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A few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference called Accelerating Change, at Stanford University.
I offered a talk on The World of Always On. Use the wireless router as a platform for applications which live in the air, I said. Sensors and motes can measure the condition of your heart and blood, can measure the condition of your lawn, can monitor your perimeter, can find your stuff. A PC board can calculate when alerts must be sounded, or can respond to your verbal commands. This can let millions age in place safely.
Nothing happened. I’m not a programmer. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m a journalist. I was speaking of what I expected to see, it was pure advocacy. I had no power to make it so.
But I was right about the trend. The World of Always-On is starting to happen. In China.
It was the failure of Always-On to happen here which led to my current obsession with politics. What I have been looking for are policies that will accelerate change. In normal times, throughout the 20th century, America had the very best environment for accelerating change. We had the schools, we had the laws, we had the freedom to fail. Something, I concluded, had gone horribly wrong.
What was wrong will, unless the next election is stolen outright, be
put right. (If it is stolen, I can’t vouch for any outcome.) It will be
put right slowly, but it will be put right. Because businesspeople,
regardless of party, aren’t stupid. And businesspeople (as opposed to
the bureaucrats who run our largest corporations) run America. Always
have.
We will get copyright and patent reform, albeit slowly. We will
get more freedom to invent, and more incentives to bring inventions to
the market.
So how then do we accelerate change? How do we take advantage of this re-awakening?
We do it by making change a priority. Not just a political
priority, but a business priority, an academic priority, a media
priority.
In the early years of the 20th century, in the 1930s, and in
the 1960s (all described as times of Crisis in my work on political
history), we did precisely this. We made heroes of our inventors –
Thomas Edison, Howard Hughes, the Apollo project. We made celebrities
of them. We need to do that again. And we will.
The way we do that is by setting big goals in front of people,
and bringing the media fuss to those who offer solutions. There will be
some wrong turns, some bogus solutions. But rapid progress will result.
The problem with merely "letting business decide" is that business
follows demand. By its nature it can’t lead. Absent pressure to change,
it will consolidate and atrophy. We need to create demand, to focus
demand, to make demands. Do that and business will change.
There are many ways in which we can do this. We can do this through the
political process, as was done in the 1960s with Apollo. We can do this
through a media process, as we did in the 1930s with aeronautics. We
can do this through an educational process, as we did in the early
1900s with cars and planes and electrical appliances.
In going through the effects of my ancestors, who lived through those
times, what I’m most struck by is their careful attention to
technology. We can be that way again. Despite my lack of a technical
education, I have tried to be that way in my work. We all need to be
that way.
There are enormous challenges facing us, starting with the task
of trying to save what we can of this planet and its ecosystem from the
"progress" of the past. The only way forward is forward, through
technology, through the process of accelerating change.
I promise to devote the rest of my life to that search, and I hope you will do the same.
Get an iPod Nano, a Nike+ iPod Sports Kit, and some running shoes (Nike+ or your own favorites and an adaptor, see my website). Use it for a week as a runner or walker and then tell me:
1. Always On isn’t already hitting the market.
2. Big companies aren’t innovating.
3. Small companies don’t have opportunities to help out too.
As for remote heart monitoring and other medical apps… If their bits have the same priority as some fat kid’s BitTorrent download of a movie that isn’t even out yet, the liability problem will be too high to attract investment or use. Neutering the network seems a great plan for slowing Always On application development.
Get an iPod Nano, a Nike+ iPod Sports Kit, and some running shoes (Nike+ or your own favorites and an adaptor, see my website). Use it for a week as a runner or walker and then tell me:
1. Always On isn’t already hitting the market.
2. Big companies aren’t innovating.
3. Small companies don’t have opportunities to help out too.
As for remote heart monitoring and other medical apps… If their bits have the same priority as some fat kid’s BitTorrent download of a movie that isn’t even out yet, the liability problem will be too high to attract investment or use. Neutering the network seems a great plan for slowing Always On application development.
Brad, why does medical monitoring have to go over the Internet? Why can’t it go over a nice private network with all kinds of QOS and SLA. If a company is worried about liability, wouldn’t they want an SLA from their network provider? The Internet is not a private network and there is no need for it to behave like one. Network neutrality doesn’t say that a operator can’t operate private networks, just that the operator can’t just replace Internet access with private network access and still claim it is Internet access. Both private networks and the Internet have a valid place in the order of things and it foolish to claim that advocating one is the same as condemning the other. Unlike other issues, there is no reason to your arguments on this topic, just name calling.
Brad, why does medical monitoring have to go over the Internet? Why can’t it go over a nice private network with all kinds of QOS and SLA. If a company is worried about liability, wouldn’t they want an SLA from their network provider? The Internet is not a private network and there is no need for it to behave like one. Network neutrality doesn’t say that a operator can’t operate private networks, just that the operator can’t just replace Internet access with private network access and still claim it is Internet access. Both private networks and the Internet have a valid place in the order of things and it foolish to claim that advocating one is the same as condemning the other. Unlike other issues, there is no reason to your arguments on this topic, just name calling.
Jesse… Broadband penetration in the U.S. was 69% in September. Let’s say you have a heart attack Monday. You go to the hospital and they can release you to home monitoring if your cable company has given you a smart router. No need to provision any special lines to your home or anything. Just have a tech come out and set up the CPE. Cost of setup, $300 max and one day turnaround. Definitely worth getting you out of the expensive hospital and into home care where you’ll be more comfortable.
Want it on a specially provisioned line? Maybe you don’t have a twisted pair available for the phone company. Maybe the cable company only has one drop to your house (likely). I mean, if you are pro-competition, doesn’t QOS and packet prioritization enable the use of common facilities to provide competitive services?
Hatred of Ed Whitaker isn’t a philosophy, nor a telecom policy. I don’t see why that’s so hard to grasp.
Jesse… Broadband penetration in the U.S. was 69% in September. Let’s say you have a heart attack Monday. You go to the hospital and they can release you to home monitoring if your cable company has given you a smart router. No need to provision any special lines to your home or anything. Just have a tech come out and set up the CPE. Cost of setup, $300 max and one day turnaround. Definitely worth getting you out of the expensive hospital and into home care where you’ll be more comfortable.
Want it on a specially provisioned line? Maybe you don’t have a twisted pair available for the phone company. Maybe the cable company only has one drop to your house (likely). I mean, if you are pro-competition, doesn’t QOS and packet prioritization enable the use of common facilities to provide competitive services?
Hatred of Ed Whitaker isn’t a philosophy, nor a telecom policy. I don’t see why that’s so hard to grasp.
Network Neutrality doesn’t stop private networks and Internet services from sharing the same physical network (even last mile). It just demands that the network operator is transparent in how the capacity is reserved between the services. You can have all the packet prioritization you want — just keep it away from the Internet traffic. Meanwhile, if you have throttled the Internet bandwidth to provide high QOS for your private networks, come clean about it so that customers who are lucky enough to have a choice of providers can make an informed choice.
Network Neutrality doesn’t stop private networks and Internet services from sharing the same physical network (even last mile). It just demands that the network operator is transparent in how the capacity is reserved between the services. You can have all the packet prioritization you want — just keep it away from the Internet traffic. Meanwhile, if you have throttled the Internet bandwidth to provide high QOS for your private networks, come clean about it so that customers who are lucky enough to have a choice of providers can make an informed choice.