The End of the Millennium I suppose at the end of the millennium, people have millennial thoughts. They get a millennial fever. They get religious fever and all kinds of fevers that they expect there's going to be a summing up and that we're going to make a big step into the next the next phase of whatever we we do and it becomes almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy I think people pack their bags and get and get ready but the act of packing their bags
They think things happen, even if they weren't going to happen anyway. The circumstance of the world right now seems pretty discouraging. You know, the pollution, the economy, Rwanda, Bosnia.
How do all these things happen exactly at the same moment? How come politicians seem to be lying so much and we're finding out so much about them and we're finding out so fast? how come the soul seems to be faltering a little bit you know it's like Tinkerbell when she didn't get enough support her light sort of went out you know that dimmer and dimmer and dimmer we had to say we believe in you think about I think we're kind of in that phase that stage right now
The moment we're living in now is one of those cusps that we've probably hit every long so often throughout human history. So I actually don't think that the anxiety we feel now is entirely millennial. I don't think it's about about the turn of the century. I think it may be about the end of something, something longer. I really do think we may have come to the end of what you could call the modern program.
There will be no sudden ending. We will see our children grow, and theirs grow after them. For 50 years we awaited the future. with a mounting sense of fear. Our path to the next millennium seemed certain to be lit by the bright lights of a nuclear conflagration. But now as we raise our eyes, we see that we have almost made it to the year 2000 and beyond. And our minds are no longer filled with sharp fear, but with something just as frightening, an aching sense of slow decline, of a world without direction.
and we know that no idea, no dogma or belief can claim to hold an answer. Yet we yearn to find a vision, to hold on to something strong, to carry us ahead. But now voices can be heard. We have heard them many times before, but this time we so badly want to listen. They tell us, do not fear. We will not go empty-handed into the next thousand years. There is something that we always carry, that we never can put down, that sometimes seems to lead us,
and other times to follow. Technology. Technology is with us. As we look towards the century's end and the world in disarray, we feel so empty-handed. When we want to find some answers, technology is calling. And it's offering us its promise to give us something new, to make the future shiny, to brighten the millennial bloom. The mood of the times is change.
I mean, that's a trite word to say, but it's terribly important. The trouble is it doesn't look dramatic when you actually see it. It looks like a new supermarket, or it looks like just one of these things. sitting on the table beside me, which is new technology in the home transforming the workplace. But it looks innocuous enough. So people don't realize how damaging or how exciting it could be both it is to our society. My father's generation had a working life of 100,000 hours. With the technology to hand, I can now do all of the work that he completed in a mere 10,000 hours.
With the technology that's coming, my children will be able to do all the work that I can do in less than a thousand hours. It means that our working life is going to be faster, more eventful, more creative. Also it means that we will be able to do things that are entirely impossible today at home in terms of entertainment, in terms of experience. It's going to change the way in which we approach everything. What that means is that the things that were right five, three, two years ago won't work well enough in two, three, five years' time to come. So we have got to learn new things, not once in a lifetime or twice in a lifetime, but
every three years or five years. This darn thing, they change the models every two years. However much we might wish to put down the new tools that we have made, we never can return to a world without invention. Technology is evolving, invisibly and fast. The most powerful computers of yesterday are disposable today. A pile of lost microchips in the junkyard of invention. The speed at which chips are getting more powerful is almost predictable if we look back over the last few decades. Every two years, the chips get twice as powerful. And in fact, that's going to continue out for at least the next decade.
And so we can see the power of a supercomputer, the most expensive computer, being available for only hundreds of dollars to individual users. it's by having very intelligent computers for everyone and these high-speed communications networks that this revolution is enabled but there's no doubt those advances will be coming the chips will get faster and faster and faster and faster and we'll have something that that could be very dramatic in the last 15 years we've seen quite a revolution in the world technology Let me show you a cable here that is basically a 1930s design. It's able to transport a thousand simultaneous telephone calls on copper pair.
that just 30 years ago, there is a cable that could transport 10 times this number of talkers in one of these kiteshaw tubes. So not a thousand, but 10,000 in one of these tubes, and there are 18 of them. So instead of a thousand telephone calls, 10,000 telephone calls times 18 tubes in about the same volume. Now what is really quite remarkable is this optical fiber. Now, thousands of these in gold on one of these optical fibers. That's as thick as a human hair. We have installed in the UK 3 million kilometers of optical fiber. It is made from only 90 tons of sand.
