Marconi Society member event "Fifty Years Ago and In the Future"
4:22PM Aug 16, +0000
Speakers:
Vint Cerf
Keywords:
federico
technology
computers
internet
system
years
marconi
microprocessor
spectrum
applications
transistors
marty
problem
future
chips
cell phone
world
communications
radio
artificial intelligence
recording in progress
oh
yeah am I see your full screen Shall we start?
Let's give him some one
more minute i
takes a little bit of time for the system to ingest everybody to Yeah,
I mean as groups I'm emitting all but then they come in in another group here we go there are at least 25 people here,
actually 63 According to my numbers
I see my nephew Steve Cooper is here. Hi, Steve. And my beautiful wife is here are really
alright, I think that's good. I think we do too.
Shall we start then? Thanks. So hello.
Do you think we're ready to go? The numbers joining cheap tapered off so it's time to go?
Okay, time to go. Hello, I'm Barry Sullivan, program development director for the Marconi society. In just a minute. I'll be turning this over to Dennis Robertson, the chairman of our county society to officially welcome you. But before I do, I just wanted to share a few housekeeping points. We are recording and we're going to be posting this recording for many more people to say enjoy this event. So if I'll just ask everyone to please keep your microphone on mute. As a courtesy to to the speakers and to also any future viewers. We'd like to keep the background noise to a minimum. Now you will have an opportunity to submit a question for the panel. If you notice at the bottom of the screen, there's a q&a button down there. You can use that to write your question and we'll be passing them along to the panelists. Finally, I'd like to share that there is a closed captioning feature available for our zoom meeting here. If you'd like to see a running transcription of this session, simply click on the CC button at the bottom of the screen. You can use that to turn the feature on or off as you prefer. So now it's my pleasure to turn the virtual podium over to Dennis Roberson Marconi society Board Chairman. Thank you, Barry.
And welcome to everyone to this exciting Marconi society event. I hope you are as enthusiastic about this event as I am this truly is an opportunity to hear from titans of industry. People who have created much of what we live and depend on today for our our activities. It's an interesting period that they will be talking about the early 1970s 50 years ago, were a period of great invention, the creation of at a very fundamental level, the elements that we depend on completely in the case of Federico Jagan, the invention of the microprocessor in the case of chronologically Marty Cooper, the first cell phone all with a handheld device and in the case of Vint Cerf, the essence of the Internet itself TCPIP. This will be an amazing session hearing from these individuals, and I'm very much looking forward to it myself. This is an event that was initially billed as a members only event. And as we pondered that we decided that this was too good to hold in the Marconi society itself. And instead, we make this available to a much, much larger audience, as an example of the benefits of being a part of the Marconi society. Hopefully, you will take that into account as you move forward. I know that you didn't come to this event to see me or bury in front of me. So let's move to those that you really did come to see and I'd like to introduce our master of ceremonies for this event, Yasmin, and she is herself a very accomplished individual. He is a Marconi society young scholar and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University, which is, as most of you know, one of the outstanding academic institution in the United States. So again, to keep things brief, the KISS principle applies and Yasmin, please take it away.
Thanks so much Dennison. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm super excited, honored to moderate this panel. Let me go ahead and share he was sly. kick things up. Ah, so Okay, so today we're gonna have a tree your New Year's legends, my own role models, and this is my absolutely perfect Can you see the slides and slide view? Yes. So let me quickly talk about the agenda for today. First, we're gonna have three short remarks by our three panelists. Then we will open it up for questions. Panel discussions and also questions from the audience. So please, keep your questions coming. Leave them in the chat. We'll read it and select which questions we want to ask given our short time. So I thought a lot about oh, boy, I'm gonna I'm gonna do justice introducing our pioneers in short, three, four minutes. In a set, I thought you will probably know everyone and your Google than you did your homework. So instead, I'm going to just share a few pictures with you that I really love solving with Federico Faggin. So, as you all know, Federico was one of the inventors of mass silicon gate technology back in 1968. This is the building block of our IC and then the most transistors that we see today in every single device from memory to complex logic, circuits and systems. In 1971 52 years ago, Federico developed the first commercial micro processors Intel 4004, and then after 1008 and then ADA. So I remember working with AD AD backup my undergrad, but I don't remember divergence before me before that. So, you can see a picture of this in the 4004 on the top right of the slide and this was originally used in a calculating machine. You can see right next to it. It's it was interesting to learn that this initial CPU was a four bit CPU with only 750 kilo hertz of clock, right? It's very different from what we know as a modern CPU processors today, and I think Federico here is holding the layout of the chip. So correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is the layout of the chip that is holding here. next panelist is wind surf. So when, as you know, he is the pioneer of Internet he with Bob Kahn, developed the first TCP IP protocol. They wrote the first document back in 1973. and published it in it plan, I do a transaction on communications. I went back and read the document actually have a surprise that was quite interesting and easy to read and very much similar to what we know of TCP IP for the commit I teach my students in my introductory class today. The sketch that you're seeing here is recreated from Vince original sketch that he tried to simplify the problem simplify this very complex problem. By showing three packet switch networks connected through multiple gateways and host computers and trying to come up with rules of how these networks should talk to each other and manage errors that might happen. During this connection, leave the picture on the right bottom as at around the same time that he sort of went into 1973 Even when got his PhD at UCLA. Last but definitely not least, we have Martin Cooper on the call. He's the inventor of the first portable cell phone in 1973. I believe Marty has one of the one of the prototypes with him right now. It's very heavy, two and a half pounds. It's very big about 10 inches long. He also made the first phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk. And I think this was a great test to see how the signal quality is given a noisy background in human atmosphere. It's so great to have you all here with me today. This is my absolute pleasure. Without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to Federico to start his short remarks.
