Nearly three years ago, after attending the Heidelberg Laureate Forum honoring great mathematicians and computer experts, I wrote a three part series on the big technologies of this decade:
This is a good time to revisit the trends. A recession is also the best time to start a new tech company. Incumbents are faltering and you get a clean sheet of paper to write the future on.
Continue reading "The Three Big Challenges Boiled Into One" »
Imagination is in a constant competition with Moore’s Law.
Imagination often loses.
Moore’s Law makes many things possible. Not all these things are worth doing.
I call things that aren’t worth doing junk tech.
Bitcoin is junk tech. Web3 is junk tech. Blockchain is junk tech. So is the “metaverse,” in the sense that we should all live in a virtual world rather than the real one.
Good applications can come from junk. The home shopping service I supported in 1984 became an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format. The map CD-ROM I worked on in 1989 became a format for geographic data. Creating lemonade from lemons is always a great opportunity.
For 200 years, since the Monroe Doctrine, Latin America has been ruled by an Iron Triangle of economic oligarchs, religious extremists, and militarists, backed by the veto of the U.S. government.
Democracy and liberty never stood a chance. Even when “leftists” took power, as in Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, they simply adapted the system. The party became the religion, and the party leaders the oligarchs. The military rules. Power flows from the barrel of a gun.
We teach our kids that America never adopted that system, but we did. In the American South, from 1876 until roughly the mid-1950s. The KKK was the military, the Southern Baptists were the religious, and local landowners were the oligarchs. Textile manufacturers moved south and adapted to it. It was the refusal of northern businesses to go along after World War II that led to its breakup.
Back in 2019, while at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, I wrote about three key trends that would define the 2020s.
They were the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a programming language .
Since then, there has been progress in all three areas. The pandemic, and resulting parts shortages, have delayed but won’t prevent the end of oil. You can see the Machine Internet in all the hype over 5G. The Moderna vaccine is indeed using DNA as a programming language.
Turns out there’s a 4th trend, and there may be more.
One topic in the coming re-write of my Moore’s Law book, now called Moore’s Law Explains it All, involves what I call Moore’s Law of Politics.
Moore’s Second Law, the rising capital cost of chip making, offsets Moore’s Law itself. Moore’s Law of Software, its value increasing with use, offsets Moore’s Law of Content, because most content doesn’t gain in value once you read, hear or see it.
At the same time Moore’s Law of Health, the fact that technology lets us live longer, creates a negative in Moore’s Law of Politics.
Political decision-making is stuck in the past.
I got a reminder of this during my recent trip to Heidelberg. I met a young Vietnamese mathematician. He was about the same age as my own son, 28.
I asked him about the Vietnam War. To him it’s an historical relic, like our Civil War. Even his father wasn’t impacted by it. It’s something from his grandfather’s time.
Try to summarize an hour in the presence of Vint Cerf in 500 words.
I can’t do it.
Cerf is the most famous name at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. He accepts that. Wherever he goes he is surrounded by eager young researchers. They come hoping for wisdom but also get lessons in charm, and his full attention. These are important lessons, that if you want to be heard you should listen as well.
Cerf helped design the TCP/IP protocol, 45 years ago.. He is still one of the most vital voices on the Internet and will answer any question asked, at length, and in complete sentences.
Take autonomous cars.
A single car is like a peppercorn, he said. A bunch of them are a peppermill, getting in one another’s way. Things get very complex, very fast.
“Don’t make assumptions about the behavior of systems, especially if they’re large and complex and have many interacting parts,” he said. “There are some airports without controllers. So pilots get on a common channel ad the pilots negotiate with each other. I can imagine self-driving cars taking advantage of these mechanisms to negotiate .”
That’s the way Cerf’s brain works. Every question gets an extended, thoughtful answer, leaving his listeners with much to think about, and wanting more.
Stephen Smale’s heart has been beating for almost 90 years and he still wants to know why.
He has a new theory about it.
Smale turns 90 next June, and is the oldest Heidelberg Laureate at this year’s Forum. But he’s also one of the most active, in a purely academic sense.
For his recent work, a mathematical theory of the human heartbeat, Smale started with Huygens’ description of a diffusion force, which causes two pendulums on a beam to beat together. Then he took a theory from Alan Turing on morphogenesis , concluding his solution was too linear, not dynamic enough. He added two hypotheses, monotonicity rom computer science and a hard-wiring hypothesis, from brain science.
“This is the beginning of a model for the heartbeat,” he said, moving slowly to a blackboard. The blackboard’s presence was the first sign of his age. While other speakers had used notes or PowerPoint decks, Swale was going from memory, only writing equations to illustrate the path.