There is enough communications capacity on there for every man, woman, and child on the planet talk twice over at the same time. Technology is moving swiftly, and its evangelists have a fear that some of us might be left behind, that we won't buy into their dream. So they're selling us a vision of technology that's easy, that makes the world a simpler place and brings us all together.
We are being sold this vision, not by politicians or revolutionaries, not by righteous men nor angry men, but by the soft and reassuring tones of corporate presentation. I think that one of the issues we're facing in our industry is a growing number of people out there who are very concerned about technology and not being able to relate to it. Technology seems difficult, it's hard to use, it's intimidating, and there really is a serious concern. And I think one of the things that we need to do, and I know that's one of the things that motivates us at Apple, is to really find ways to present this technology in a way that is non-threatening and to try to help people get over this hump. What we're really trying to do is make things that change the way you live your life This is a good example. This is a guide to London
And I put it in and I can today Indicate where I am and what kind of restaurant I want and not only does it give me a choice of restaurants But then even tells me to walk there But what I really want is a better system that will show me the map of London and say you are here So that requires some more technology, but we can do it a few years it'll be there and again i won't think of this as a computer it will change my life though i can go to foreign cities cities i've never been to and i'll always know where i am and know where the things are that's what's going to be different those that offer to equip us for nothing less than a better life are gentle kind and likable they're bringing us a gift they hate to disappoint
They're taking care of business. They dream of machines that are ubiquitous, that are always close at hand, that become the fabric of our lives, and unite us with each other. The basic idea of ubiquitous computing is for computers to get out of the way so people can do what they want to do with their lives. So to make ubiquitous computing happen, we've had to build all sorts of new sizes and shapes of computers. For instance, this very little one I have here fits in one hand. I can see information here and control it with the buttons, but I can also do other things. I can write. I can hang on the bus. We've also built very large sizes of machines like this one behind me.
Quite a big display. This one is showing sort of my community here. This is my office and here's me and the space outside my office where we are now. I can see there's fresh coffee down here and I can see a meeting going on down here. In general we use this to create a better sense of community of people working together in the office place. Now this knows where people are because of their use of the little handheld machines and also this little device I'm wearing which is an active tracker. And through this and through the tab here, it can tell where people are, what they're doing, and help people have a better sense of community through ubiquitous computing. They're not just selling electronic toys. They're selling us community. The very thing that makes us feel that we are human.
human and they're selling this community in new electronic forms helping us meet with strangers though we never leave our homes i'm going to be giving you some examples of the work that microsoft is doing in the area of interactive television we're pretty excited about this area because it represents the synthesis of computer technology which traditionally has been on the desktop and television technology which has traditionally been in the living room the idea of virtual community is perhaps the most exciting application of interactive television. I'd like to show you an example of something that we put together that represents how a number of different people who share a common interest, in this case art, can participate in a real-time experience with the museum. What we have here is a museum tour that's going on, and we're invited to join it, and
we will do that. And as we join it, we'll see a number of other heads across the bottom of the screen that represent the other participants who are participating from their homes. Now, in this type of experience, the docent who comes up on the screen is inviting us to participate by saying what we'd like to do next. Okay, we have a choice. We can talk more about the history of the Bray or we can talk about a particular artist's work. Now, what we're doing here is seeing each of the participants as they speak are labeled by name. So if you're interested in finding out more about a particular member of the virtual community, you can click on that person and find out more information. So we've selected Abby, we'll click on her bio, and up comes Abby's bio, and she tells us about why she's a member of this virtual community. For as long as I can remember, I've enjoyed making art and looking at art and going to
museums. When I was 11... It may seem as if we're changing what it means to be human beings by the rapid introduction of all this incredible technology, but I think what's actually happening is that we're just giving a much better opportunity to reach what's really important to us in life much more quickly. If you contrast our lives today to that of our grandparents, we have had so much more information exposed to us in our lifetimes, even midway through life, than they had by the time they died. And it's just an amazing thing when you think about it, the pace at which we are leading accelerated lives. So I think that technology, when viewed properly in perspective, actually offers us an opportunity to fine-tune a lot of the way we live our lives on a daily basis. And it enables us to make decisions. It enables us to bring information to us that is more important, bring that closer, push
other information that's not important farther away. So it is an evolutionary step, but it's one in which we are integrating the capabilities of technology rather than having technology dominate and lead our lives. For decades we regarded the machine more as an enemy than an ally. We begrudged its intrusion into our lives. We thought it was fighting to take our place.