I'm pleased to be here to talk about a time of history when I was young. In 1968, computer the smallest computers were called mini computers. And they had a CPU that was made with the order of 50 to 100 integrated circuits using bipolar technology. And then they had core memories for the random access memory and they could hardly fit in a desk a lot of money. So that technology was the best that could be done in those days. There was a technology that was up and coming was MOS but he had many, many problems. And in 68, I was able to create a new technology that changed the way that the MOS devices were built. That brought five times the speed of the incumbent technology was at that point, you could have much lower leakage, which meant that you could make dynamic memories and you could integrate twice as many transistors in the same area. So that technology was able to solve problems that were that neurology or with bipolar technology computer on a chip. So that technology then ended up in the hands of Intel and the 1970 I joined Intel in their develop the first design the first most the
time goes to the right way the right choice and
with microprocessor the old way that we design system changed because now instead of you know designing a dedicated system, especially for control applications, you can you can use a computer of course your computer was too expensive was too bulky cost too much blah, blah. But if you you know but so if you had a control problem, for example, you would logic of a control problem and make a dedicated system. But now with the microprocessor, you could use software instead of hardware. So all of a sudden the way to use to design and use systems was completely change. It took a few years of course, but now you don't even think about developing a special hardware to do to solve a problem. You already saw problems with software. The other things that happened is that because the you could build a computer in a small printed circuit board, an entire computer and of course we with silicon gate technology, you couldn't we couldn't do dynamic RAM we could do non volatile memories. That were a no no with the previous technology, we could do CCDs so that technology allow all the missing pieces to be done in a single chip and so by by 1978 We had a computer on a chip, meaning not only the CPU the core microprocessor, but also the memory and wrong RAM in ISOC, programmable IO. So those were the microcontrollers that change the way that we do a systems today they obviously they ended up in pretty much any application. So this enormous change allow, for example, the cell phone, the cell phone, could not work if you didn't have a computer inside of it. And so, so you had to have a computer in all application in small boxes, using a little bit of power instead of 1000 watts or something like that. And so with this with this technology, the future and the applications that occur were enormous. Also, MOS Technology lend itself to be reduced in size. And so if you have what is called the more Moore's law, which is the doubling of the power of a ship, every couple of years or so, which is which has been driving the technology to the point that today, advanced microprocessors have 50 billion transistors against the 2350 Perhaps if I remember correctly, 52 that the 4004 that were drawn by hand by me had and so that's, that's a big change. And today, of course, the impact of microprocessors on the on all aspects of of, of our life. communications were revolutionized with with, with the microprocessor, the these the personal computer changed the way that we use computers because they became personal as opposed to being shared devices. And the same happened with with different devices developing to intelligent phones that we have today that really literally changing our life. So today, we already played this at the threshold of a new change in technology, which is the use of artificial intelligence, which requires specialized microprocessor that are many, many hundreds of times faster. So they are specialized then the regular computers. We are we're nearing the end of Moore's law because we had reached three nanometers critical dimensions and three nanometers is essentially 30 atoms next to each other. So we are we're we're down to almost atomic scale. And therefore we have we will have to use creativity and you know, a new technologies which are coming. I stopped here because there will be many questions later and so I don't want to short the others.
Thanks a lot. And I definitely have a lot of questions and we'll get back to you Federico wins. Please take it away.
