00:00:00 And a very considerable amount of information about different aspects of

00:00:08 chemistry and the electronic revolution over the last 40 years. We've had views into the future.

00:00:15 I'm sure we've got lots of different places we might like to visit with our panelists.

00:00:21 There is a microphone here in the middle which I would encourage people to use and

00:00:31 as we get going to kind of come to that microphone. I feel a little bit like the auctioneer here and

00:00:39 say, what is our first bid here? Will someone start us going with a question? Do we have a

00:00:50 question here? No microphone is ever short enough for me. No microphone stand. It was a wonderful

00:01:05 presentation. Thank you very much. I've loved everything I've heard today. I have a question

00:01:10 about what in the media has been talked about a lot about a technology gap between rich and poor,

00:01:18 both in nations and in classes of people here in the United States. One of the things that struck

00:01:23 me, though, is that there's a reverse effect or law where the gap seems to be closing over time

00:01:35 rather than expanding. And I wonder if you have any kind of comment about that, where you see,

00:01:41 if you feel there is a gap still, if you feel it's closing, if you feel the

00:01:49 decreased cost of transistors and so forth that we've been hearing about have contributed to

00:01:53 closing the gap. I'll try first. I think the gap, first of all, is not so much between rich and poor.

00:02:05 It's between educated and non-educated. You know, education is the entry card into participating in

00:02:13 the electronic information age, essentially. Certainly, some of the new technology does

00:02:22 bring a lot of people who haven't been participating before into it, particularly

00:02:26 things like cell phones. People who wouldn't have been connected for years by hard wire now

00:02:33 suddenly are part of the communicating community. So technology has had some kind of a narrowing

00:02:40 impact. But to fully participate, education is the key. And there, I don't see a huge closing of the gap.

00:02:53 I'd like to comment on that. I have this wonderful picture. I should have brought it.

00:02:59 One of our engineers

00:03:05 went with his wife to her homeland, which is about halfway down the Mekong River,

00:03:11 and no roads, no anything. And they stopped at this little village and went up, and there was

00:03:19 this little noodle house, and with this big banner across it that said, Internet.

00:03:29 Now, you know if they have an internet connection there, it's everywhere. So as Gordon said, it's

00:03:38 education that makes the difference between whether you participate and whether you don't.

00:03:44 And right now, we have the most powerful educational tool that has ever existed in the

00:03:50 form of the internet and access to the internet, and it's everywhere. And it's getting more so, not

00:03:57 less so. So it's enormous leveling. It's enormous outreach to bring up people who will participate.

00:04:05 And there's even hope for our own society in the sense that we seem to not be able to

00:04:13 operate our schools, at least the K-12, in any sensible way. But the kids that want to learn

00:04:21 stuff can figure it out. I know when I was a kid, most of what I learned was stuff I figured out by

00:04:28 reading and talking to people and stuff. And the internet gives every child in the globe that

00:04:35 opportunity. I think it's just enormously powerful what technology has done for society in that way.

00:04:44 May I add to that? I'd like to suggest not a difference of opinion, an agreement,

00:04:55 but sometimes it's important to know what others think of what the technology gap is here in the

00:05:02 United States. Right now, many years ago, Bob Noyce, a Fairchild, suggested, and when he suggested,

00:05:13 you did it. Why don't you go to the Soviet Union, Harry, and see if you can do some work with our

00:05:20 technology in Russia? The date was 1967-1966 time frame. And I said, oh, of course. No one

00:05:33 missed a chance. The point I wanted to make was in more than one of the institutes in which

00:05:40 I presented a 15-minute piece on what was going on in integrated circuit technology,

00:05:48 I was asked, as I say more than once, Dr. Sello, is your father rich? And I said, no. As a matter

00:05:59 of fact, he's rather poor, and I think I'm going to have to assist him. Sort of halfway as a joke.

00:06:05 And the faces were very serious. And the impression was right then on the spot that the

00:06:11 only reason I could be important in the United States was because I came from some sort of a

00:06:20 finance gentry that would allow me to do all this work in this new field.

00:06:26 And this is what the Russian engineers and scientists thought was the case.