But the technologists tell us it's different now. They say this is the moment. Finally, this really is the moment when we and the machine become the best of friends. And though we may want to resist, to insist that this has nothing to do with us, a part of us also wants to believe. For technology is in our blood. It's already beneath our skin.
Technology isn't just little bits and boxes that come from California and Japan. It's the sum total of our material civilization. all of that is technology and to a very real extent that's what we are you switch off telephone network and you switch off with computers we start the nervous system of this planet is the telephone network the synapses of this planet are the computers we are already dependent on that technology and will be increasingly so in the future.
In many ways, this revolution may be so profound as it that it raises questions about what it even means to be human. The sort of things that drive evolution are when we have some kind of abrasion with our environment. Now, if an animal, a group of animals, say, moves to a new territory where perhaps it's a lot colder, then gradually they will develop much thicker coats.
Human beings do something rather different. We move somewhere that's colder and we make ourselves thicker coats. We build ourselves thicker buildings, warmer buildings. We build ourselves heating systems. Now, and all these things are as much a product of our genes as we ourselves are. And it's now not just a question of walls and shirts. This buffer zone is becoming connected up with information networks. We used to have to look up at the sky to know what the weather was like. We can now get it over television or radio. And more significantly than that, we can actually search for information because we have intelligent networks of computers that are continually sifting information and communication from all around the world and making something of it before it's delivered to us.
So as our buffer zone becomes wired up in this way, it's changing from being this kind of a buffer zone to this kind of a buffer zone. It's becoming a virtual epidermis. A computer sitting all at the desk.
alone on the far side of the desk, never threatened to change us from the way we really were. But now we've connected those lonely terminals together. We've offered them a place to talk. It's a place we cannot see, a fourth dimension to the world. But we feel the need to name it, so we call it cyberspace. Cyberspace is a word that I coined in 1981 without really knowing what it was going to mean. It seemed to me that when I saw people working with computers, or particularly kids playing video games,
that they were relating to a notional space that was not within the machine, but somehow beyond the machine, beyond the screen, not inside the box, but beyond the screen. And you can see that when people work with computers, I think, that they're yearning to sort of reach through the interface, reach through the desktop and manipulate this material which exists somewhere else. And from that perception, it's only a very short leap to the idea that all these national spaces on individual computers might be considered in a sense to be connected. And as soon as I made that jump, it occurred to me that in fact, in a way,
they all were. Although this was a decade ago and the Internet didn't exist in the sense that it exists today, but I knew that some computers were in fact connected to one another. that the ATM at the bank is connected to a big bank computer that keeps track of your money. So cyberspace becomes literally the place where the bank keeps your money. It's also the place where increasingly where the stock market occurs. The market no longer really occurs on the floor of various exchanges. It occurs in this extra geographical, near instantaneous zone where we increasingly do so much of what we do that passes for civilization.
