On technology and human desire

On technology and human desire
By Margie Wylie
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM

Being a Nobel laureate has its perks. Heads of state seek your opinion, famous photographers want your picture, and the press eagerly awaits your Big Thoughts. However, a jet-lagged, harried Arno Penzias seems like a pretty regular guy.

Less than 48 hours earlier, Penzias was addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, about the economic impacts of communications media like the Internet. At his Telegraph Hill condominium in San Francisco, the man who shared the Nobel prize for discovering background radiation in space is attempting to address the impact of a leaky roof. With a living room full of lights, camera equipment, and people from NEWS.COM, the lithe 63-year old juggles a ringing phone, a ringing doorbell, and a coffee cup.

With a cordless phone caught between his shoulder and ear, Penzias pulls a volume from a bookshelf and tells a story to the tinny hold music insinuating itself into his ear: When he won the Nobel, he posed for a famous photographer in front of a blackboard full of equations. "When I got the book, I noticed that I was in there, but no Leonard Bernstein, no Marilyn Monroe, no John F. Kennedy, all people he had shot," Penzias says. "So I asked him, 'Why me?'" The photographer's answer: "It was the best picture ever taken of a blackboard," he recounts as he breaks into a smile.

The photographer set out to take a good picture of a Nobel physicist and wound up with something more transforming. That's what can happen in research. This Bell Labs chief scientist was working on a satellite antenna when he helped create one that could detect the low-level space radiation that helped support the Big Bang theory.

After 36 years of research with the New Jersey labs, Penzias says he now spends a lot of time in airplanes. A year ago, he handed off the lab's day-to-day management and relocated to San Francisco where he took on the role of roving technology ambassador, interpreting the Information Age for audiences in the name of Lucent. (Lucent was split off from AT&T after last year's telecom reform laws were passed.)

But while he's optimistic about the possibilities that lay ahead of us in the next few years, Penzias says that technology is a tool that's less likely to transform us than to magnify who and what we already are. When Penzias worries aloud about today's failing educational system and failing literacy, declining civility, lack of thoughtful dialogue, and selfish attitudes, one wonders from where Penzias's hope springs.

Apparently, it comes from the economy. America's freer, more technologically-driven society may be in turmoil now, he says, but more and better jobs are to come.

We chatted in Penzias's home, perched over sweeping views of San Francisco Bay, about the value of technology, the future of work, and the part technology can play in humanizing our lives.

When you became chief scientist for Bell Labs a year ago, you said you would be "looking at what's going on in start-up companies and communications conglomerates." What have you found?
Penzias: What I found is that there are some enormous opportunities. In the next couple of years, there has to be (and I think there will be) a kind of marriage of telephony with the Internet, and to a lesser extent also with entertainment. Once the excessive enthusiasm dies down and the megamergers get out of the way, plain hard work will show some of these folks what they can do.

For now, we're going through some really bad growing pains. The telephone companies are subsidizing, in some sense, the modems that some of the ISPs are offering their services over. I don't think that so-called subsidy (because you get the unlimited phone calls) is going to be replaced by a tax. I think what's much more likely is that the better of the telephone companies will learn to live with and profit from modems, and that they, instead of having to become ISPs, for example, could provide Internet connectivity to the ISPs instead of doing the whole job.

You don't have to do the whole job. Telecommunications providers can provide the lower levels of networking and let someone else go out there and do the customer care and that job. So the business that the telephone companies are very good at, which is providing that connection to the house, could be a very profitable business. And, as technology is advancing, I think some of that can be done with a relatively modest investment.

The Internet is just one of many networks depending on how you count it. There are intranets and extranets, there's a telephone network, we have the private data networks. So depending on what you're trying to do, you want to use one or another of them. The Internet by itself doesn't really make money: It's the ability to glue things together. [It's] really part of glue to make the rest of society work better.

NEXT: Technology as economic glue

Technology as economic glue

Is there still a role in corporations for fundamental research?
Sure. My economics colleagues talk about interdependencies, of the notion that one economic benefit gives more value when another is connected to it. Suppose you had 800 numbers, catalog businesses, and FedEx. Those are three smokestacks. As businesses, they do okay, but the fact that they work together is where the real value is created. It's that intersection.