Thanks so much, everyone for joining us today and thanks Federico for setting the stage it's perfect because those low small, low cost and small processors made it possible for us to develop communications technology, which was quite different from what the telephone system grew up on, which was called circuit switching. So in the late 60s, we started to explore an idea which had been around for a while from the early 60s, and that's packet switching, which makes the communications look like electronic postcards, but it only made sense if the computers that you use to write the run the packet switching software were cost effective. So the early days of the ARPANET which began in 1968. The first equipment showing up in 69 were run with many computers that were taking advantage of what Federico was just describing. We were able to start out with dedicated telephone circuits that connected those special purpose processors together in which interface to the host computers that had the actual applications running on them. The host computers over time and morphed into gigantic data centers that use billions of the kinds of chips that Federico was describing and the communication systems have advanced from dedicated telephone circuits to mobile packet radio which we had running in the Bay Area in the 1970s mid 7576 timeframe. geosynchronous satellites like it will set up for a which we were running in the 19 late 70s to support long distance communication again, all of this is packet switch in 1973 by Metcalf and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center invents the Ethernet idea which he gets from a radio based system in Hawaii called Aroha net, where collisions are resolved by having a random delay and then you retransmit at random moments to avoid repeated collisions. Ethernet of course is morphed into what is now known as Wi Fi and simultaneously with Marty Cooper's work as you'll hear a bit more about it, we had 2g and 3G, 4g and now 5G And 6G is coming to say nothing of going from the geosynchronous satellites to mele,
middle
level satellites and now many of you may already be using low Earth orbiting satellites as he would find in the Starlink system that's running SpaceX. So over this period of time several things have happened. One of them is that the speeds and the scale of this system have gone up is often a consequence of the scaling of the computers that that Frederico was describing. The system has grown in the case of Internet when it was first started. In 1973. It had only three networks it was the ARPANET, the packet radio net, mobile packet radio net and the fact that satellite net by 1983 when we turned it on, there might have been 400 computers on the system. Today there are billions of machines on the network which spans the globe and reaches beyond the Earth in the low Earth orbit and larger orbit satellites. And we're not done yet. Because we're now going off planet. There's already work that's been going on since 1998. To expand internet's operation across the solar system. new protocols have been required, which lets me mentioned briefly that the layered architecture of the packet switched Internet allowing people to add new protocols and any new layer, add a new layer, as Tim Berners Lee did when he invented the World Wide Web in 1991, which was aggrandized by work at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. With the Mosaic browser, which eventually morphed into Netscape Communications in 1994, and triggered the dot boom in 1995. So here we are, it's 2023. Computers are everywhere. Communications is everywhere. We're reliant on software that other people have written. And it is a time of both tremendous pain capability to say nothing of artificial intelligence, which is also surrounding us. But it's also a time of great challenge because a lot of these very powerful technologies allow people to do harmful things in the online environment. So we're now trying to find ways of making the system safer and more secure while preserving all of the benefits that we watched it washed emerge over the past 50 years of Internet sport. So I'll stop there, and hand off to I assume it's Marty. He's next.
Yes, please, Mark, take it away.
Well, it's a glorious day in Del Mar. Erwin, we looked outside the sun shining for the first time in two weeks, and I think that's an omen. That is going to tell us a lot about what's happening in the next 50 years beyond what we've been talking of up to the gonna spend a little bit of time talking about the history. I want to spend more time talking about what I think is going to happen in the future with this confluence of three technologies that together, have only started. The revolution is going to happen in the future. I think we're just learning how to use the conductivity, the ability to access all the information of mankind and to process that information in ways that make it useful for that. I think we're just just beginning but let me talk about the real beginning and I have to go back more than 50 years. Let me go back 130 years to a laboratory of 100 hertz is talking to this isn't a university town in Germany. He has several of those colleagues together. They're looking at this little wooden box with two little towers on it. And the towers on top of the towers are these silver balls. And he pulls the drapes, a turns the gas light down. You must recognize that the light bulb hadn't been invented yet. And you could actually voltaic pile, this wooden box spark leaps between the two silver balls across the room, or as a circle of copper wire. The spark appears. Smallest work appears on this other wire is now demonstrated that Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism really works at the speed of light. These radio waves have gone across thinking they didn't have radio, but these waves have gone across the room and causes spark to occur. And Heinrich says and we have now demonstrated that Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism This is works because of course it has no practical use. But we it gives us something to work on for the next few years. A couple of years later, barcoding and I'm talking about our barcoding decides that maybe there is a practical use. And he does the exact same experiment, except in this case. He has a generator that puts out many kilowatts of electricity. The spark turns out to be a lightning rod. Oh, I have the antenna he used was between telephone poles in new Newfoundland. And if there were any birds sitting on those wires of a telephone poles they became immediate toast because we were putting kilowatts in, literally a lightning bolt. And sure enough 3000 miles away in the British Isles. We detect a length of sound and he has created concept of course, barcoding the path to this. There are some dispute about whether Tesla did this at the same time. Tesla was in the US where Cody was in. And Russia, guiding pop off is celebrated as having invented the radio. In India. It's a guy named Bose. So we really don't do it better. It's not important because this started on a revolution. We're barcoding started a company within a month. They had saved 1000 people from dying at the sinking of the Titanic. And the next thing you know we have radio we have television 1947 Bell Labs announces that they are the actual actually have two Bell Labs researchers write a paper about how we can multiply the capacity of the radio spectrum using a distribution of radio signals in a pattern of circles. They didn't know that. Radio waves have not been educated yet to stay within these circles but somehow the system did end up being workable. But they also decided that there was no practical use of this now they put it into a filing cabinet. 