It reminds me a little bit of a cartoon I once saw where there's these parking meters and they're all down the street and one says to another, right we're all ready let's invade. So you've got all this stuff and now suddenly it's starting to get hooked up. What this is really about is not people getting more information but people suddenly having the ability to send information as well. Me and my computer isn't really very exciting. Me and some other person through my computer is very exciting because the computer mediates the communication but what's really happening is much more interaction among people. The Internet is a system that connects all sorts of computers together. Let me show you what it's like. If I have a computer in my office and I want to talk to some computer down the hall,
I don't need the Internet. I just string a wire between them. Now I can chat. I can send files. I can send electronic mail back and forth. But there's not just computers down the hall. There's computers all over the world, different companies, different countries. they also have computers with wires between them chatting back and forth. If I want to get from here to here, I need some way to connect. Well, I can't run a wire to every different other computer in the world. That's where the Internet comes in. It's the system in the middle that connects all these different computers together, lets them all talk to one another. That's me get from any computer in the world to any other computer in the world to get to its information, to read books, to send electronic mail,
to send documents all around the world. Just when society began to seem like something from the past, the Internet offers the allure of a web that reconnects us. But what we find so attractive is not just the technology. It's the chance to find the very thing we feel that we have lost, simple human contact. And what this really tells us is how deep our worries are, how much we yearn for company as society fragments.
In the internet we do not see a solution, it's just a shiny mirror reflecting back our needs. I'd been a businessman. I was married, settled down. Typical 80s kind of guy. And I was taken ill very suddenly. It completely changed my life. I ended up in hospital for the best part of a year. Came out of hospital, confined to a wheelchair. Totally paralysed. Couldn't do hardly anything for myself. In fact, I couldn't read or write at that time because it was a brain disease that I had. I started using a computer purely to try and get some cold nation back. I played a golf game by hand for a notion. I used a word processor with a spell checker that actually interrupted me every time I
spelled the word wrong, so I learned how to write right again. And then I discovered networks, somebody gave me a modem and I connected to Prestel. There was a little club type network on there called Micronex, and it was just small groups of people talking about anything. I soon discovered that I could join in with this conversation as easily as I could before I was ill. I could just pop into the pub or pop into the office and talk to people. I became involved with KIT, which is the biggest conferencing system in the UK, and it's connected to the internet. In effect, I transferred my social life into cyberspace because in the real world, I couldn't get out there. there was no access for me and I found this new freedom there and it actually
helped me pull myself together I discovered people were interested in me for what I had to say for how I was thinking and they weren't put off by the fact that I was this big fat lump in a wheelchair who couldn't move who was very foreboding by the time they actually came to meet me face to face and see me my physical presence. They got to know me so well that it didn't matter. I could have had three heads and it wouldn't have mattered. My close friends on that system, we don't just communicate by computer. We phone each other up. You sort of reach a stage where
you're that close to somebody that, yeah, you can trust them with your phone number. You phone each other up, we talk over the phone. We meet up in real life. We go down to the pub. Today we're off to a barbecue where hundreds of people who use a virtual community called Kicks will be there. It's not just this distant thing. They're real relationships. Doesn't look unusual. Somebody will come out and they'll think, all right, what's the deal you're trying to come from? Community really happens in informal conversations among strangers in public places. Now, we used to have the Commons and the Town Square. In America, we had the drugstore lunch counter, a place where we could have a cup of coffee and talk with the mailman and the mayor.
That no longer exists in many places. The automobile has brought us suburbia. It has disconnected people from each other. These high-rise buildings have replaced the villages. The fast food outlets and the malls have replaced the places where people used to congregate. We have a real hunger for that kind of community. Even though we move from place to place, we are much less rooted than our grandparents were. We need to have a feeling of conviviality and sharing interests with like minds, of having people out there who know us, who share our interests. If we're in the hospital, they'll come visit us. If they're in trouble, they'll help us. We're beginning to find some of that on computer networks. When the real world is failing us,
it's our humanity that leads us in search of something else. In San Francisco, there's a virtual community called The Well, the whole Earth electronic link. It's where Phil Catalfo went when his son was suffering from leukemia. The well for me was already a community of resources and support. And so when this happened, you know, when something, this grave happens to you or more pointedly to your child, you reach for every bit of help you get. It's just not something you can deal with very handily on your own. And so it was very natural for me to reach out to the community that had been the most supportive to me as a parent in the years leading up to that.
