By Michael S. Malone
If you have any involvement in high technology, the one cringe-worthy moment in this week’s rather dreary President Debate was not “that one“, but this one:
”If we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily, here in the United States. It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades.
“And we can do it, but we’re going to have to make an investment. The same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate, we’ve got to understand that this is a national security issue, as well.”
That was from Senator Obama, describing the role that government can play in driving American business via a more planned economy. But even if one agrees with the first paragraph - and I’m not sure I do, as those new jobs will likely come at the cost of at least as many traditional energy industry jobs, whereas the information processing industry was basically brand new - there’s all sorts of things wrong with that second paragraph.
If Senator McCain had made that statement, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised. Even though we’re now past the original canard that the Senator didn’t even know how to use email - and I hope the people involved in that attack are suitably ashamed for have insulted a disabled war veteran - one still assumes that a 72 year-old man is probably not up on his electronics industry trivia . . .though that doesn’t let him off the hook, as I’ll soon explain.
However, Sen. Obama is a child of the digital age. He was born after the invention not only of the transistor, but the computer chip. He was eight years old when the microprocessor was invented, and was still in high school when Apple introduced the Apple II personal computer. He, at least, is supposed to know this stuff already.
Now, it’s pretty obvious what he did wrong in that second graph: What he meant to say was not “computer” but “the Internet” - and I’m sure his handlers would dismiss that as a slip of the tongue. But as Portfolio.com has already noted, “It’s not exactly a major gaffe, but it’s a mistake that no one who was decently familiar with the technology industry would be likely to make.”
That’s right. What it sounds like is a guy who memorized this statement, then screwed it up when he finally had to deliver it. And that’s pretty dispiriting, because it means that neither candidate — no matter how sophisticated his on-line campaign apparatus, no matter how many tech advisors he has on his staff, and no matter how often he references eBay or Google - really has a clue about America’s largest manufacturing sector, its greatest source of new job creation, or the dynamo of our economic growth. How is either man supposed to lead us into the second decade of the 21st century, when he doesn’t understand the single most defining cultural and economic force of the last thirty years?
The usual reply is that electronics is pretty complicated stuff, and you can’t expect an elected official to understand the nuances of semiconductor architecture, Uniform Resource Locator syntax, and Boolean algebra. True enough. But it has also been almost seventy years since the invention of the computer and the transistor, and almost forty years since the creation of the Darpa/Arpa/Internet, so is it too much to ask for these folks to at least have a rudimentary understanding of these technologies? Worse yet, one can make a very strong case that Moore’s Law of semiconductors and Metcalfe’s Law of networks have done a better job of explaining the course of the last half-century than any other metric - census data, demographics, life expectancies, purchasing power, church affiliations, etc. - beloved by sociologists and futurists.
Yet, despite the fact that Moore’s Law, to take the most extreme example, was first formulated in 1964, and probably 30 million Americans who work in tech know it by heart, I’ll wager that no more than a handful of our 535 Representatives and Senators know what it is, much less can explain its implications. Given the central role that electronics and high tech plays in the economic health of the nation they represent, and the crucial part it plays in sparking cultural changes - music downloads, the Web, digital television - that ripple across society and lead to the revision of existing law, shouldn’t they know this stuff?
As for tech being complicated: sure it is. But to obtain a basic understanding of how it all works (sand to silicon to systems to software to networks, the on/off switch to silicon gates, hardware to software to firmware to applications), and the larger forces (like Metcalfe’s Law) takes, oh, about . . .a half hour.
I know this because I’ve done it, with schoolchildren, and I’m not that great of a teacher. You might think that somewhere in the course of their often decades-long careers that these Representatives and Senators might have found room in their busy schedules of calling on contributors and attending embassy parties to devote thirty minutes to educating themselves on such an important topic.
But even if they did set aside the time, there’s no guarantee they’d actually listen. Exactly once in my thirty year career as a journalist was I asked to explain the digital world to a legislator. More than a decade ago, T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor (and these days, SunPower) asked me to come in and give a well-known United Senator a quick tutorial on tech. I spent several days paring my presentation down to just twenty minutes.
