by Joel Garreau
Okay, it only took 35 years. And he missed the possibility of how few “housewives” there’d be by then. But you get the point of the power of The Curve. The practical outcome of this juggernaut is that IBM is expecting to fire up a machine around the time this book is published. Called Blue Gene, it is 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, the machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It is designed to handle 1,000,000,000,000,000 instructions per second. “If this computer unlocks the mystery of how proteins fold, it will be an important milestone in the future of medicine and healthcare,” said Paul M. Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research, when it was announced.
Probably by the time you read this, Blue Gene will be probing the deepest underpinnings of human biology. Proteins control all cellular processes in the body. They fold into highly complex, three-dimensional shapes that determine their function. Any change in shape dramatically alters a protein’s activity. Even the slightest change in the folding process can turn a desirable protein into an agent of disease.
That means that breakthroughs in computers now are creating breakthroughs in biology. “One day, you’re going to be able to walk into a doctor’s office and have a computer analyze a tissue sample, identify the pathogen that ails you, and then instantly prescribe a treatment best suited to your specific illness and individual genetic makeup,” Horn said.
What’s remarkable, then, is not this computer’s speed but our ability to use it to open new vistas in entirely different fields—in this case, the ability to change how our bodies work at the most basic level. We will be able to do so because at a thousand trillion operations per second, this computer might have something approaching the raw processing power of the human brain itself, depending on whose measurements you trust of the abilities of that organ between your ears. Nathan Myhrvold, the former technology chief of Microsoft, points out that it cost $12 billion to sequence the genome of the first human. He expects it soon to cost $10 for anyone who wants theirs done.
Other vistas that are opening up because of The Curve of information technology include genetics, robotics and nanotechnology. The ability to tinker with our genes offers the astounding promise—and peril—of immortality, which mythically has been the defining difference between gods and mortals. It also offers the possibility of an even greater variety of breeds of humans than there is of dogs. Robotics allows machines increasingly to behave like living things, and living things increasingly to be enhanced by machines—blurring the line between the made and the born. Nanotechnology is the means of creating objects by working at the scale of individual atoms and molecules, allowing the creation of materials with astonishing properties, such as clothing that not only is bulletproof but also stores electricity, making batteries obsolete.
And still The Curve rises. The limits to making chips on flat pieces of silicon are widely expected to be reached somewhere around 2015 as the lines etched on them approach the width of molecules. Does that mean Moore’s Law will top out? Or will it simply shift to another means of computing? Historically, the upward arc of computer power has actually been a cascade of S-curves, with a new technology appearing just as the old one begins to peter out. As a result, although one can find a plethora of predictions throughout the 20th century claiming that computing was about to reach one insurmountable barrier or another, they all turned out to be wrong. As the limits of mechanical calculating machines were hit around World War II, they were succeeded by an entirely different kind of machine, the first electronic computers, filled with vacuum tubes, so big that buildings often were built specially to contain them. Just as the practical limits of vacuum-tube-filled machines were being hit in the 1950s, machines featuring individual transistors replaced them. Just as the transistor machines were reaching their peak, they were replaced by the silicon integrated circuit. What will flat silicon be replaced by, and when? Quite a few alternatives are in the works. You didn’t expect Intel to just give up, did you?
The next generation may include machines that have circuits in three dimensions, like the brain. Also machines that harness the power of the vastly spooky realm of quantum mechanics. There is even work being done on “meat machines”—machines that use nature’s own DNA to compute. More to the point, rapidly evolving machines allow us unprecedented opportunities to see how we might create the next generation of rapidly evolving machines. Even the bootstrapping process is accelerated. For example, the information technology that enables the manipulation of atoms in nanotechnology—a nanometer is a billionth of a meter—allows the creation of new materials that may be used to keep The Curve rising well after flat silicon is obsolete. Whether Moore’s Law continues, however, matters. How fast these successor technologies will prove to be feasible is a critical uncertainty. It determines whether we will have enough time to handle the way the world will change.
The driver of this incessant change is the need to compete or die. The classic example is Wal-Mart. The way it got to be the largest employer in 21 states, with more people in uniform than the U.S. Army, with its daily sales of $1.42 billion exceeding the gross domestic product of 36 countries, is its intimidating speed. Seventy percent of its merchandise is rung up at the register before the company has paid for it, Fortune magazine noted. Speed is why Wal-Mart does not route all of its ships from China the obvious way, across the Pacific. Instead, many take the long trip through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic. As a result, exactly half of Wal-Mart’s imports end up on each North American coast. More expensive, but it ultimately gets the merchandise to your hands faster. The interior of a Wal-Mart distribution center may look like the labyrinthine warehouse in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark—think 42-foot-high corridors of toilet paper stretching toward the horizon—but much of the stuff never touches the depot’s floor. It moves from one truck to another truck along 24 miles of conveyor belts. All of this is accomplished with Wal-Mart’s ever-improving technology. Now Wal-Mart is pioneering the idea of putting those radio frequency identification flecks onto every object it sells. These tiny midges are replacing bar codes. They call out “Hi, I’m here,” to anyone with a transceiver. By 2006 Wal-Mart expects to keep track of inventory from factory to consumer by having one such chip hidden on each of the more than 5 billion crates of stuff it handles in a year. It is also moving to tag individual items on the shelves, starting with the most frequently shoplifted. (Did you know one of the most boosted items is Preparation H? Go figure.) Wal-Mart loses billions a year to theft. If these chips dramatically reduce this shrinkage, all other retailers will have to compete to lower their costs or die.