22 years later, at&t remember at at the Bell System the monopoly that ran all our telephones, they decided that the time was ready to do this. And they announced that they were going to come up with a new system. Car telephones. They had engaged a consulting company and the consulting company called them I forgot whether it was Ernst and Young or do you like the ultimate market? This new device this car telephone that propel SR was going to produce was about a million followers in the whole world. There would never be bored to death. Believe it or not they were right. Because there were in the history of mobile telephones. There the maximum number of car telephones that ever existed was the order of a million in the whole world because my colleagues and I and Motorola decided that the world was ready for personal communications people didn't want to call a car they didn't want to call a house they had been doing for 100 years, wanted to call a person and created the very first portable telephone example which I have heard yesterday as a way to describe it. So I will go further. into that today, or 8 billion people in the world. There are more than a billion cell phones. By the way, I don't know why we call it a cell phone. But it had to be because the system created this thing. This device that we use today is not a phone and has nothing to do with cells because the cells didn't work anyway. But are more people using cell phones today. More than half the people in the world are using cell phones. I believe we have just barely learned how to use this device just on the cusp of several real revolutions. And I just want to mention by name I can't go into detail. Healthcare now have sensors that we can put a person's body that can measure virtually everything. Not only your pulse, your blood pressure almost everything now we are learning every day how to put more sensors. The sensors can communicate with the central computer who can do a physical examination not every year or every five years, every minute. There is the potential such thing as a disease before it really becomes a disease. And if we can do that we can zap these diseases and stop them. There is the potential law of brain to eliminate the whole idea of disease. We're not going to have disease, the future the major use of this new device the ability to access all the information in the world is to improve productivity and we are doing that in spades are countries in Africa and the United Nations determined that over a period of 20 to 25 years that a billion people moved out of the fair power poverty, still poor, but their productivity brought out by the ability to connect has virtually eliminated severe poverty in Africa. And when you extrapolate that still further there is the potential to totally eliminate private productivity completely. And the most important revolution I think that's going to happen. We put all these things together is that education, the idea of a teacher giving a lecture to a bunch of students, each of whom has access all the knowledge in the world more than the teacher knows is kind of ludicrous. The education system is going to change. The is going to take advantage of the fact students will have full time access to the Internet. Doc just with her at school but everywhere.
Somehow or other the education system is going to transform into a system where people are learning all the time. Our children, the students are going to be less further we are in the world and I see the future is one more poverty doesn't exist anymore, where people are smart enough not to ever go to war. That's my vision of the future. And I challenge you to launch my vision. Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot everyone. So I want to go back almost 50 years ago, maybe the day that Federico you tested the first photons and foreign is borked when the day that you develop the first TCP IP protocol and you submitted the paper or Marty the Veda the day that you develop the first prototype. Very few how much of this transformative technology but you predicting back then like are you predicting that this is a big deal that is going to transform the way that we live? And as the technology evolves, surprised you the most about your own innovation. You have
an order that you want to do this in.
No no, I think whoever wants to go first.
Well Marty just jumped in. So go ahead, Marty.
Molly jumped in because I couldn't quite hear what I was saying. So why don't you start with repeat yes when challenged with
Okay, so basically she's saying when when we did some of these early took these early steps. Did we have any idea of what was coming as a result. And in our what have we been surprised about? My surprises in the Internet world came in two forms. The first one comes when I realized that this is a potentially commercial system that might reach the general public because the original work was done for the Defense Department in order to design and build a command and control communication system for the US military and for its allies. And that's what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency charged Bob economy to do. And to integrate a number of different kinds of radio based and wire based communication technologies into a common and broad global spanning Internet. But the fact that it might be of commercial interest doesn't really strike me until 1988 When I walked into the Moscone Center in San Francisco and saw 25,000 people looking at Internet based equipment, software and applications and realizing that there must somebody thinks they're gonna make money out of this. So then I was thinking, Well, how do we building essentially a, an economic engine to sustain its use and growth? So that was the first surprise was realizing that it might be commercializable. At that point, there was hardware and software that was being sold but the service wasn't available till the following year in 1989. When three commercial services popped up in the US UU net psi now then surf net. The next big surprise comes when Tim Berners Lee announces the World Wide Web in December of 91. And at that point, nobody noticed except for the guys at the National Center for supercomputer applications, and they said, Oh, this is a nice text based search engine or browser. But what if we made a graphical interface, graphical user interface, so they invent the Mosaic browser and suddenly the Internet looks like a magazine, everybody downloads the Mosaic browser, and suddenly the world wide web becomes very visible to a great many people. But it wasn't. It wasn't until the that technology was commercialized at Netscape Communications that we started seeing people for the sheer joy of sharing what they knew creating web pages, many of them manually writing their own HTML code. Until finally applications were developed to make it much easier to design, build and deploy a web page. So the early and mid 1990s were a big surprise for me. So much information flowed into what we call the World Wide Web that nobody could find anything which drove the need for search engines, some of which many of you will remember Alta Vista, Yahoo and Google in 1998, and Bing later, all of which we use many of us every single day, many times a day. And then the next thing hits and that's 2007 When the smartphone arrives in the form of the iPhone, and up until that point, Marty's work and the work of the Internet had proceeded more or less in parallel, but by creating a device that had a computer and multiple radios is the touch sensitive screen, a camera speaker and a microphone. The the invention lapsed, an enormous number of functionalities into a handheld device. And suddenly the mobile smartphone becomes the way you get to the Internet. And the Internet is the Internet gives the smartphone access to literally millions of applications and all the content on the Internet. This is a hyperbolic, mutually reinforcing environment. So those were the things that really surprised me. And of course, I'm expecting to be surprised again, assuming Marty's vision of the future materializes.
