INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM
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very predictable phenomenon. I have developed a methodology-with
a set of mathematics behind it. I don't have a perfect crystal ball, but my
track record has been quite good by using this methodology.
If
you read
The Age of Intelligent Machines,
which I wrote in the
I980s, and which came out in I989, it predicted (I didn't call it the
World Wide Web) something that sounds like the World Wide Web in
terms of a worldwide network of interconnected computers and infor–
mation resources that anybody could access. In fact, a lot of predictions
in there are quite accurate, including sustained economic growth,
because of two things: the increasing efficiencies of information tech–
nology and the value of information and knowledge itself.
Recently, Alan Greenspan attributed the unprecedented economic
growth of the I990S to the efficiencies of information technology, which
is half the story; the other half is the fact that new wealth consists of
information and useful information-knowledge. We've created a trillion
and a half dollars of new market capitalization in Silicon Valley alone
over the last ten years, all of which is knowledge primarily in software
technologies that are infusing the whole economy; five or six trillion
dollars of new market capitalization throughout the country are in these
information technologies.
I predicted the strategic reliance in warfare on the intelligence of
software and information technologies. We first saw that in the Gulf
War in the I990S, and then more recently in the show of total domi–
nation by Allied forces because of the superiority of our electronics and
computer technology. I also predicted the fall of the Soviet Union
because of the democratizing effects of distributed information. And
the coup of I99I against Gorbachev was really undone, not by Yeltsin
standing on a tank, but by the fact that everyone was kept informed by
the early forms of e-mail, fax machines, and cell phones-technology
that is much more powerful than the copiers the authorities had tradi–
tionally banned . And, I said that the authorities in the Soviet Union had
a dilemma: they could either provide knowledge
to
workers (basically
all their administrators and professionals) with computer technology,
which would be vastly more powerful than the copiers they had offi–
cially banned, and would in turn break their control over informa–
tion- which is the foundation of totalitarian control- or they could
deny them these technologies, in which case they'd become economi–
cally irrelevant. And I predicted they would do a bit of both, and to the
extent that information technology did seep out, it really destroyed the
ability of the authorities to maintain totalitarian control. To the extent
