 25% in the past two decades, while its value has more than
doubled. These trends all have their roots in the scientific revolution of
quantum theory at the turn of the last century, when it was discovered that
the assumed source of the solidity of matter -- the atom -- is as empty in
proportion to the size of its nucleus as the solar system is empty in
proportion to the size of the sun.
The discoveries of the quantum era allowed the manipulation of the inner
structure of matter, and unleashed the power of microelectronics to change
the inner structure of society. A centrifical force, it made cheap personal
computers more powerful in impact than the most ambitious
supercomputer of a decade before, flinging intelligence to the fringes of all
networks, industries, and organizations. Lending new meaning to the maxim
that knowledge is power, hierarchies and top-down organizations tumbled
into heterarchies, knowledge freely flowed across peer networks of
powerful technicians and engineers, and CEOs bowed to the superior
learning of their nominal subordinates.
In the end, the quantum revolution endowed every teenager at a computer
workstation with more potential creative and communications power than a
factory tycoon of the industrial era, a broadcast magnate of the television
age, or even the youth's often baffled parents, as later generations
surpassed the earlier in computer skills.
Now, at the turn of the new millennium, in a further
unfolding of the overthrow of matter, we are moving
into an industrial era based on photons, totally
massless bearers of electromagnetic energy: light.
The new paradigm is the all-optical network -- in
which photonic communication ends by driving even
the infinitesimal mass of electrons out of the critical
paths of networks. At the heart of this technology is
wavelength division multiplexing: sending many
different colors of light down a single fiber thread
one tenth the width of a human hair. Soon a single
cable will carry as much traffic as the entire
American Internet infrastructure carried in one month
in 1997.
You cannot deploy a technology so radically
superior to the incumbent system of television
broadcasts and phone connections without invoking
profound forces of social, economic and cultural
change. Because the vast flood of broadband
services will necessarily overthrow most of the
powers and principalities of current world industry,
these advances are incurring often tacit but still
tenacious resistance from all the beneficiaries of the old narrowband order,
from voice based telephone companies to television broadcasters, from
mass advertisers to Hollywood producers, from communications regulators
to the communications bar, all supported by ranks of mayors, judges and
politicians, from Alaska to Florida, intimately entwined and embedded in
the old order.
For the new system to prevail, it will be necessary to explain the power of
this tool to the public and to politicians. This is the campaign I described as
religious, fueled by visions of change and redemption, and powered by
faith.
What does faith have to do with it, my critics will ask. This, after all, is a
technology of facts and physics, not visions and passions. The answer is
that only faith enables us to make this kind of leap.
Faith is central to every process of innovation. A crucial law of intellectual
creativity is that belief precedes knowledge. The logic of creativity is "leap
before you look." You cannot fully see anything new from an old place.
The old saw of "look before you leap" provides only for the continual
elaborations and refinements of old ideas that comprise the bulk of
scholarship (and the bulk of "industrial progress" in large and static
companies).
Imagination, intuition, and hypothesis are the first steps of technical
creation. As in love, a man must trust his intuition, and act on faith, before
he can really know. Love appears blind to outside observers, but lovers
know that it is guided by a more exalted vision and opens new realms of
knowledge and creativity. Commitment can create its own confirmation. To
the man who dares not commit, dares not love, the entire world seems
barren and dull, the future pregnant with doom. It is love and faith that
infuse ideas with life and luminosity.
We may not always describe ourselves as religious. But the act of creation
is a religious act. Religious faith takes many forms, from church attendance
to prophetic visions. But they all entail a commitment to ideas or concepts
that are unprovable at the outset, that are empirically incalculable because
they refer not to statistical probability but to singular outcomes, whether
personal salvation or the success of a business innovation.
Without religious commitment, new ideas cannot take flight and flourish,
new technology cannot be projected into untilled markets, and new
systems cannot be built. No market test can prove the demand for what
does not yet exist. You cannot build bridges by counting the swimmers.
The investor who never acts until the financials affirm his choice, the athlete
or politician who fails to make his move until too late, the entrepreneur who
waits until the market is proven -- all are doomed to mediocrity by their
trust in spurious rationality and their failures of faith.
In the United States on the eve of the new millennium we face the usual
calculus of impossibility, recited by the familiar aspirants to a master plan.