Rico, you go first, and I'll finish it right. Me.
The surprise was the fast microprocessors were adopted.
You know, when I did
this work, the first applications that we could see, were, of course, calculating machines because those were obvious and and it was the first microprocessor was designed explicitly for a customer that was making a family of calculators with it. But I saw that for applications where the next batch because in those days to control anything will be costly. If you have to design a special system dedicated system only you can only sell, you know 100 or 1000 of those systems. So the cost of developing the hardware would be prohibitive. And so you know that was the first application that Intel went after, after I showed that, you know, the that family could really be affected for control application. So, so that was the beginning. But at that time also the technology had begun the more slide began to be understood, especially in terms of what do we need to do to drive the curve, so to speak, and, and so, by reducing the size of transistors in a sort of a almost a predictable way. We were able for the next 40 years to double the number of transistors and in double the speed almost, you know, regularly to the point where you know, we had transistors that you could have a microprocessor that will run 234 Giga hertz, which, you know, if you had asked me, I thought there were no it was not possible, because at that time this the eyes of the transistor would have had to be so small that I didn't think we could have been able to do it. But in fact, using you know, using specially tog Rafi equipment that was blew my mind really when when I saw them, we could go down to micron and keep on going to the point where today we have chips that have 1 trillion transistors, those are the the the flash memory technology chips that, you know, we use routinely. We don't even don't even pay attention to. But those chips are made by making the order of 100 layers of transistors, one on top of each other. So it's an unbelievable technology. But we tend not to pay attention to that because we simply use the technology. But again, would I have imagined that we could do that in 50 years ago? Absolutely not. To me, to me the personal computer that became a also an instant success. In some ways. And the creator the background where millions of people could have you know, access to a computer. Were foundational because that allow the allow them to do all these services allow Internet to become a real you know, real market as opposed to a curiosity. So so the the baseline of personal computers that allow them Internet to be to become very effective, and they became a virtuous cycle you know more you know more computers more, you know, better, better, cheaper, more computer, more and more applications, intermediate Internet, not as a technology because that was very clear that you know, that it could be done and all that, but as the new applications that nobody had thought about, you know, search engines, you know, you know, being able to bet on you know, betting games, I mean you name it or I forgot now the name of the company, because they they come and go but but basically applications that I wouldn't never imagine were really happening every month, every month something new. So for me the the this, this technology has, has had many surprises. And finally, in it for intelligence back in, in 1986, a company synoptics where we wanted I wanted to make chips that learn by themselves. So using using floating gate transistors and being able to use neural networks I was able to show that that worked, but the amount of computation necessary was just not there in those days. But that technology was the technology that now we find applied everywhere. With the with chips they make trillions of multiplications per second. And in that technology also came out of the same basic movement that we have seen. And as I look ahead, I see applications that go way beyond way beyond what the technology that we have, but that the technology that we have will allow to develop the technology of the future. You know, for example, the fact that that we have transistors that switch using power that is much much more than the brain uses uses about 1 million less less watt per per switching and so that you know, that is an incredible you know, is it is it proof of principle that we need to learn from today. The chips for AI, some chips dissipate 400 Watts, so that's crazy. I mean, how can you use chips so that you know for 400 Watts, we are back to where we started with computers that you know that dissipated kilowatts, but but but life is showing us biology showing us ways of doing it. They're wanting computers to actually do the simulation and learn how life
really that we may return to that.
