(OT)
Future Nerd
Getting small--very, very
small--with Xerox's Ralph
Merkle.
By Michael Lewis
(posted Wednesday, May 27, 1998)
As everyone now knows, a lot of the
pieces of the personal computer--the mouse,
the desktop box, the graphical user
interface--were first invented by researchers
at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. By the
mid-1970s, Xerox had thought far enough
into the future to fear (wrongly, as it turned
out) that the computer would displace the
photocopier. But they had not thought much
about what to do with the personal computer
once they had invented it. In a story told so
often that it cannot possibly be entirely true,
Steven Jobs visited PARC one day in 1979
and left with the Macintosh in his head. But
true or not, the anxiety that fuels PARC
today has an added layer. The Xerox Corp.
now fears not only that someone might
invent something that will moot the
photocopier but that they themselves might
invent something worth billions and fail to
notice. Xerox continues to fund PARC, and
PARC continues to generate all sorts of
interesting inventions. But now its
inventions, no matter how bizarre or
obscure, have the aura of the Next Big
Thing.
Which brings us to Ralph Merkle. I first heard about
Merkle from John Seely Brown. Brown, who is the
director of Xerox PARC, often finds himself having to
explain exactly why a photocopier company needs a
research division in Silicon Valley. His answer is the
same as it was when PARC was first created: One day
someone is going to come along and create something
that renders the photocopier obsolete. "We want to be
the ones who creatively destroy our own business,"
Brown says. But now when he is asked what is likely to
be the instrument of his destruction, he points to Merkle.
erkle works in a field called molecular
nanotechnology. You would never guess it from its
name, but molecular nanotechnology is the science
of building machines atom by atom. Its intellectual
provenance dates back to a 1959 lecture given by the
physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman played the same
clarifying role in science as Warren Buffett does in
finance, except that instead of investments, he blessed
theories. Twenty years before anyone else thought much
about it, Feynman blessed molecular nanotechnology:
"The principles of physics, as far as I can see," he said,
"do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering
things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any
laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in
practice, it has not been done because we are too big."
Among his abundant gifts was Feynman's ability to
speak semicolons.
Apparently, there are great economies in building
machines atom by atom, instead of in giant clumps of
atoms as we do now. A molecular computer the size of
a sugar cube, for instance, would be more powerful than
all the computing power on Earth today. (Why, I have no
idea.) It would also be able to replicate itself (ditto) and
therefore ultimately be very cheap to manufacture. And,
of course, once you create so much computing power
cheaply you change Life As We Know It. You might put
an end to death, for instance. Tiny computers could be
implanted in our cells to reverse their natural
deterioration. You might also put an end to work, since
fantastically powerful computers will provide for all our
needs. "Basically," says Merkle, "people will have a lot
more free time." The catch is that it may be 50 years
before this happens, depending on the serendipity of
science and the presidential candidacy of Al Gore, who
has shown some interest in funding nanotechnology
research. "Spending anything less than the whole of
GNP to develop this," says Merkle, "is worth it."
There's no point in my trying to evaluate
nanotechnology or, for that matter, anything Merkle said.
One of the reasons Merkle is Big Man on Campus at
PARC is that people like me will never be able to
evaluate what he is talking about. To judge the
plausibility of his ideas, I rely entirely on surface data: 1)
The people who accidentally gave you the personal
computer think he has great ideas; and 2) People with
Nobel Prizes gather at conferences with him to discuss
those ideas. So there must be something to them.
ut to the layman, Merkle himself is an interesting
nerd study. The nerd world has its own version of
Freud's narcissism of small differences. People who
think about problems that might be solved in the next
three months are looked down upon by people who think
about problems that might never be solved. (And vice
versa, probably.) Merkle defines the outer limit of what
the market will pay nerds to think about. Compared with
Merkle, says Brown, "Bill Gates' vision does not reach
the tip of his own nose." Gates is a mere huckster.
Merkle is "an artist" who "sees the future." Merkle
himself sounds actually proud when he says, "If you ask
what the payoff of nanotechnology is in the next 10
years, I'd have to say 'nothing.' "
Because he has a hand in technological change, the
ordinary nerd is widely perceived to be a visionary. In
truth, the ordinary nerd views his mind as a roulette
table, with the odds moving against him as he pushes
further into the future. He stacks all his chips on red or
black, the immediate future. In other words, the risk
profile of the ordinary nerd isn't very different from the
risk profiles of the ordinary, socially well-adjusted
conformists they have replaced at the top of American
business.
Merkle is different. He has stacked all his chips on
00. He is a future nerd.
he future nerd is less a market phenomenon than a
psychological one. Essentially, he is a person willing
to take rational thought to an irrational extreme.
Merkle is, for example, an Extropian. (See his elaborate
Web site for a description.) He is also a cryonicist,
which means he has paid to have his mortal remains
frozen. On his wrist Merkle wears a silver chain with a
dog tag that tells you whom to call if you stumble upon
his dead body. There are only about 30 people hanging
"in suspension," as they say, but among them Merkle
counts dear friends whom he fully expects to see again
in better times. "In order for me to be unfrozen," he says,
"there must be a) truly spectacular medical technology
and b) a future that cares enough about people to
unfreeze them. And if both a) and b) are true, then it
sounds good to me. I'll go for that! Given the kind of
future we're looking at it would be really frustrating to
miss out for some foolish reason like you get old and
die."
The point is that the man who is actually thinking
about the Road Ahead and the man who makes money
pretending to think about the Road Ahead are two
different creatures. Maybe that's just as well. John
Kenneth Galbraith once remarked on how much safer
we all were because the ferocious market animals who
emerged each morning from the subway onto Wall
Street did not channel those same energies into radical
politics. The same might be said of the young wizards of
technology who shun honest intellectual pursuits for
money. They forsake the tiny chance to wreak havoc in
the distant future for the much greater chance to make a
fortune in the near future. The market actually does not
support a lot of people like Ralph Merkle. Probably we
are all a little saner for it.
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