Fifteen minutes into my presentation, the Senator was already looking at his watch. At the seventeen minute mark, having learned nothing, the Senator excused himself to do what he had really come to Silicon Valley for: hit up T.J. for money.
All of this may seem like just another amusing example of how out-of-touch our elected officials are. But it has dangerous implications. Over the last two decades we have seen Congress (and the Administration), out of ignorance, reaction or just plain grandstanding, do almost everything it can to undermine high technology, and especially entrepreneurship” from crushing regulations (which is why there are no tech IPOs anymore) and anti-trust harassment to bizarre accounting requirements on stock options to criminalizing success to falling for the latest scientific scare.
Senator Obama’s answer was a classic example of this. If he’s talking about the invention of the computer, then you’d be hard-pressed to name any government scientists, at least in the U.S., who were involved in the process. The ENIAC team was a group of academics at Penn; the Mark I was a similar group at Harvard. The same could be said of Alan Turing in England and Conrad Zuse in Germany. Most of them took government money, for sure, but the impetus for that support was World War II - and I doubt either candidate is willing to commit to go to war just to drive technological innovation.
On the other hand, you can make the case the Internet was started by a quasi-government agency, ARPA (later DARPA), as way for the DoD and it Defense contractors (especially universities) could quickly and safely communicate. But it was the World Wide Web, developed by folks at CERN, and released to the general public in 1993, that set off the Internet revolution.
As it happens, I’m old enough and happened to be in the right place as a teenager to have used both government-designed mainframe computers and DARPANET . . .and trust me, if these two technologies had been left in the hands of ‘government scientists’, we would all still be using electric typewriters, rotary phones and doing our research down at the local library. I’ll even go so far as to suggest that Silicon Valley was really born when HP stopped accepting specialized government contracts and chip companies like Intel took off in pursuit of the consumer and commercial markets.
Government is best at large-scale basic research - especially when it funds it from private enterprise - and, sometimes, at kick-starting a new commercial industry. But after that, it is usually just an impediment at best and a crusher of innovation at worst. Thus, to use the example of the computer, or even the Internet, as a justification for greater government interference in the marketplace is not only wrong, but dangerous as well.
Meanwhile, once again we have two Presidential candidates (the only exception I can think of in the last forty years was Al Gore) who don’t seem to have a clue about any of this. Given that one of them is going to be establishing this country’s economic priorities for the next four years, shouldn’t they learn - and quickly?
So, I’ll make this offer to both campaigns: Give me (or anybody else who writes about tech) just 30 minutes with your candidate, any time and anywhere, and I’ll make sure, for the good of the country, that they never make this kind of mistake again.
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1. ADF:Great piece. Only one exceptionable comment, and that being “and I’m not that great of a teacher.” Yeah you are, and you know it, and thanks for it, from everyone who “just didn’t get it” about some aspect of tech until they read something by Michael S. Malone.
Oct 12, 2008 - 7:16 pm 2. Pajamas Media » Neither Presidential Candidate Is Very Tech-Savvy:[...] Read the entire story here… [...]
Oct 13, 2008 - 8:17 am 3. zeppenwolf:Actually, as I understand it, McCain has a reputation in the Senate for being pretty dern tech-savvy. Ya might want to look into that before writing another article which assumes the opposite.
(Hint: Try “google.com”)
Here’s a quick taste from the first page of a google with “McCain tech savvy”:
“In 2000, Forbes magazine called him the ‘Senate’s savviest technologist,’” Goldberg wrote. “That same year, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg gushed that McCain was the most ‘cybersavvy’ of all the presidential candidates that year, a crop that included none other than Al Gore.
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:00 am 4. wGraves:Actually, we’d probably be using MiniTels or the US equivalent. Boring! The French came up with the beast by commanding the best and the brightest to invent the future. What Europe lacks is lots of alternative technologies and an open market to sort them out and see what works best. Our greatest danger is that Obama and his buddies will try to take charge of innovation by dictating the future. Too bad, won’t work. They aren’t smart enough. The market is better than all of our government scientists tied up with a bow.