So making the connections is the role of...
The point is in our world gluing things together is much more important than smokestacks. So, invention is important; innovation takes those inventions and changes the world. But integration is what differentiates a modern economy from an also-ran: innovation in the middle, invention on the bottom, and integration on top.

"Works with" is our world today. It's not how well something works; it's what it works with. So in that sense, instead of building just isolated invention, you've got to turn them into innovations. But unless they integrate with something, unless they glue together, you don't win.

At Lucent, we've got a slogan which is "We make the things that make communications work." A nice little slogan. My slogan is "The things that make communications work work by working together." And that integration is the difference, that focus that I believe is necessary. Because technologies come together, all of the things that we're doing here today are possible. The Internet comes from that. Everybody talks about the "merger of computing and communication." It's one of a number of places where complementarities (to use the economics word) yield fabulous economic benefits.

Can you produce something which fits with the things we've already got? It's a harder job. Anybody can design something from the ground up. Take 100 engineers; they can build a better operating system than Microsoft's. It's not a problem, but it doesn't work with anything.

Bill Gates is a very, very rich man, but he came by his money honestly because he understands the power of connecting stuff together. These other guys who have said "ours is better" didn't understand what's needed in the world. We somehow seem to worship this isolation, the guru on the hill, the particle physicist, or somebody like that. But it's a hell of a lot more difficult to say, as a different Bell Labs physicist did say, "We've got some lithographic equipment in Spain that we would like to get more output from. We want narrower lines, and we don't want to have to buy a whole new set of lasers for $80 million to $100 million."

NEXT: The future of work

The future of work

You seem to spend a lot of time talking and writing about whether or how computers can replace humans. Why is that? Can they?
Oh, I don't think so! No, I wrote a book some years ago called Ideas and Information about how to think about a computer. I couldn't tell you what not to think because it's very hard to say, "Don't think about ice cream for the rest of the century." It's much easier to put your mind on something else. So I tried to give readers an idea of what there really is inside of machines. A pocket calculator can't push its own buttons. Then going through this, I presented what I thought was a fairly convincing case for the great difficulty--in fact, I think, almost impossibility, virtual impossibility, as I can't say anything is totally impossible--of a computer, no matter how powerful, replacing a human being. Human beings just do too many different things.

Then I wrote a second book more recently that shows that a not very powerful computer plus some communication can easily replace a department full of human beings. It's hard to replace an individual; it's rather easy to replace a department because individuals do a strange number of wonderful, different, varied things every day of their lives, but the total department in which they work has a pretty routine job.

The purpose of a purchasing department at a place like Wal-Mart is bring in so many truckloads of soda pop, toasters, and T-shirts at the best possible prices and sizes that people will buy. The department's job is well-defined. The individuals, however, have all sorts of Rolodexes and look around trying to figure out, "Well, the folks in Arizona got a lower price on this than we did last time, so I want a better price from you. I know that the people over at Kmart are doing this, and so we ought to do something else." All this kind of [person-to-person] negotiation, fiddling back and forth, a computer can never do that.

On the other hand, a computer plus communication got rid of the entire purchasing department altogether. Just take the bar code reader at the cash register and every time a box of Pampers or some light bulbs is zipped out that reader, Procter & Gamble or General Electric gets paid. Now, you don't need the purchasing function anymore because the stuff is shipped in by the manufacturer.

So it's computers and communications together have allowed large sections of hitherto productive pieces of this bureaucracy to be eliminated.

So the grunt work is gone, basically.
No, it isn't the grunt work, because the people who did it were not grunts. Being a purchasing agent is a very tough job, right? Being an interviewer is a very tough job. But on the other hand, if somebody decides that we put in some kind of satellite system and we're going to replace you with David Brinkley from someplace else, then you can be replaced.

But isn't that just stretching people thinner in their jobs? You talk about one person covering many areas.
Yes, it's stretching people. I'm sure some of it has gone too far. But what I'm saying is that the person, the individual purchasing agent, was not a grunt. The function in this new world was a grunt function. [They were] very gifted, hard-working, creative people, the sum of whose tasks turned out to be a grunt job. That's the point.