Wonderful, thanks a lot for the RICO Marty
virtual I appreciate being the last speaker in this question because then I can explain what every all the previous speakers meant to say that we knew back in 1973. Cell phone was going to be a popular device. The story we told was that someday when you were born, you would be assigned a phone number. If you didn't answer the phone you had died. We had no idea. You could put a digital camera inside a cell phone because digital camera had been invented. The Internet has been invented before the processor did not exist. So how could you do all this? stuff that we're doing today? So all those things are a big surprise. But the big surprises are yet to come. I think that the cell phone today is terribly suboptimal. I mean, just think about it. We you want to talk to somebody you hold the phone up to your ear this awkward position. You have what we call the Apps applications. There are 4 million applications available to you now how do you pick the one that you're going to use? So the cell phone of the future is going to be very different from the one we have today. You're gonna have all kinds of surprises. Certainly there will be an artificial intelligence. The cell phone is going to be an extension of your personality. And not some guy at Apple or Samsung who decides what your cell phone is going to be this artificial intelligence will analyze your behavior and find the right apps make your life better. Or perhaps it will create the apps by itself but the whole sample of the future of cellular telephony is improving humanity improving human experience. We are doing a lot of very interesting things in the Internet of things. I don't object to working on the Internet of things, but we haven't yet finished the Internet of people. I hope we work very hard at that. And Adam, if you're listening to me, I know you are. I hope you take that personally. I think we have some wonderful experiences to be had in the future of cellular telephony.
Great, thanks. I see a lot of questions in the chat. Please keep them coming. I see a question by Dennis I'm gonna phrase it with Dennis permission a little bit. Oh, Vint, your hand is
yes. I wanted to respond to to Marty for just a second because the the power of the Internet is indeed the people who use it. Then same argument can be made for the mobile phone and all the computers that people like Federico have developed. The problem that we have, of course, is that not everybody has everyone else's best interests at heart. And so we're seeing these powerful tools being used in a variety of ways, some of which are in fact quite harmful. There's of course, a huge conversation going on right now about artificial intelligence and machine learning and various applications that arise from it, and the potential hazards that the use of these large language models might pose. And so the real problem we have right now in addition to any technological challenges, is figuring out how to hold accountable bad behavior. How to do that on a on an international scale, while at the same time preserving all of the value that we have seen already realized, with the systems that we have today as primitive as they might seem to be looking from the 50 years in the future. So we need sociologists and psychologists and anthropologists and people who are concerned about legal structures. We need people who deal with people and understand you know how it is that we accept certain behavioral norms in exchange for certain benefits. That's the social contract that was so talked about many years ago. So the challenges here are not only with the technologists, they're also with people who helped shape the way societies work. We need to help as technologists to reinforce tools that will allow those solutions to be implemented. But we are not the sole parties that can solve all the problems. We have a much broader agenda and a much broader need for smart sociological step steps that need to be taken at the UN and the International Telecommunications Union and elsewhere. We're seeing all of these debates going on which are aimed at trying to cope with some of those challenges.
Great, thanks, man. So the question coming from Dennis is what are the biggest technology and societal challenges and I guess we already alluded to it. So want to make it more specific. For example, for Federico, you mentioned Moore's law intended right. So what is going to be coming after that? What is next? Are we prepared for what is going to be the challenges we kind of have to solve in the chip technology in the next 10 years? When you mentioned dealing with the bad players and ensuring that security of the Internet is preserved? What are your thoughts on digital divide and making sure the Internet is accessible to everyone? And then, for Marty, Marty, I know you've worked a lot on a spectrum management and solar system as well, right. And as we have more and more of these devices, billions of IoT devices and cell phones, we know that the spectrum below subs below six gigahertz is getting more and more crowded. Right and of course, we're not optimizing the spectrum as as much as we can, right? Do you think by optimizing the spectrum and do a better job in a spectrum management the problem is going to be solved or do we need to explore higher bands, millimeter waves mid band even sub tracks? So these are three specific questions. But the underlying theme is what are the main challenges to be solved in the next 10 years in each of the innovation? So for the record, you want to pick the first
All right, well, the obviously there is not much room left with the current technology in reducing the size of transistors, we you know, we think that you know, it will be almost impossible to get to one centimeter that cannot domes, because if you when you say atoms that align either 10 atoms but you know, plus or minus one, I don't know. Well, it's kind of it's kind of tough to do. So we're already we're already at three and so we need to become smarter and the way we use the technology we need to be more creative. In the past, we have brute force the entire system the entire process by you know, if we can quickly reduce the size by a factor of two then we have four times the power. And so so you know, this strategy no longer works, so we have to become clever. There is going to be an end to that game in the appetite. For computational power is especially for you know, to use low power the normals, because as I mentioned earlier, the many of the applications that we're talking about today, you know, gobble up, gazillions domotic, you know, of multiplications per second. And so, so where do we go? Now, there is the promise on one end of quantum computation, where you have entangled quantum bits as opposed to classical bits that are the the exploited to do computation, which allows you to do parallel sort of parallel computation, which can be that many orders of magnitude faster than what we can do with classical computers. But quantum computers have two problems. One is that they have to work and near absolute zero temperature minus 273 centigrade. So that's a that's a tough thing to do. And of course, they you cannot have one of those in your pocket. And so they can be a service through you know, the through the web or through some cloud computing service for people they want to use this type of computers. And the other problem is that there are no general purpose they there are only, you know, a handful of algorithms now that can use the power of quantum computation. And so there is a lot of work to do, but I think fundamental because he's going to teach what is quantum physics saying? Nobody understands quantum physics today, and nobody understands why quantum quantum objects are entangle. I mean, scientists have been fighting over this for you know, 80 years and finally, they had to concede that there is this non local property of reality, which is called entanglement. No time to explain what it is but the point is that we have something here, which is so revolutionary. And something that actually explains why life is actually not a classical phenomenon is a one two and classical phenomenon. And this is an area where I've been working for many, many years. And it's an area that I promise to explain who we are, who are we are we machines, driven by the principle of the survival of the fittest. If that is what we believe we are, we are in deep trouble. God the survival of the fittest means war. And the fact that we are machines means there is no hope. The machine breaks we do not exist anymore. So the problem of consciousness, the problem of free will, the fundamental problems that are at the basis of the in this in the world, because that equality is not a technological problem. It is a human problem is a parameter of the heart. That is the problem that needs to be solved. And that goes beyond technology. And that requires
heart. Oh,
was that a strong message? Thanks a lot for recall. Our tea do you want to go next?
