Part 20 (1/2)
The future is wide open. As we mentioned, Silicon Valley could become the next Rust Belt in the coming decades, as the age of silicon pa.s.ses and the torch pa.s.ses to the next innovator. Which nations will lead in the future? In the days of the Cold War, the superpowers were those nations that could wield military influence around the world. But the breakup of the Soviet Union has made it clear that in the future the nations that will rise to the top will be those that build their economies, which in turn depends on cultivating and nouris.h.i.+ng science and technology.
So who are the leaders of tomorrow? The nations that truly grasp this fact. For example, the United States has maintained its dominance in science and technology in spite of the fact that U.S. students often score dead last when it comes to essential subjects like science and math. Proficiency test scores in 1991, for example, showed thirteen-year-old students in the United States ranking fifteenth in math and fourteenth in science, just above Jordanian students, who ranked eighteenth in both categories. Tests taken since then annually confirm these dismal numbers. (It should also be pointed out that this ranking corresponds roughly to the number of days that students were in school. China, which ranked number 1, averaged 251 days of instruction per year, while the United States averaged only 178 days per year.) It seems like a mystery that, despite these awful numbers, the United States continues to do well internationally in science and technology, until you realize that much of the U.S. science comes from overseas, in the form of the ”brain drain.” The United States has a secret weapon, the H1B visa, the so-called genius visa. If you can show that you have special talents, resources, or scientific knowledge, you can jump ahead of the line and get an H1B visa. This has continually replenished our scientific ranks. Silicon Valley, for example, is roughly 50 percent foreign born, many coming from Taiwan and India. Nationwide, 50 percent of all Ph.D. students in physics are foreign born. At my university, the City University of New York, the figure is closer to 100 percent foreign born.
Some congressmen have tried to eliminate the H1B visa because, they claim, it takes jobs away from Americans, but they do not understand the true role that this visa plays. Usually, there are no Americans qualified to take the highest-level jobs in Silicon Valley, which we've seen often go unfilled as a consequence. This fact was apparent when former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder tried to pa.s.s a similar H1B visa immigration law for Germany, but the measure was defeated by those who claimed that this would take jobs away from native-born Germans. Again, the critics failed to understand that there are often no Germans to fill these high-level jobs, which then go unfilled. These H1B immigrants do not take away jobs, they create entire new industries.
But the H1B visa is only a stopgap measure. The United States cannot continue to live off foreign scientists, many of whom are beginning to return to China and India as their economies improve. So the brain drain is not sustainable. This means that the United States will eventually have to overhaul its archaic, sclerotic education system. At present, poorly prepared high school students flood the job market and universities, creating a logjam. Employers continually bemoan the fact that they have to take one year to train their new hires to bring them up to speed. And the universities are burdened by having to create new layers of remedial courses to compensate for the poor high school education system.
Fortunately, our universities and businesses eventually do a commendable job of repairing the damage done by the high school system, but this is a waste of time and talent. For the United States to remain compet.i.tive into the future, there have to be fundamental changes in the elementary and high school system.
To be fair, the United States still has significant advantages. I was once at a c.o.c.ktail party at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and met a biotech entrepreneur from Belgium. I asked him why he left, given that Belgium has its own vigorous biotech industry. He said that in Europe, often you don't get a second chance. Since people know who you and your family are, if you make a mistake, you could be finished. Your mistakes tend to follow you, no matter where you are. But in the United States, he said, you can constantly reinvent yourself. People don't care who your ancestors were. They just care what you can do for them now, today. This was refres.h.i.+ng, he said, and one reason why other European scientists move to the United States.
LESSON OF SINGAPORE.
In the West, there is the expression ”The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But in the East, there is another expression: ”The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” These two expressions are diametrically opposed to each other, but they capture some of the essential features of Western and Eastern thought.
In Asia, the students often have test scores that soar beyond those of their counterparts in the West. However, much of that learning is book learning and rote memorization, which will take you only to a certain level. To reach the higher levels of science and technology, you need creativity, imagination, and innovation, which the Eastern system does not nurture. So although China may eventually catch up with the West when it comes to producing cheap factory-made copies of goods first manufactured in the West, it will lag for decades behind the West in the creative process of dreaming up new products and new strategies.