Retailing is hardly the only arena of competition, although by the middle of the first decade of the new century, eBay was poised to be one of the nation’s 15 largest retailers, with Amazon.com joining the top 40. Small, casually run antique stores are closing because they can’t take the competition from eBay. This echoes the way small, casually run bookstores closed because of Amazon.
Take manufacturing. “The choice facing Dell’s rivals, from Gateway Inc. to Hewlett-Packard Co., is simple: adopt many of Dell’s Net-efficient methods or exit the business,” BusinessWeek noted.
Think of services. Expedia became the biggest leisure-travel agency in America, with profit margins higher even than American Express, starting from nowhere when the Web was created. Unable to keep up, 13 percent of traditional travel agency locations closed in one year.
How about finance? In the first few years of the 21st century, online mortgage service LendingTree was growing by 70 percent per year.
Or consider the pharmaceutical industry. There are three groups of people who will ultimately be attracted to any new enhancement. In order, they are the sick, the otherwise healthy with a critical need and the rest of us.
This became immediately obvious when a new drug called modafinil entered the market in the early 21st century. What it does is shut off your urge to sleep. It works without the jitter, buzz, eup
horia, crash, addictive characteristics or potential for paranoid delusion of stimulants such as amphetamines, cocaine or even caffeine, researchers say. The FDA has approved modafinil for the sick—narcoleptics who fall asleep frequently and uncontrollably. But this widely available prescription drug with the trade name Provigil immediately was tested on the needy well—healthy young U.S. Army helicopter pilots. It allowed them to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well rested. Then, after a good eight hours’ sleep, it turned out they could get up and do it again for another 40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.
It’s the future of the third group—the millions who, in the immortal words of Kiss, “wanna rock and roll all nite and party every day”—that deeply concerns the sleep industry. “It’s a standing joke among sleep doctors that nobody sleeps in New York or Washington,” says Helene Emsellem, director of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “Except in New York they do it for pleasure, while in Washington they do it to work.”
Modafinil and its follow-on improvements hold the potential for changing society. “This could replace caffeine,” says Joyce Walsleben, director of New York University’s Sleep Disorders Center. Caffeine is as old as coffee in Arabia, tea in China and chocolate in the Americas. It is the globe’s most widely used drug—a bigger food additive in dollar terms than salt. Will people feel that they need to routinely control their sleep in order to be competitive? Will unenhanced people suffer fewer promotions and raises than their modified colleagues? Will this start an arms race over human consciousness?
Similarly, at the turn of this century, a little boy was born. His doctors immediately noticed he had unusually large muscles bulging from his tiny arms and legs. By the time he was four and a half, it was clear that he was extraordinarily strong. Most children his age can lift about 1 pound with each arm. He can hold a 6.6-pound dumbbell aloft with each outstretched hand. Otherwise, the boy appears normal—at least so far. He is the first human confirmed to have a genetic variation that scientists believe could lead to new approaches for building extraordinary muscles in people.
Wyeth Pharmaceuticals has begun preliminary testing of a drug designed to mimic the effects of his mutant gene as a possible treatment for the most common form of muscular dystrophy. At the same time, the discovery is raising concerns that athletes will try to exploit the discovery to enhance their abilities. “Athletes find a way of using just about anything,” says Elizabeth M. McNally of the University of Chicago, who wrote an article accompanying the findings in The New England Journal of Medicine. “This, unfortunately, is no exception.” What happens when such a drug moves from the sick to the healthy with an urgent need to the rest of us who work out only sporadically and with mixed results? Will abdominal six-packs be just a pill away? Similarly, what happens when brain-enhancement procedures are developed to fight Alzheimer’s? Will they also be eagerly embraced by the ambitious?
Consider the effects The Curve has had on the arts. The traditional music industry is being gutted by tens of billions of online downloads. Sales were down 20 percent in one year alone. Next up: the same for the movie industry as films become increasingly available online.
Warriors in all of these realms soon learn that planning to compete in the age of The Curve is a lot like shooting skeet. You can’t aim at where the clay pigeon is at this moment. You have to aim at where the clay pigeon is going to be, especially if you’re trying to draw a bead on sophisticated global players such as China and India, who might not be in the game were it not for the way The Curve drops prices and shrinks communication distances. You have to figure out where the competition is headed and plan to beat it three, five, ten years out. Thus is acceleration of The Curve constantly fueled.