Well, that was a wonderful comment Federico. I don't know how we got to define the heart and technology, but I think we're going to work it out. But there is a myth. That spectrum is like beachfront property, or you use it up and there isn't anymore and yet capacity of the spectrum from that time, but Marconi did his first transmissions when he transmitted from Newfoundland to British Isles, that there could only be in the entire world, maybe four or five simultaneous conversations, otherwise they would have interfered with each other. I did an analysis of where we are today. It turns out over the first 50 years, we increase the capacity of the radio spectrum by a million times in the next 50 years ago, we had presented another billion times. So we are trillion times more efficient today in using the radio spectrum than we were in Marconi time. And yet, we still have just barely tapped the techniques for using the spectrum effectively. In fact, we're doing everything possible to make it harder to increase the capacity of spectrum and we left the the in the US we left the Congress to decide how to allocate the spectrum. I can't think of any group less competent to understand radio spectrum than the US Congress. The whole idea of giving somebody exclusive access to a PC spectrum doesn't make any sense at all. Because sharing the spectrum is the way to make one of the most important way of getting more capacity in the spectrum and yet today, every element of the spectrum is on exclusively by somebody. That's just not a practical thing. But there is no doubt in my mind that we can increase the capacity of the radio spectrum over the next 50 years by another million times. Air that's a good thing because we are thinking of new ways of using the collaboration of people to solve all of the big problems in the world. And I hope Frederico that that we technologists can figure out how to understand the human heart and in the process, and the UE very concept of war. What do you think?
Yes, man, if I could just interject quickly here we do have a number of questions that have been entered through the q&a. And there's one in particular that I'm looking at that, I think is a nice follow up to what Vint and Marty and Federico are were just saying, the question is does the panel think the r&d the US r&d complex is doing what is needed to keep these great innovations coming? What we could we be doing better? ARPA, ARPA academia corporate research, different today than 50 years ago. There are countries other countries or regions that look to be doing r&d Better. That might be models for us going forward. The next big thing? If you'd like to put that to the panel, this event raising his hand to respond,
I'll be happy to start an answer anyway. First of all, there are other countries that are advancing in their state of the art of research, trying to be an obvious one. I believe in the long run, though, that science is widely shareable and that's our whole theory is shared knowledge is what advances our ability in the long run and so we should take advantage of that. Internet is one tool for sharing that information. And I'm excited to see more and more of that happening. I do think that by the way, that the phrase survival of the fittest, which Federico said meant more, I'd like to suggest a more optimistic interpretation of what that means. It's more like most adaptable because if you look at the theory of evolution is the adaptation that drives evolution. And so what we need as a society is to learn how to adapt to a more positive environment to pay attention to our problems, like global warming, pay attention to smarter use of spectrum like Marty was saying sharing is the learn to do sharing when you're in kindergarten, you know, we should remember those lessons and apply them to our everyday lives and the challenges that lie ahead. I know we're going to run out of time soon. So I'll stop. Maybe others would like to respond to that question as well.
