Flying Blind

Discussion in 'Intelligence & Machines' started by kmguru, Oct 30, 2002.

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  1. kmguru Staff Member

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    Flying Blind


    The world is changing faster than our ability to measure it.

    By Bradford DeLong



    Nobody knows anything. It’s the one constant in Hollywood, immortalized in William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade. Tinseltown may have more formulas than face-lifts, but nobody can confidently predict whether a picture will be Basic Instinct or Showgirls. Making movies is a crapshoot: Differences invisible to investors and executives alike are enough to produce genius — or a total dog.

    Sound familiar? The titans of the silicon age continue to calculate the pace and direction of technological change, at fast and furious Internet speeds. But nobody knows what works.

    A century ago, business forecasting and economic policymaking were in roughly the same situation. Nobody knew anything quantitative, nobody knew anything reliable. This void called forth a response: Bureaus of Labor Statistics and Economic Analysis were born, along with think tanks and national income accountants. Their data collection and analysis efforts gave us manufacturing surveys, productivity estimates, and consumer price index reports, the statistics that to this day define the economy. And, for a while, it kind of worked. But then came the information age.

    Past industrial revolutions — steel, for example, or the coming of mass production to the automobile — had seen explosions of technology that drove the prices of key commodities (train rails, the Model T) down by 5 to 10 percent a year for one, two, or three decades. The information age is not your father’s Oldsmobile: The price of computation, according to Yale’s Bill Nordhaus, has dropped 42 percent per year over 60 years — a trillion-fold fall since 1940.

    Today’s technological revolution has so far lasted between two and six times as long as previous revolutions. It is between five and ten times as fast, a race between a cheetah and a possum. And it is a larger share of the economy. It changes what people do in their work, where it is done, and even what economic activity is. The problem: We are not sure how. (Spare a thought for Alan Greenspan — negotiating a soft landing is even harder when you don’t know where the statistical ground is.)

    Suppose you need to know the volume of Internet traffic. A company like Telegeography will provide beautiful information graphics and statistics on capacity. The University of Minnesota’s Andrew Odlyzko will say that Internet traffic each year is between 1.7 times and 2.5 times as much as it had been the year before, and that “data” traffic will become a larger share of telecommunications than “voice” traffic sometime in the next several years. But what we really want to know is not capacity — it’s use. And the difference between 70 percent and 150 percent annual growth (let alone the sixteen-fold increase claimed by ex-WorldCom execs) is the difference between prosperity and bankruptcy for multibillion-dollar companies. (See “After the Gold Rush,” page 194.)

    Say you want to know the size of the Web. Netcraft will tell you about the 35 million Web servers it can find, and explain that after growing from 1 million to 35 million in the previous five years the number has fallen in the past two months. Netcraft cannot tell you, however, whether a “Web server” is a shared slice of a single computer, or 20 different computers networked together. And Netcraft cannot tell you how busy those Web servers are.

    Four years ago, it mattered less that nobody knew anything. Tech growth was faster than anybody could handle, and the right strategy was to throw as many resources into the sector as we could. But now the first phase of explosive growth is over, and a great deal hinges on being able to form a coherent picture of what high technology will be like five or ten years down the road. We don’t want to invest too much and create the equivalent of the fiber glut elsewhere in the economy. But we don’t want to invest too little and fail to grasp opportunities.

    WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW ISN'T CAPACITY - IT'S USE. GOOD LUCK.

    We try to tease out a partial picture of what is happening by combining individual pieces of information and extrapolating. It turns out the most reliable pieces are not those about quantities, but prices. Intel and AMD are confident that for this decade at least they will continue to deliver double the microprocessor power at the same cost every two years. Disk drive manufacturers: double the storage every 15 months. Memory manufacturers: double the memory every 18 months. As telecommunications companies flame out, go bankrupt, and get recapitalized, the price of intermediate (not last-mile) connectivity will fall rapidly and reliably, too.

    We know very well how fast our information-processing and information-producing capabilities are growing. What we don’t know, however, is how they will be used — how valuable those uses will turn out to be, and how rapidly they will diffuse.

    “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” the head of Warner Bros. famously proclaimed the same year words were first spoken onscreen. Like talking pictures or the railroad before it, the Internet changes everything. If only we could understand how.


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    J. Bradford DeLong (www.j-bradford-delong.net) is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley and coeditor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
     
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