This compete-or-die imperative, of course, is ancient. That’s why you can see echoes of The Curve over the millennia. For most of civilization, economic growth was so slow as to be essentially invisible. Increased wealth was not part of most people’s life expectations. Annual per capita income in Western Europe at the time of Christ was $450 in today’s dollars. It took more than 18 centuries to see fewer than one and a half doublings, to $1,269 in 1820, according to the economist Angus Maddison. Yet less than 200 years later, it was $17,456, more than six doublings since the Romans, almost all of it in modern times, and The Curve is continuing up. In the 20th century alone, the U.S. gross domestic product marched inexorably up a curve, through booms and depressions, doubling five times—from a few hundred billion dollars right after World War I (in year 2000 dollars) to more than $10,000 billion by the end of the century. Just in the last half of the 20th century, the world’s gross domestic product doubled almost three times in constant dollars. The world’s exports doubled six and a half times in constant dollars during that period. Remember, this means an increase of almost a hundred times. The fastest-growing category was “miscellaneous,” according to Don Kash, the distinguished professor of innovation at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. This means, he says, that innovation was occurring so fast that people were increasingly incapable of categorizing what it is they were inventing.
You even can see The Curve in human evolution. To get from the formation of the Earth to the first multicellular organisms took perhaps 4 billion years. Getting from tiny organisms to the first mammals took 400 million years. Getting from mammals to the first primitive monkeys took 150 million years. Getting from monkeys to hominid species such as chimpanzees took something like 30 million years. Notice how the pace accelerates? Getting from hominids to walking erect took 16 million years. Getting from walking erect to humans painting on cave walls at Altamira, Spain, took 4 million years. Getting from cave painting to the first permanent settlements took some 10,000 years. Getting from settlements to the invention of writing in Sumeria took about 4,000 years. At that point, biological evolution was trumped by cultural evolution. We could now store, recall and widely share our thoughts and insights. Intelligence became less the property of isolated bands and more the sum of civilization. As humans increasingly became capable of acting collectively, they could make advances in the arts, sciences and economics far beyond the capabilities of any individual, and The Curve really started to take off. Four thousand years to the Roman Empire, 1,800 years to the Industrial Age, 169 years to the moon and 20 more years to the Information Age. Where we now find ourselves. Wondering if and how this Curve ever stops and whether or not we like this game. Thinking about whether we are about to enter another transition. Considering the likelihood that we are engineering our own evolution.
Meanwhile, the amount of computer memory you can get for a dollar is doubling every 15 months. The cost-performance ratio of Internet service providers is doubling every 12 months. The modem cost-performance ratio is doubling every 12 months. Internet backbone bandwidth is doubling every 12 months. The size of the Internet is doubling every 12 months. In short, the number of other curves of accelerated change unleashed by Moore’s Law have themselves begun to proliferate exponentially.
Human genes mapped per year—doubling time, 18 months. Resolution of brain-scanning devices—doubling time, 12 months. Growth in personal and service robots—doubling time, 9 months.
U.S. manufacturing productivity is increasing on a curve. U.S. patents granted have been rising on a very steep curve. The number of scientific journals has doubled every 15 years since 1750. The number of “important discoveries” has doubled every 20 years. The number of U.S. engineers doubles every 10 years. Even dollars spent on U.S. education are rising on a curve.
In 2003, 35 years after its founding, Intel shipped its one billionth chip. It expects to ship its second billionth chip in 2007. Compete or get out of the game.
Actual physical mechanical devices are dropping exponentially in size. Entire motors smaller than a human cell exist in the lab. The size of computers is also dropping exponentially. In la
te 2002, Elizabeth Mullikin took a cream-colored oval object from her doctor. Rob Stein of The Washington Post described it as looking “like a big multivitamin, except one end was a clear dome. And a white light was flashing from the tip of it like a lighthouse beacon. She popped the blinking object into her mouth and washed it down with a drink of water. ‘Honey, it was not any worse than taking any old pill,’ said Mullikin, 77, of Columbia, Maryland. ‘You just take a sip of water and down it goes.’”
What she had swallowed was an M2A disposable diagnostic capsule, also known as the “gut cam.” It’s a self-contained, wireless color video system designed to travel through the digestive tract, continuously taking pictures of any tumors, internal bleeding, and lesions that might show up—just like in the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage.
“People want their cell phones small. They want their garage door openers to be small,” noted Martin Schmidt, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Some of the fruit of that effort is what you’re seeing in medical devices.” With the gut cam, “it was the push toward digital cameras and circuitry from cell phones. So the question is, ‘What is the next thing like that?’”
All of these exponential curves are adding up to a world profoundly different from the one humans are used to living in. We have crossed some line. “My son today wakes up in the morning certain of one thing,” says Kash, the professor of innovation. “And that’s that the world will be different by nightfall. He expects it.
“Humans didn’t used to live that way.”