A couple of days after I got home from the hospital, I sort of went over to his office. And he was typing on his computer. And I asked him what he was doing. And he said, well, I'm talking to a friend. I'm like, how? and he says, it's a computer network. And I'm like, what? And he said, and so he explained it to me, and it was pretty cool. There were times when maybe Gabe was going through a really hard patch where he was having nausea or pain or whatever the case might be. or maybe I was just speaking for myself and talking about the worries I had within the context of my family and the context of my marriage and the context of my role as a father, you know, and was worrying about how I was going to be able to do it all.
And just being able to say that online and have people say, oh, listen, you're doing fine or listen, we're behind you all the way and, you know, whatever the case might be, was an immense relief and an invaluable resource. So when his blood counts were low, and they stayed low for several weeks, a little longer than they expected, we got very nervous. And it became just an automatic thing for me to turn there when I had something to say. And it got me through the darkest times. And it also helped me really exult in the happiness. It's not like the virtual community is going to replace the non-virtual community, but it certainly can augment it. And it ought to augment it because we can't have too many ways to make those kind of connections.
We need those kind of connections if we're going to preserve human culture and ourselves as a species. And that's one of the unexpected bonuses of this technology that can help us do that. I'm old enough that I can actually remember a world in which there was no television. I can very dimly remember that. I don't remember what we did before we had it, but I can remember my father bringing the first one home and it was a big wooden box with a little round screen and a sort of dim, jerky image. And after that, what we mostly did was sit around and watch that thing. And we're still watching it.
It's gotten bigger and brighter and it's in color. I think it's difficult for us to know what we lose. We're constantly losing things and often as we lose them we can't remember what they were. They go, we really do lose them totally. When we look with hope to cyberspace, to replace what we have lost, then we know that we have given up on the world that we have made. Though we don't know where we're going or what it is we've left, we are rushing to find
a future that will save us from ourselves. Most people are accustomed to asking the question, what will a new technology do? Very few are inclined to ask what will it undo. Then I think we have to ask the question, who will be the winners and who the losers in any new technology? Because all technological innovation is a Faustian bargain. It giveth and it taketh away, but not in equal measure. I think a good way to think about our situation today is to imagine that it is 1904, but know what we now know about the effects of the automobile. Surely someone would have said,
is there anything we can do to maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages? Well, no one did that in 1904 or 1914 or 1924 or 1934. Now in 1994, I think it's rather too late to raise this question because it's clear that the automobile controls us. We don't control it. I have thought certainly with the computer technology we would begin to engage in a serious inquiry of both its advantages and disadvantages. But as it seems, this is not happening. Most people are going ahead in their enthusiasm for computer technology in the same blind way
as we have done the previous technologies. Technology is beguiling. We stand frozen in its beams as it illuminates the future. We are mesmerized by its clicks and words amid the dim that is the present. Our nerves are warm. Things are beeping and buzzing. We're there trying to, like, you know, rest for a second and bing the fax machine, that paper rolling out. out you know when I see my fax I get sweaty I think you know what now it's usually not good it's usually a problem that's why they're faxing you and then if that wasn't enough you know you're blinking like crazy and your email is here and you've got to answer everybody you have to answer dumb questions and
smart questions in the same way because people know you got that message you know and there's no way of going you know selectively answering questions We don't want so many messages and we're sick of being so very accessible to every kind of call and every kind of person that ordinarily maybe we could have skipped over or gotten to get back and not been home. And this email thing is just, for most of us, gone too far. One of the dangerous, although understandable, assumptions that we now have is that information is always and ever our friend.