I once spoke at a conference in Saudi Arabia, where another featured speaker was Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. He is something of a rock star among the developing nations, since he helped to forge the modern nation of Singapore, which ranks among the top nations in science. Singapore, in fact, is the fifth-richest nation in the world, if you calculate the per capita gross domestic product. The audience strained to hear every word from this legendary figure.
He reminisced about the early days after the war, when Singapore was viewed as a backwater port known primarily for piracy, smuggling, drunken sailors, and other unsavory activities. A group of his a.s.sociates, however, dreamed of the day when this tiny seaport could rival the West. Although Singapore had no significant natural resources, its greatest resource was its own people, who were hardworking and semiskilled. His group embarked on a remarkable journey, taking this sleepy backwater nation and transforming it into a scientific powerhouse within one generation. It was perhaps one of the most interesting cases of social engineering in history.
He and his party began a systematic process of revolutionizing the entire nation, stressing science and education and concentrating on the high-tech industries. Within just a few decades, Singapore created a large pool of highly educated technicians, which made it possible for the country to become one of the leading exporters of electronics, chemicals, and biomedical equipment. In 2006, it produced 10 percent of the world's foundry wafer output for computers.
There have been a number of problems, he confessed, along the course of modernizing his nation. To enforce social order, they imposed draconian laws, outlawing everything from spitting on the street (punishable by whipping) to drug dealing (punishable by death). But he also noticed one important thing. Top scientists, he found, were eager to visit Singapore, yet only a handful stayed. Later, he found out one reason why: there were no cultural amenities and attractions to keep them in Singapore. This gave him his next idea: deliberately fostering all the cultural fringe benefits of a modern nation (ballet companies, symphony orchestras, etc.) so that top scientists would sink their roots in Singapore. Almost overnight, cultural organizations and events were springing up all over the country as a lure to keep the scientific elite anch.o.r.ed there.
Next, he also realized that the children of Singapore were blindly repeating the words of their teachers, not challenging the conventional wisdom and creating new ideas. He realized that the East would forever be trailing the West as long as it produced scientists who could only copy others. So he set into motion a revolution in education: creative students would be singled out and allowed to pursue their dreams at their own pace. Realizing that someone like a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs would be crushed by Singapore's suffocating educational system, he asked schoolteachers to systematically identify the future geniuses who could revitalize the economy with their scientific imagination.
The lesson of Singapore is not for everyone. It is a small city-state, where a handful of visionaries could practice controlled nation building. And not everyone wants to be whipped for spitting on the street. However, it shows you what you can do if you systematically want to leap to the front of the information revolution.
CHALLENGE FOR THE FUTURE.
I once spent some time at the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and had lunch with Freeman Dyson. He began to reminisce about his long career in science and then mentioned a disturbing fact. Before the war, when he was a young university student in the UK, he found that the brightest minds of England were turning their backs on the hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, in favor of lucrative careers in finance and banking. While the previous generation was creating wealth, in the form of electrical and chemical plants and inventing new electromechanical machines, the next generation was indulging in ma.s.saging and managing other people's money. He lamented that it was a sign of the decline of the British Empire. England could not maintain its status as a world power if it had a crumbling scientific base.
Then he said something that caught my attention.
He remarked that he was seeing this for the second time in his life. The brightest minds at Princeton were no longer tackling the difficult problems in physics and mathematics but were being drawn into careers like investment banking. Again, he thought, this might be a sign of decay, when the leaders of a society can no longer support the inventions and technology that made their society great.
This is our challenge for the future.
People alive now are living in the midst of what may be seen as the most extraordinary three or four centuries in human history.
-JULIAN SIMON Where there is no vision, the people perish.
-PROVERBS 29:18
In mythology, the G.o.ds lived in the divine splendor of heaven, far above the insignificant affairs of mere mortals. The Greek G.o.ds frolicked in the heavenly domain of Mount Olympus, while the Norse G.o.ds who fought for honor and eternal glory would feast in the hallowed halls of Valhalla with the spirits of fallen warriors. But if our destiny is to attain the power of the G.o.ds by the end of the century, what will our civilization look like in 2100? Where is all this technological innovation taking our civilization?
All the technological revolutions described here are leading to a single point: the creation of a planetary civilization. This transition is perhaps the greatest in human history. In fact, the people living today are the most important ever to walk the surface of the planet, since they will determine whether we attain this goal or descend into chaos. Perhaps 5,000 generations of humans have walked the surface of the earth since we first emerged in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and of them, the ones living in this century will ultimately determine our fate.