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:41 am 5. Self-hating boomer:The fact that 0bama doesn’t understand the internet or high tech in general doesn’t concern me one bit, because both parties have to date resisted temptation, and left it alone to develop organically. This is good. The government can only screw it up, they have nothing positive to contribute.
Which is why the ignorance of energy is gravely concerning. Neither candidate will keep his hands off, but 0bama in particular will try to Jimmy Carter the economy by screwing with alternative whatevers until we’re importing 90% of our oil.
It should be gravely concerning to anyone who actually understands energy that 0bama made a goal of 1,000,000 plug-in hybrids (which won’t even scratch the surface, and no mention of how the government is going to make 1,000,000 people buy those things, especially since no automaker has plans to produce that many), and then in the same speech claims that he’s going to reduce electrical demand on the grid by 2020 (and btw, how long does he plan on being in office?)!
It’s too much to expect for the president to have a clue, but a clueless micromanager is a very dangerous thing. Hands off energy.
Oct 13, 2008 - 9:58 am 6. always right:Re: Latest sounding ’scientific’ scare
Two areas of high tech, one you have referred to, and the other Biotech, had initially offered a golden opportunity for growth. At least in the biotech field, we won’t be seeing the true potential due to ‘fear’. Our government and university faculties actively promote just such FEAR.
Here is why. The government officials’ job is to project the worst case scenario “What If (stuff) goes wrong….How do I plan ahead?” The higher academia focusing on research into ’science-soudning scares’ because that’s where the funding comes from.
Like you said, the real entrepreneurs out there in the process of creating wealth and growth are triply hit by the diminishing source of initial funding (no more venture capitalists), a miriad of government rules and regulations, and environmental nazis.
However, the most damaging ‘concept’ is this relying on government to propel us into the next high-tech golden age.
Oct 13, 2008 - 10:01 am 7. Ditto:From its meager ABC beginnings (that’s ‘Atanasoff-Berry Computer’ not the television network) the ENIAC emerged and was privately patented though it was developed at the behest of the military during WWII. When left to solve their own problems, Americans can be downright resourceful. We don’t need politicians stepping in to take credit or “guide” us.
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said ‘A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have…’ I vote for the candidate advocating for the smallest amount of government, not the one promising me that the government will solve all my woes.
And you better believe that if we elect a candidate who doesn’t keep our military strong and continue developing innovative means of protecting ourselves, this country will regret it.
Oct 13, 2008 - 10:18 am 8. tim maguire:And all this time, I thought the computer was invented by Lawrence Waterhouse to break Japanese codes during WWII.
Oct 13, 2008 - 12:18 pm 9. msmalone:Tim: Nope. The Zuse Z1 (and I believe the Harvard Mark I) was already working before the War. Turning’s great paper was 1936 and I believe there was also a working Turing Bombe prototype at the beginning of the War. And, if you want to be a purist, the mechanical Babbage Difference Engine was built in 1824 . . .
Oct 13, 2008 - 1:20 pm 10. Self-hating boomer:The computer was “invented” by a whole panoply of people going back to Babbage. Significant contributions were made by everyone from Pascal to Turing to von Neuman, and probably about three dozen other significant geniuses going back several centuries. Like quantum mechanics, it wasn’t “invented” by any one person, but emerged from all of the small contributions made by very large individuals.
Unfortunately, this kind of attack by a gang of geniuses won’t help us with energy technology; it’s a very different animal that is less a question of science than it is of technology.
Oct 13, 2008 - 1:25 pm 11. cedarford:wGraves - What Europe lacks is lots of alternative technologies and an open market to sort them out and see what works best. Our greatest danger is that Obama and his buddies will try to take charge of innovation by dictating the future. Too bad, won’t work. They aren’t smart enough. The market is better than all of our government scientists tied up with a bow.
Bullcrap.