But for the person who is now getting great service through Wal-Mart but doesn't have a job anymore, that's probably not much solace.
Well, the solace is that in the United States we have the lowest unemployment of any Western country. In other words, many more jobs have been created by fixing up our economy than have been destroyed. We lose about 4 million jobs a year through layoffs. The number is probably larger, but that's the official number. Actually, it may be smaller. Some of the talk about layoffs is just churn, but the net growth of jobs in the United States is an economic miracle, and that happens here because of efficiency.

The Europeans, on the other hand, for the best of motives--and they're not stupid, they're not evil--have inflation barely under control (no better than we do) and have double-digit unemployment. It may be as high as 20 percent in many of the advanced countries in the world. That's a lot of people out of work. [Europe] is protecting existing jobs instead of progressing.

So when we talk about the Internet and computers and communication, as we did recently with some of my European colleagues in the World Economic Forum in Davos, [Switzerland], one of the moderators on one of the panels said, "Look, we're scared of unemployment." The whole Internet religion that the Americans seem to have is frightening to them. Someone said something about how the Internet will change the distribution of wealth, and somebody from the audience says, "Yeah, from IBM to Microsoft!" But in fact, a lot is happening, but it's happening differently here than in other countries.

How is our country different?
The complementarities I told you about: We have a much freer economy, things glue together, boundaries disappear, companies are much less change-adverse here, not because they want to be but because they're forced to.

So telecommunications reform was a good thing? I'm speaking of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996.
I think it's too early to say. I think certainly it's needed and we have to somehow recognize the changes that are taking place. On balance, I think it certainly is helpful. What we're trying to do in the world, after all, is take advantage of the new technologies and more than that--the mergers and the complementarities between technologies.

In order to do that we try to have as few barriers as possible. A lot of companies don't realize what they can do until they're forced to do it. There is a real hot breath of competition that has a habit of getting people focused on what they should have done and otherwise wouldn't have.

So what's it going to take to get a job in the digital age?
I think the economy keeps getting more complicated. I think the time years ago when just a diploma and a Caucasian background got you lifetime employment doesn't work anymore. Today, [Americans] are not able to command, as we once did, almost half the gross planet product. Our share is smaller, our aspirations are higher, our needs are bigger, so people have to probably work more effectively.

Today, U.S. manufacturing is in many ways the most productive in the world. But today, manufacturing would like to have people with a two-year community college degree. Now, I'm not sure that community college really teaches anything; it may just be a filter because it's getting kids with a little more work ethic. It isn't what you learn at a community college necessarily. It's just getting kids who understand a little bit more about how to learn, because how to learn is really far more important than what you know. While it's easy to get people to memorize stuff, the habit of learning is really tough. That really is what the basis of competitive advantage comes from, internationally or even among individuals.

Can computers improve our educational system? Can they really ready children to get jobs in this competitive a marketplace?
Probably yes to both, they can improve it some. I think any tool is useful and then there certainly have been cases where [computers have been]. I'm very concerned, though, that it ends up looking like a cheap fix. One of our tendencies as Americans is to look at an item, get it fixed, and get on to the next one. That was yesterday's news. I worry about the difficulties that we have in this computer age, this technology mania.

I think we are the only modern nation where the majority of employees of the teaching agencies are out of the classroom. We have less than 50 percent efficiency in terms of the number of people. I don't think there's any other country that is as bad as that. You know, we talk about regulation and bureaucracy and stuff, but if you look at the other major countries, they have put more teachers in the classroom than we do, and we seem to need all these curriculum development and superintendents and assistant superintendents. Everybody tries to get out of the classroom. They get paid more money, the work is easier, and then we're surprised that our kids don't get taught.

So I don't think that computers are necessarily the big difference. Television is a big negative. A professor I met, a famous chemist, has gone through seven editions of his book over almost a lifetime of teaching. Every time, [he's asked] to shorten the amount of text, increase the number of pictures, and made the problems easier. What I see coming out of schools are the best and brightest as good as they ever were, but that second tier is not as good. I look out in Silicon Valley where they're looking for really good people, and there's a desperate shortage. You can get lots of grubs, but you can't get as many good people. And truly educated people require some discipline. I'm not sure you get that in this television age of ours.