Unless there is a natural catastrophe or some calamitous act of folly, it is inevitable that we will enter this phase of our collective history. We can see this most clearly by a.n.a.lyzing the history of energy.
RANKING CIVILIZATIONS.
When professional historians write history, they view it through the lens of human experience and folly, that is, through the exploits of kings and queens, the rise of social movements, and the proliferation of ideas. Physicists, by contrast, view history quite differently.
Physicists rank everything, even human civilizations, by the energy it consumes. When applied to human history, we see that for countless millennia, our energy was limited to 1/5 horsepower, the power of our bare hands, and hence we lived nomadic lives in small, wandering tribes, scavenging for food in a harsh, hostile environment. For eons, we were indistinguishable from the wolves. There were no written records, just stories handed down from generation to generation at lonely campfires. Life was short and brutish, with an average life expectancy of eighteen to twenty years. Your total wealth consisted of whatever you could carry on your back. Most of your life, you felt the gnawing pain of hunger. After you died, you left no trace that you had ever lived at all.
But 10,000 years ago, a marvelous event happened that set civilization into motion: the Ice Age ended. For reasons that we still do not understand, thousands of years of glaciation ended. This paved the way for the rise of agriculture. Horses and oxen were soon domesticated, which increased our energy to 1 horsepower. Now one person had the energy to harvest several acres of farmland, yielding enough surplus energy to support a rapidly expanding population. With the domestication of animals, humans no longer relied primarily on hunting animals for food, and the first stable villages and cities began to rise from the forests and plains.
The excess wealth created by the agricultural revolution sp.a.w.ned new, ingenious ways to maintain and expand this wealth. Mathematics and writing were created to count this wealth, calendars were needed to keep track of when to plant and harvest, and scribes and accountants were needed to keep track of this surplus and tax it. This excess wealth eventually led to the rise of large armies, kingdoms, empires, slavery, and ancient civilizations.
The next revolution took place about 300 years ago, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, the wealth acc.u.mulated by an individual was not just the product of his hands and horse but the product of machines that could create fabulous wealth via ma.s.s production.
Steam engines could drive powerful machines and locomotives, so that wealth could be created from factories, mills, and mines, not just fields. Peasants, fleeing from periodic famines and tired of backbreaking work in the fields, flocked to the cities, creating the industrial working cla.s.s. Blacksmiths and wagonmakers were eventually replaced by autoworkers. With the coming of the internal combustion engine, a person could now command hundreds of horsepower. Life expectancy began to grow, hitting forty-nine in the United States by the year 1900.
Finally, we are in the third wave, where wealth is generated from information. The wealth of nations is now measured by electrons circulating around the world on fiber-optic cables and satellites, eventually dancing across computer screens on Wall Street and other financial capitals. Science, commerce, and entertainment travel at the speed of light, giving us limitless information anytime, anywhere.
TYPE I, II, AND III CIVILIZATIONS.
How will this exponential rise in energy continue into the coming centuries and millennia? When physicists try to a.n.a.lyze civilizations, we rank them on the basis of the energy they consume. This ranking was first introduced in 1964 by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, who was interested in probing the night sky for signals sent from advanced civilizations in s.p.a.ce.
He was not satisfied with something as nebulous and ill defined as an ”extraterrestrial civilization,” so he introduced a quant.i.tative scale to guide the work of astronomers. He realized that extraterrestrial civilizations may differ on the basis of their culture, society, government, etc., but there was one thing they all had to obey: the laws of physics. And from the earth, there was one thing that we could observe and measure that could cla.s.sify these civilizations into different categories: their consumption of energy.
So he proposed three theoretical types: A Type I civilization is planetary, consuming the sliver of sunlight that falls on their planet, or about 1017 watts. A Type II civilization is stellar, consuming all the energy that their sun emits, or 10 watts. A Type II civilization is stellar, consuming all the energy that their sun emits, or 1027 watts. A Type III civilization is galactic, consuming the energy of billions of stars, or about 10 watts. A Type III civilization is galactic, consuming the energy of billions of stars, or about 1037 watts. watts.
The advantage of this cla.s.sification is that we can quantify the power of each civilization rather than make vague and wild generalizations. Since we know the power output of these celestial objects, we can put specific numerical constraints on each of them as we scan the skies.