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Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering From the 2000 NAE Symposium on Frontiers in Engineering (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Bits Versus Atoms -- The Future of Information Technology
Pages 105-114

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From page 107...
... Then came electronics, radio and television, the computer, telephone, air conditioning, the highway system, spacecraft, health technologies, petrochemical technologies, fiber optics, and so on down the list. A couple of weeks ago I got a call from CNN, and they wanted to know why the Internet, which was ranked thirteenth, was so low on the list.
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From page 108...
... That's still very significant, but the truth remains that most of the world is not yet connected. However, I have thought about the Internet versus the other things on the Greatest Achievements list, and it has led into what I want to talk about today that is, the nature of information technology.
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From page 109...
... Information technology, however, is nothingness personified. It weighs nothing, is created from nothing, and is indestructible in many ways.
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From page 110...
... It' s bad enough now that the computer you buy is obsolete in a couple of years, but imagine if it were obsolete so quickly that there was no stability in the world. Or, think of a world where Moore's Law stopped, and computers stopped getting faster.
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From page 111...
... I think Moore's law is so fundamental to what's happening in information technology that it's going to continue for another 100 years. How could it go past the next half of the chessboard?
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From page 112...
... I heard a talk recently by Brian Arthur, an economist at the Sante Fe Institute, who is credited with writing the original paper on network externalities. He's got a new law that he unabashedly calls Arthur's Law, which is "Of networks there will only be a few." This really applies to the law of network externalities, but the kind of networks he's talking about are not AT&T versus AOL or anything like that.
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From page 113...
... Napster is another example of what's going on in information technology. First, it's an example of the kind of network in which winner takes all.
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Key Terms

  • road ahead
  • months doubling
  • stuck onto
  • network externalities
  • networks dominated

  • winner takes
  • feature sizes
  • onto atoms
  • empty boxes
  • network grows

  • exponentials build
  • achievements list
  • aspect helped
  • cost issue
  • brian arthur

  • total value
  • internet versus
  • power plant
  • little web
  • linear factor

  • movie goes
  • physical world
  • network effects
  • stopped getting
  • management mistakes

  • friend douglas
  • people staring
  • core memory
  • versus aol
  • carpenters building


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