Without strategic direction, all the “unfettered free market” does is come up with proprietary incompatable technologies that don’t serve the public well, and make businesses “burned” by technology incompatable with domestic and international partner businesses reluctant to invest in the 1st place.
When the Pentagon left its equipment up to dfense contractors, they soon found men were dying because the Navy, Army, and AF were going the direction of incompatable pieces and parts, with comms unable to talk to one another, even between units in the same Army.
And we found that in the 70s, the free market and reliance on lawsuits and supply&demand market forces to resolve quality issues had left us with a pile of shoddy goods whose elimination took years, decades to go through the system. And we found that insurer and government standards that the Euros and Asians had kept in place made for better quality from the start and we lost market share to them.
And new technology roll outs spread further and faster in Europe and Asia because stuff like cell phones were not based on 5 “genius of the market-based” incompatable systems as in the US, with limited area coverage, but from standards imposed that ensured the cell phones worked everywhere..
There are things that the government does far better than free markets do. New technology infrastructure is one (DARPA & the Internet), and imposing necessary standards on industry (ASME code, Nuke quality, regs - for example)
Oct 13, 2008 - 1:37 pm 12. thegr8_1:Technology why can’t we use it to vote. Voters show their Social Security number when they go to vote. It is verified in government database that it is your number and you have not already voted. Then and only then you are permitted to vote. Sounds like a program a student could write in a couple of hours. Avoids ACORN and all of this other crap going on.
Oct 13, 2008 - 6:47 pm 13. John Moore:I would much rather have our politicians AND CITIZENS schooled in the methods and sociology and history of engineering and science than the actual technology. They can hire someone to tell them the technology quickly enough, but way too many big mistakes are made by those who don’t know what’s behind it all - the scientific method, science as it operates, and engineers and how engineering works.
As for cedarford, while there is a case to be made for government sometimes setting standards, the free market does a pretty good job by itself. Are you using a windows computer? The government didn’t design or standardize the hardware - competition and cooperation between competitors (standards groups) produced it. Using a Mac? Apple came up with that.
Using the internet? ARPA/DARPA funded the research that started it, but it really went wild with commercialization - especially by companies such as Cisco, Ebay, Google, etc.
The lack of a single in cell phone transmissions in the US does seem to be a hindrance compared to Europe… but… without that, TDMA would have won over CDMA as a standard, and CDMA turned out to be so much better that it was adopted world wide. And CDMA only happened because of competition in the US market.
Oct 13, 2008 - 8:05 pm 14. Marc Malone:thegr8_1 - It’s not just the software, but the infrastructure. Your voting site would need to be wired for it. All of them would. People would also wail about government databases, blah, blah, blah….
Oct 14, 2008 - 3:08 am 15. Fred:A little bit of knowledge is dangerous. They’d start inventing things in their legislation. Proprietary networks or some version of network neutrality that’s totally broken.
Think of the semi-knowledge they had of the stock market; It lent them a false sense of security.
Oct 14, 2008 - 4:27 am 16. submandave:Self-hating boomer, I am less concerned about Sen. Obama failing to understanding “tech” than about him failing to understand the economic and market forces that have allowed tech to grow, diverge, expand and become a dominant force. Apparently by his statement he believes that the government built Silicon Valley, a sentiment that seems to bode better for Soviet-style government innovation and research plans (which, incidentally, largely depended upon espionage from US government and industry) rather than the free-market of cyber-cowboys heading west for the silicon rush that really has built the industry.
If he seriously intends to grow the energy industry along the same lines as the low-regulation beginnings of the tech industry then I might consider voting for him. I seriously doubt, though, if that’s what he meant.
Oct 14, 2008 - 7:20 am 17. Mike T:The network you are posting this from is proof of the opposite, moron. Do you have any idea how many variants of the BSD TCP/IP stack and other homegrown ones there out there that **just work** to get your packets delivered transparently from point A to point B? Yeah, government mandates made that really necessary. Why, we’d all be stuck using IPX and God only knows what else if the government hadn’t come out and mandated a TCP/IP standard on network technologies.