respond to this event because you know the principle of the survival of the fittest there used to be the principle of the strongest to me, to me to call it the fittest is the politically correct version of this article. You know, the fact of the matter is, we think that we are machines science is telling us today that we fiends if we are machines, then probably because a machine that we built collectively called AI would potentially be better than us, because they are also machines. Do Are we really machines or are we not? That question has been motivating me the last 35 years of my life, research the nature of consciousness and the nature of freewill and I am actually happy to say in the last two years, together with a top physicist in in Italy, which you know, is a one of the top 10 in the quantum information. We have come to a theory that actually shows that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. And as such, it exists in a reality which is vaster. The reality where you have space and time and the matter that we know
that we think is the only
thing that exists. So if you start there, all the sudden then living systems are quantum and classical systems that connect consciousness, which is not part of the living system is actually exist in reality vaster and living systems then connect to the reality of classical information, the matter the macroscopic matter that we think is a reality described by classical physics. So now we have a different view of where we are. And in that view, the death of the body is not the death
or
we started from here, we
can actually go way beyond what we have been able to do because in the past, we had been considering ourselves completely isolated from the others. That's why if I killed somebody, oh, no problem to me. I mean, you know, basically, that person is separate from me. Actually, in the quantum world, the quantum work is holistic. There are no separable parts. We are all all part of a hole supposed to be a reductionistic world. So just changing the sense of who we are, can change the way we act in the world because now if I heard something, the I ended up hurting myself because we are all connected. And if I do some good to others, then I do good to myself. So it is this philosophical starting point. That has to change because if we don't start from there, with the root is not saying in the root is not saying wars will continue.
Oh Frederico because my comments are much more trivial than what you're talking about, but I subscribe to everything you just said. But one of the big problems is we have a short term future is that we are regulated and politicized by people who do not understand technology. We have a patent system that broke a long time ago was supposed to protect the individual inventor, and at the moment, it only protects the biggest companies who don't need production. So some are other we have to figure out how to revise our political systems to understand the kinds of things that you're talking about Federico and Finnish talks about so we can get out of the way. The technologists put a minimum of guardrails in there people talking about well, we ought to pause. Artificial Intelligence. Well, good luck. The genies out of the bottle you're not gonna put them back in again. We serve our other half to get some intelligence into our political system and I think that's a major challenge. When it add
one more to Marty and like answer various questions in a different way. I guess the problem in academia at least is that the incentives are for you to solve similar problems, right? That you can publish more and you have fast turnaround right in your projects. And it's yes, there are fundings available. If you want to do a transformative technology that will take decades, but we have enough of it. I don't think so. And I think that's a problem. Definitely that kind of impact. The the innovation and innovation culture 50 years from now.
So it's, it's been again, just responding to that. One of the things that I've enjoyed in the course of my career is something called a skunkworks. And what that really is, is an isolated team, which is shielded from whatever business issues are arising in order to go and focus on a particular problem and to just stay on that problem. So Internet was built in a sense in a skunkworks. When I was working on MCI Mail, we were isolated from the rest of the company, and they basically said go make this happen. So I'm a big fan of skunkworks kinds of things which let people focus on on problems and not be sidetracked by, for example, near term concerns now that it's sometimes isn't possible. I mean, you have to have sources of funding and support and facilities and everything else in order to make a skunkworks function successfully. There's a very famous skunkworks that was run by Lockheed Martin, for example, that made some of the most advanced aircraft and used in intelligence gathering. And it it succeeded in part precisely because it was given the resources it needed, and it was told don't get distracted by anything else. Just go figure out how to make this work. Well, maybe we need a kind of sociological skunkworks in order to figure out how to make these technologies work for us, instead of having it go the other way around.
We have just a few minutes left now. And
actually, yeah, I have one final question that I really want to ask. We have a lot
of time for the final question
for the carrier scientists, engineers in the room. What is your advice? What is your message for the next generation of inventors?
I have a simple one. If you want to do something big get help. Especially from people who are smarter than you are.
Work as a team.
Great so Oh, I enjoyed the discussion a lot. I hope everyone enjoyed as much as I bet I think we need t shirt saying on it. Spectrum is beachfront property. And the other one maybe they're all connected both through content and through wireless communication, something like that. So thanks. A lot, everyone for participating. I know Barry has a few final thoughts for us to share with us. So I'll hand it over to you Barry.
Thank you. Yes, man. I just wanted to, again as we're closing if I if I can have here we go. Again, as Dennis said at the outset, no, this was originally to be a members only event but we decided to share it more broadly. And you know, there may be many people in the audience who have been dissipating and say gaining some insight into what are some of the benefits of becoming a Marconi Society member. So by being a member of the society, yes, you get access to events like the ones that we just had, that we all just participated in. And emerging from these kinds of events, networking opportunities with the kinds of people that you had speaking with us today. We do have a regular magazine, the Marconi signal, and also a monthly newsletter. And one other announcement I'd like to make do have our annual Marconi society Awards Gala, coming up on Friday, October 27. at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural Natural History in Washington, DC. I'll say that seats at the gala are limited, but if you are interested in attending, please go to the Marconi society where you can get additional information on how to attend the event there.
See the link at the bottom of the page there and I believe that the link is also now in the chat if you'd like to find out more about becoming a member of the Maccarone society and participating in the various events and getting access to all the benefits of comes with membership. Thank you everybody and look forward to in contact with you all again.