NEXT: Techno-optimism, human realism

Techno-optimism, human realism

How can we strike a balance between the sorts of demands of the unbridled economic growth that seems to come out of the information economy with the technology and with the people using it? There's a feeling that because of digital technologies we can have an endless economy, yet we see the strain on humans and on families. Technology gets scapegoated because it's the enabler.
Technology is a tool and it can make us whatever we are already, only more so. I think it brings out the good in us as well as some of the nastier sides. So people can be more effective, more reflective (learning more), more competitive, and also they can waste more time.

When you spoke at the conference where we met, which was at the New School for Social Science, I came away feeling like you were an incredible techno-optimist. Now I'm not so sure.
I am a techno-optimist. Technology really can do a lot, but I think that it isn't going to make us more thoughtful, more moral. It's an enabler, but in the end, it's really [comes down to] us. If there is a 1990s phrase, it would be, "It's not my fault." Whatever it is, it's never my fault.

Whether the problem is technology or [something else] depends on your point of view. It's either greedy corporations or a government plot on the one hand, or it's immigrants or pushy women or Asians who have the nerve to give money to politicians. That's something that rich WASPs should be allowed to do, but why should Asians be allowed to bribe people, right?

So where can technology make a better society?
In our society today there's still an enormous amount of congestion-rationing. The amount of time people spend fighting for parking space...it's such a huge waste. Well, information technology can fix that. I don't think we all have to sit in our own cars and sit on the road all the time that we do, all that terrible waste of resources. That doesn't mean everybody has to go stand on the corner and wait for a bus. In Paris, for example, every bus has a GPS (global positioning satellite) device in it. That information is now being fed back to the dispatcher. Well, that's okay, but why shouldn't the riders know about it? They've got these 20 million Minitels out there. The Minitels should say "Hey, the bus is a block from your house," or you should say, "When is the next bus coming and is it empty or not?" There are all sorts of opportunities that we're not looking at.

Paul Saffo, [director of the] Institute for the Future, talks about artifacts. He talks about analog, that it's going to be an analog world again soon. I don't think he's exactly right. He's on the right track, but I wouldn't say it exactly the way he's saying it. I think it's not the digits that are going to disappear--the digit is going to become irrelevant. The digits, after all, are ways of gluing real things together. As the digital technologies get better, they will be able to make those items--the physical things, the analog world that Paul talks about--more useful. And if done right, it could make us more human, more relaxed, and do things in easier, better ways.

But there are plenty of people in America who are not willing to swap off the tiniest bit of individualism, their ability to hop in their cars and go at any time, for the most noble of ideals.
What we really need to do in our society is to stop subsidizing people for squandering resources. There's a German study that claims that it costs society about $4 for every dollar the motorist spends. Think of all the land area that's turned over to private cars. Folks that can't afford cars are paying for the streets, too. So if the people in the cars really paid for the space they used, then public transportation might not look so unattractive. I think you can get a little closer on cost-based pricing. But that is true, people do have their elbows out. And that's the sad thing in our society--we don't have as much of a sense of community as I think we ought to.

One of the things I worry about in the Internet is that the so-called communities on the Internet often are not discussions and are not interactions between people who want to learn from one another, but it's the convinced patting each other on the back. Or occasionally, it's a little more like a Roman coliseum, where people gather to watch their enemies be destroyed. It's like these radio talk shows where people listen in to hear their favorite [host] tear somebody apart. The Internet is okay, it's a tool, but we do want to teach our children and teach ourselves more about what's valuable.

Our economy and technology give us license to do what we want, much more of what we want than our ancestors. In many ways, certainly materially, we are better off. But now that we've taken care of some of our physical wants, maybe we can get back to thinking about the other stuff. I don't know how we do it. Technology provides a tool and a convenient scapegoat, but it's up to us. We have to decide what we are going to do with the technology. We can use it for good things and we can use it for bad things. Let's get to it.