[asia-apec 1561] Melbourne Age - WEF coverage

[APEC Monitoring Group]

Fear is the key, says technocrat

By GARRY BARKER
Tuesday 12 September 2000


World Economic Forum protesters were motivated by fear and outmoded notions
of technology, one of the world's leading technologists said yesterday.

The protesters were haunted by 50-year-old forecasts of the future of
technology, said John Gage, co-founder and chief scientist of Sun
Microsystems, one of the principal Silicon Valley companies.

"They believe that what we represent is in some way depriving people of
jobs," he said. "But that is a 1930s view of where things came from and what
will be happening with these machines that do the work of human beings."

A symbiosis would develop between machines and humans that would change the
way governments, corporations and individuals thought and worked.

They would create work, not destroy it, he said. But enormous cultural and
technological changes would occur as these links between humans and machines
developed.

People who today thought they had no role in the IT revolution would be
brought into play by new information systems. New and cheaper means of
information transfer were being developed, through devices such as cell
phones always connected to the Internet, and "digital ink" plastic sheets
that could be used to download documents.

These were here, or coming, but the information side had a lot more work to
do than the technology side.

"You may not realise it, but the World Economic Forum is taking a leading
role in setting the agenda for government and for business in attempting to
bridge the digital divide to those billions of people who, for the moment,
do not participate."

He showed a tiny Japanese network cellphone. "One million of those sold in
the past four weeks," he said. "Every girl in Japan has a pink one that says
`Hello Kitty', and they browse 17,000 web pages. They wear them all the
time, because everything is there, from e-mail to movie times."

Making such devices serve some human use was the fundamental drive in every
company that was attempting to mix technology and information with business.

"When you hit it with something small and cheap that provides an immediately
useful function to people, then you can sell a million in a few weeks and
keep on doubling those sales.

"This represents a shift in the information technology business."

Over the past half century the design of computers had not changed much. "We
still think of computers as things that put files on disks. That technology
will continue for some time yet, but now we have the network that has put
$US10 trillion of added value into the industry, into companies that make
computers that talk to each other.

"Everything is now on the network. You can reach your information
instantly."

While there were only about 200 million PCs in the world, there were almost
20 billion chips in cellphones, printers, light switches in every device
that added intelligence.

Modern cars had as many as 150 microprocessors built into them.

"We are watching a transformation as those cars are linked into the network
because they provide an interface with a human that is useful routes,
prices, services of all kinds," Mr Gage said.

The speed at which technology was advancing was awesome, he said. He spoke
of Sony's new Playstation console, which he said would soon not only connect
to the Internet but would have a 30-gigabyte hard disk.

About 1 million would be sold on its release date, October 26, and in a year
they would sell about 80 million, he said.

"Say they sell 10 million," he said. "That means 300,000 terabytes of online
storage possible by Christmas. That is more data storage than in all of
Australia; more than in the entire US Government, including the intelligence
agencies."