Oh right, they didn’t have to do that. The market took care of it.
Sure, we could be like Europe and Japan. We could have a single standard that “just works” for cell phone technologies. On the flip side, we’d also have much less competition in the mobile market, and would have to accept whatever plan the incumbent wants to give us. Most Australians, for example, would love to have the service competition that we have for even basic Internet access.
Oct 14, 2008 - 9:07 am 18. Jim Baker:Politicians are living in a parallel world of perceptions. Therefore, technology makes very little difference to them. They don’t or won’t solve problems because they are concerned about the perceptual downside of any action. In their world, inaction is preferable to action because their opponents can’t pound them with what they haven’t done. The difference between the political fortunes of George Bush and Barack Obama is a striking example of perceptual reality of the politician. Too often Bush has chosen Your high tech world is driving a huge and growing industry, bur I doubt whether politicians will ever be any more interested than the typical I-pod customer. I work in a huge and growing energy industry and politicians have never had any more interest in us than they have in computer tech. Get used to it.
Oct 14, 2008 - 11:09 am 19. Vas is Das Kapital:To assess the honorable senators’ competencies, based on their technological prowess is hilarious, but moreover specious, because such competencies are irrelevant for the office they seek, given that the course of matters relating to religion, education, medicine, and economy are outside of the jurisdiction of government to create, regulate, or stimulate, else once again face the wrath of rebellion, as had Britain faced in 1776 in attempting to escalate taxation and central control over the colonies, and not even providing universal medicine in return, to boot. (Just tossing that last bit in to see if you’re both paying attention and able to hold your breath that long in your head.)
I prefer politicians waste not a single iota of neural agitation on technical matters and focus solely on their responsibilities. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially academic knowledge by otherwise non-participants in the field of endeavor in question. It is far, far better for government to be irresolute in matters beyond their jurisdiction, and relegate and confine such academic musings to their own private time, separate from the task of governing. If any government official spots a weakness in or an opportunity to improve something in the private sector they are completely welcome to resign from their government posts and dive right into the private sector, roll up their sleeves, and get cracking like the rest of us.
Look, even if we the people get down on our hands and knees and beg for socialism, hell even if we arm the government, prostrate ourselves before our now lordly masters, and beg for communism, still does not give the government any moral mandate to assume any jurisdiction over our private concerns, no matter how little responsibility we wish to reserve over our fates.
Yea verily, our good government has only one purpose in its portfolio: to buffer and resolve human aggression and disputes, (a) internally with a judicial system, (b) externally by means of military defense. That is all the “governing” that humans need to ensure that no man, business, or nation may act with force, coercion, aggression, or fraud against any other man, business, or nation.
Administer nothing but justice. That’s what I want my elected representative on the Oval office to do. So, HERE, HERE! I say to filibusters and bicameral gridlock until Ron Paul is elected.
Vote for impotent government and potent citizens, with little business ventures, perhaps such as http://www.turnblogsintocash.com.
Cheers!
Oct 14, 2008 - 11:14 am 20. SAF:submandave:
Concur with your comments.
The problem isn’t that Obama doesn’t know tech the problem is he doesn’t believe in the things that make tech blossom and grow.
We should all be deathly afraid of a candidate that thinks oil company profits are obscene. Because Microsoft, Apple and Cisco make a much higher percentage than do the oil companies. once they discover this it will be full scale war on those greedy computer/network guys.
Oct 14, 2008 - 12:48 pm 21. Daily Pundit » Voyage of the Damned:[...] Edgelings.com » The Techo-Unsavvy Candidates All of this may seem like just another amusing example of how out-of-touch our elected officials are. But it has dangerous implications. Over the last two decades we have seen Congress (and the Administration), out of ignorance, reaction or just plain grandstanding, do almost everything it can to undermine high technology, and especially entrepreneurship” from crushing regulations (which is why there are no tech IPOs anymore) and anti-trust harassment to bizarre accounting requirements on stock options to criminalizing success to falling for the latest scientific scare. [...]