It's understandable because in the past people sought information in order to solve specific problems. Now we're faced with a problem we haven't had before, which is information glut. Information has become a form of garbage. It comes from dozens of sources. It's relentless. It's a commodity that can be bought and sold. It's not directed at anyone in particular. And so we're now faced with the problem, not of how to get information, but how to get rid of information in order to give some sort of coherence to our lives. Information has become the raw material of our age.
Each word, each sound, each picture is another bit of data. But like no other resource before, it doesn't shrink, it grows. And now, in our technological business, we are turning even ourselves to information. With meticulous obedience to the power of the machine, we are searching for the data that determines human beings. We are counting, counting the information that makes up our genes. and within ten years, when all the counting is complete, we will have a map of nothing less than life itself. With that map, we can change our course.
When a child is conceived, approximately 100,000 genes from mum and dad mixed together, they are cooked in the womb, so to speak, for nine months and then out pops a human being. It's growth, things like colour of hair, colour of eyes, and all sorts of other properties are determined by the genes that a child receives from its mother and father. What the scientists in the Human Genome Project are trying to do is actually to minutely analyze each of these genes, write down the instructions that each gene contains so that eventually on computer databases they will have an electronic equivalent of the genetic recipe that gives rise to human beings. We stand at the threshold of a revolution in biotechnology.
This revolution will in the very near future enable us to do a whole range of unprecedented things to human beings and allow us to control and direct human nature to an unprecedented extent. Up to now we've just been the passive victim of human evolution. It's gone a particular way and we've had to take it all either. But I think increasingly we will be able to take control of our evolutionary destiny and try to determine what sort of people we actually wish to become.
Genetic engineering with humans will start with the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, or muscular dystrophy. But I'm quite sure it won't stop there. may be passed against genetic engineering with humans, but they will only delay it a bit. Once it is known how to improve animals, I think the temptation to try with humans will be irresistible. We will certainly be able to use the new technology to create beings with substantial
and unprecedented qualities. In particular, we can hope that we will be able to create people who will be longer lived, more resistant to disease and environmental pollutants, and who will be healthier while they are longer lived, so they will have a longer, healthier life. And of course, these will be substantial advantages for those who can get the benefit of them. More remote is the possibility of actually creating people who are more intelligent. It's more remote because intelligence is badly understood and is probably governed by a large constellation of genes rather than just small numbers of genes. But if we can improve intelligence then of course that too will create a substantial advantage on those who can benefit from the technology.
One of the utopias that is put forward is that we will be able to, almost as it were, improve the stock of the human race. And that sounds terribly attractive, yet one has to ask questions as to who will have access to this? be able to buy the technology, who will control the dissemination of the technology.
We may find, if we are not very careful, that we cease to regard human beings as being intrinsically valuable in themselves. We may regard them as simply the biological working out of a computer program that is written in their genes. And I would like to retain the notion that a human being is actually rather more than the sum of its parts, that it cannot be reduced to a strip of DNA three billion base pairs long, but that it has a value that transcends the molecular biology.
We're no longer homo sapiens as fell to the ground in the beginning. We've become something else. We live to a remarkable old age mainly because our teeth are kept in our heads. We're all vaccinated. That's technology. We're not, you know, our bodies are filled with antibodies that wouldn't necessarily exist in nature. So we're not natural anymore.
I think we're technological creatures. We are abandoning the present while the future is uncertain. We are fiddling with technology while the world around us burns. But in the march of evolution there is a terrible fading sound of the ones who fall away who aren't carried with the crowd. In the last 10,000 years, we have been accumulating information at an ever-increasing rate and passing it on to succeeding generations.
This transmission of information by language has really taken the place of biological evolution through DNA, which has not changed significantly over that period. We cannot continue much longer with this exponential growth of information, because our brains are still the same as in Cayman days. However, we are now on the verge of a new era, in which it will be possible to modify our DNA, and improve our mental capabilities, and length of life. I just hope we use this power wisely.