Abundant bandwidth is a delusion; the Internet is chiefly a sump of
pornography and trivia; the most decentralized network in history is prone
to oligopoly; television is forever; voice will always be the key source of
telephony profits; strong encryption, the key tool of electronic commerce,
must be suppressed and thus relegated to foreign companies; insidious
global warming, pollution, ozone depletion, and other chimeras of popular
"science" require a radical cutback in energy usage; tax rate cuts require
spending cuts, which are impossible. At a time when the global afflictions of
poverty, famine and disease are about to succumb to a world-wide tsunami
of new commerce and invention, prominent politicians prattle about a
fanciful "digital divide" and promise to impose "level playing fields" on the
sprouting skyscrapers of new wealth.
The enemies of the future all betray a tragic failure of faith. Their blindness
to opportunity and their bias toward regulation and redistribution is chiefly
a religious disorder, a rebellion against the inevitable risks and uncertainties
of human life. Their regulation of telephony and cable TV -- the best
current candidates to bring broadband net access to the home -- has
already inflicted a last mile bottleneck on the information economy. Their
drive to extend this regulation to the Internet is the greatest threat to the
redemptive economy now in view in America.
We are entering a new millennium when computers will soon achieve a
processing power comparable to the 10 billion neurons in the human brain
and communications technology will reduce the limits of human
achievement to the dual constraints of time: the speed of light and the span
of life. As Internet traffic grows at a pace of a thousandfold every five
years and Web pages multiply at a pace of a million a day, Internet
ventures currently face volumes just one tenth of one percent of their likely
business half a decade hence.
The Nineteenth Century Model
In the face of this immense vista of opportunity, the current anxieties and
doubts of the world political order, its chimeras of ecological doom and
digital divides and dim monopoly threats and dire impending shortages, are
all profoundly reactionary. These concerns have their roots in the zero sum
assumptions of the premillennial economy. The overthrow of matter,
however, entails as a corollary the ascendancy of ideas as the prime
objects of economic output and consumption. Essentially infinite in its
horizons, an economy of ideas brings the issues of faith and spirit to the
fore.
As we enter the frontiers of this new economy, what the nation needs is a
renewal of the faith that sustained our forefathers at a similar time of change
and opportunity on the frontiers of 19th century America. The old frontier
of the American West also appeared closed at first. It became an open
reservoir of wealth only in retrospect, because the pioneers dared to risk
their lives and families in the quest for riches, looking for gold (of which
there was little) and finding oil (then of little use). Our previous
accomplishments as a nation were based on faith, the faith of our fathers,
the belief in things hoped for and things unseen.
All the great figures of our history -- from Washington and Lincoln at war
to Reagan at the Berlin Wall, from Henry Ford with the Model T to Bill
Gates with the PC -- had to act before the facts were in and thus had to
move under the auspices of faith.
Even more poignantly, in order to create and preserve the riches that we
now enjoy, our fathers were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice of their
lives in four major wars. Immigrants were willing to risk everything so that
their children could experience a better life. They believed in the ultimate
power of goodness -- that there were things more important, more
ultimate, than their own flesh and blood and happiness. The difference was
faith -- the belief that the things of the spirit are the real ultimate things, the
belief that human life is supremely meaningful and important, the summit of
the universe.
This belief is not entirely rational. But it is entirely essential to human
achievement. Another way of putting it is a belief in God.
How to Believe
What does it mean to say you believe in God? A minimal definition of God
is an omnipotent force of goodness. The Judeo-Christian tradition upholds
a faith that God is one, God is good and God will prevail. A belief in God
asserts that virtue will finally triumph. No matter how dark and menacing
seems the world at any particular time, goodness will win. The believer's
sacrifices will be redeemed in the future by the eventual triumph of
goodness over evil.
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once summed up our predicament:
Nothing worth doing is completed
In one lifetime
Therefore we must be saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful makes
Complete sense
In any context of history
Therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, no matter how virtuous,
Can be accomplished alone.
Therefore we must be saved by love.
These are the religious rules of economic success in millennia past, and they
will obtain in millennia to come. The twentieth century has been an era
when an atheistic belief in the ultimacy of matter and the triviality of man led
to the horrors of Nazism, Communism, and an epoch of total war. Now
sweeping through the global economy, the overthrow of matter will unleash
an undertow of religious belief that will make the new millennium a time of
awakening to the oceanic grandeur and goodness of the universe. An
economy of ideas and innovations ultimately means an economy ruled by
spirit and faith.
-- Mr. Gilder is a fellow of the Discovery Institute and editor of the
Gilder Technology Report (www.gildertech.com). |