Oct 14, 2008 - 1:48 pm 22. gs:Yet I read that Silicon Valley tilts strongly to Obama. Why is that? Or am I misinformed?
Give me (or anybody else who writes about tech) just 30 minutes with your candidate, any time and anywhere, and I’ll make sure, for the good of the country, that they never make this kind of mistake again.
If you make a video and post it online, I’ll give you 30 minutes of my time and watch it. If you update and post the charts you showed the Senator ten years ago, I’ll download and read them meticulously.
Oct 14, 2008 - 6:05 pm 23. zeppenwolf:cedarford:Bullcrap.
Without strategic direction, all the “unfettered free market” does is come up with proprietary incompatable technologies that don’t serve the public well…
“Bullcrap”?
>When the Pentagon left its equipment up to dfense contractors…
Whatever you’re talking about there, it doesn’t apply– the Pentagon, id est, A GOVERNMENT ORGAN, obviously has the burden to know what it’s doing and what it wants from a contractor. It’s hardly surprising that they goofed it up at some point, but that has no relevance to your claim listed above. If anything, I think it would detract from your argument.
>There are things that the government does far better than free markets do. New technology infrastructure is one (DARPA & the Internet),
In the arena of computers and the internet etc, private enterprise took over the task of ensuring intra-company compatabilities a long time ago. The real “infrastructure” of the internet at this point in time is in those protocols which private enterprises have voluntarily, self-centeredly, and successfully adhered to by organizing communal standards committees and accepting their determinations (”community organizing”!).
Remember in the early days of HTML when something that worked in one web-browser wouldn’t work in another one? Yeah– that was a long time ago, though: private enterprise learned the lesson. And it’s not just HTML these days– it’s an ocean’s worth of everything that matters on that machine you’re typing on.
It’s just great if Europe came up with standards for everyone’s cell phone– but there’s little if any guarantee they came up with the best solution, the one that would only come from competetion and evolution.
(And why are we talking about this?)
Oct 14, 2008 - 7:33 pm 24. wGraves:The internet was developed in the marketplace. Larry Roberts developed IP, which started out at Lincoln. The most prevalent upper level protocols were SNA (IBM), DECNET (guess), IP (ARPA), IPX (Xerox, Novell), and CHAOSNET ( don’t ask…and aptly named). They sat on top of Token Ring (IBM), Token Bus, Ethernet (Xerox), FDDI, etc. Your browser operates via HTML or XML, operating via HTTP, which runs on top of TCP which runs on top of IP which runs on top of whatever you like. Most commonly today, local level 2 is point-to-point 802.3, which eliminates speed and distance limits inherent in the original design, as there are no collisions. The development was evolutionary, not prescriptive. Standardization ocurred in Jon Postel’s (and head) drawer at ISI, nearby U C Santa Barbara, and a good thing. If the future had been left to the brain trust, we’d all be saving up to buy Symbolics Lispms.
Oct 15, 2008 - 10:27 am 25. Someone75:On the topic of electronic voting machines: Researchers at UC Irvine released a massive study last year showing that all current voting machines were vulnerable to various types of attacks. Some could be controlled via a network connection, some could be compromised by inserting a USB drive, and some could be compromised by removing a panel and pressing a sequence of buttons.
Shouldn’t we expect more? The Government pays enough for those machines!
Oct 16, 2008 - 2:37 pm 26. Timothy Birdnow » Our TEchno-Unsavvy Candidates:[...] Pajamas Media; a very good article. Bam-Bam put his foot way into it regarding computers and [...]
Oct 18, 2008 - 1:07 pm 27. x:Get real. Obama misspoke, he meant “the internet” not “the computer”, and you write a huge post on it? Get real. Why not write on real ignorance, such as Palin not being able to give a single example in 26 years of McCain’s work which was simnilar to his alleged Fannie/Freddie warnies, and not being able to give a single example of a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with (because of its ignoring states’ rights) aside from Roe v Wade. For starters! Geez.
Oct 19, 2008 - 2:40 am