Smale went through a Laplacian diffusion applying both traditional mathematics and computer science. Within a half-hour had his audience understanding “a complete picture of the dynamics,” adding a Koramoto flow equation and Morse theory to “help us understand the complete dynamical picture” for the flow, and a picture of the phases.
Smale won the Fields Medal in 1966. His acceptance of the Medal, in Moscow, became a huge Cold War controversy. Smale won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2007.
The Fields Medal goes to mathematicians for work before they turn 40. After that, it’s assumed, they start going over the hill.
Stephen Smale has yet to see that hill, let alone go over it.
It took me nearly four days in Heidelberg to figure out that the Heidelberg Laureate Forum is mostly vegetarian.
Americans find sticking to vegetables difficult. Our best friend in Atlanta became a vegetarian a half-century ago. He can’t go back. He lives in abject fear of chicken stock chefs throw into vegetable dishes without thought.
The food offered the Laureates, the young researchers, and their guests is frankly delicious. There is some meat. Just not a lot, and hardly any in food served at the event itself. During the welcome dinner, as we had our main course, a waiter offered small bites of cooked chicken breast to those who felt they needed it. I took one but felt guilty about it.
Ruth Wetzlar is proving there is nothing to fear. She’s the general manager for the forum. I spoke with her on a boat that was taking us up the Neckar River, surrounded by plates of sweet rolls, savory spreads piped onto bread and sweetened polenta cut into rhombohedrons, which are rectangles with attitude.
She explained that during the forum’s first year “we thought it would be enough to have half of it meat and half vegetarian.” They found that while vegetarians spurned the meat, omnivores ate everything. She first turned toward vegetarian and then “we decided to go vegan,” she said, serving not just vegetarian dishes as a default but seeking those without milk or egg products.
“It’s not very hard, and it’s surprising to me how yummy it is,” she said.
She’s right.
What do you do if you win one of the big prizes in math or computing and are invited to become a Heidelberg Laureate?
Some go back to their work, like Yoshua Bengio and mentor the next generation. Others become great men who wear their celebrity like a warm coat, like Vint Cerf, who is also in Heidelberg this week.
Then there is Martin Hellman. He won the Turing Award in 2015, along with Whitfield Diffie (who is also in Heidelberg), for public key cryptography, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange.
Public key cryptography became controversial as soon as it s was announced. The National Security Agency tried to suppress the technology under Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who later saw the problem with weak solutions, said Hellman. Another cryptography war erupted in the 1990s with the “Clipper Chip,” an attempt to give crypto a “backdoor” for cops. Hellman called it a front door.
The third cryptography war began only recently, with the FBI putting pressure on Apple and others to get “exceptional access” to iPhones, and the Trump Administration now trying to ban strong encryption. “It’s in a lull,” Hellman said of the current conflict. “Hopefully it dies.” But attacks are global, with even Australia trying to limit it. “They want to defy gravity to put things in space more cheaply,” he said. Hellman has been arguing this case for decades.
In the process Hellman has created a second life, as an activist.
Martin Hellman has concerns. He likes freedom, and hates war. He rejects attempts to ban encryption because cops already have plenty of information on us, like security cameras and license plates that can be automatically read as you drive. “I recognize there are trade offs. The FBI is trying to protect safety. We just have to point out when they’re wrong.”
One of the great talks at the second day of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, September 24,was delivered by Joseph Sifakis, a Greek computer scientist with French citizenship who helped found the Verimag Lab in Grenoble and won the Turing Prize in 2007 for his work in model checking and verification.
Sifakis, who once sported a great mustache but is now 72 and clean-shaven, mainly spoke about autonomous cars. He has great theory and deep thought to bring to the topic. Unfortunately he’s trying to set rules on a race that is already underway.
This is common in the world of Moore’s Law, where change happens faster than people can adapt to it. The press office here, for instance, has very nice networking cables, but all the reporters are using WiFi.
Sifakis’ work asks if we should trust self-driving cars.. Views vary. Some people distrust Tesla cars so much they block the chargers with giant pick-up trucks. Others go to sleep while rolling along freeways at 70 mph, with the autopilot on.
“Once you certify an aircraft as a product, you can’t update it,” Sifakis noted. It’s a key point. Boeing must have software fixes for the 737-Max plane run through testing and standards approvals before the plane returns to the air, because we must have absolute trust in those fixes before they go in.
For self-driving cars, the regulatory model is more lax. “Public authorities allow self-certification,” software is updated monthly, and manufacturers apply statistics to prove their designs work. It hasn’t caused a crash yet, thus it must not be capable of causing a crash.
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