00:06:35 I want to go off in a slightly different direction. Kava gave me an opening here to

00:06:39 give an advertisement. If you go to the website ocw.mit.edu, you'll see that MIT is putting all

00:06:46 of its courses, 2,000 courses. We have just over 1,000 now online. All the lecture material,

00:06:52 all the problem sets, all the stuff associated with the courses, and making it freely available

00:06:57 throughout the world. The biggest number of hits we get is from mainland China,

00:07:02 downloading that material. But all over the world, in South America, Vietnam,

00:07:07 many other places, there are little

00:07:11 schools opening up to be tutors for the MIT course material. We do not give any degrees

00:07:18 for people taking the courses, but these schools certify or help people digest the material.

00:07:25 So I think there's a case where the technology is really getting the stuff out in a way that

00:07:29 never could have gotten that before.

00:07:32 Yes, just a footnote on what Rodney and Kava are saying about the free access.

00:07:40 We at Chemical Heritage Foundation put very considerable resources into our website,

00:07:46 and what's interesting is the global reach of it and the very high use of it.

00:07:52 And it becomes then also a challenge from the producer side, as it's the standard internet

00:07:59 puzzle of how does all this stuff get paid for, as it were. But from the person out there in the

00:08:05 world, the free knowledge is available in a wonderful way that hasn't been true.

00:08:21 We have heard quite a bit about the growth of this industry in Asia, India, and China,

00:08:29 but very little comment was made about Russia or the former republics of Russia.

00:08:35 Can you give me a feel for how that is going?

00:08:39 Gee, do I like you.

00:08:44 It's not a setup.

00:08:46 First, the how it's going is definitely dependent on the particular country.

00:08:56 No question about it.

00:08:58 In Hungary, where I've had the most experience, it's far in advance in progression in integrated

00:09:08 circuit industry than it is in the rest of the world.

00:09:12 Progression in integrated circuit industry than it is in the Soviet Union, even today.

00:09:18 The Soviet Union, of course, is big.

00:09:21 I'm sorry, Russia is big, but it still carries with it the dead weight of the Soviet Union.

00:09:31 Hungary is really coming up fast.

00:09:33 It has surpassed Poland, which at one time, about six or seven years ago,

00:09:39 was considered the most open country to grow technology in.

00:09:46 There's no particular reason other than the scholarly ability of the Hungarian scientists.

00:09:54 Unfortunately, they still lack, as of two years ago, they still lack considerably

00:10:01 in the equipment, in the modern equipment, which is necessary for integrated circuit

00:10:08 manufacture.

00:10:10 Not nearly even to the level of where Intel is, but even to a modest middle class level.

00:10:18 The others that I could comment on, Romania, Bulgaria, are sort of status quo.

00:10:29 Other comments?

00:10:30 Well, Russia was certainly a place with a lot of very highly qualified technical people

00:10:38 whose jobs sort of disappeared.

00:10:40 So it's been a good place to hire very high level technical talent, particularly with

00:10:47 a mathematical bias.

00:10:48 You want to do algorithms, for example, Russia has been a very attractive place.

00:10:52 So certainly, Intel has a couple of fairly significant developments in that area.

00:10:58 A couple of fairly significant development laboratories, at least one in Russia and other

00:11:04 than the former Soviet Union, are taking advantage of this.

00:11:08 And we're not the only ones.

00:11:16 But the Russians, excuse me, but the Russians are coming here in droves compared to previous

00:11:25 status.

00:11:26 And they're very good, as Gordon mentioned.

00:11:27 I think this may be a loaded question, but I'm curious, with all the information available,

00:11:32 with all the wonderful advances that science makes, how can you explain that we have a

00:11:39 government and a political system which discourages science, which is anti-evolution, anti-stem

00:11:47 cell research, and so on?

00:11:53 I have no explanation.

00:11:58 Any brave souls?

00:12:02 OK.

00:12:03 We all look at Gordon.

00:12:07 I think we'll try a little queuing theory at the microphone, please.

00:12:12 So please, if you'd like to speak, do kind of line up, and we'll do a marketplace phenomenon

00:12:20 here, please.

00:12:22 I heard a lot of talk about speed and number of components.

00:12:27 And I really like to hear about user-friendly and reliability.

00:12:33 I heard the comparison using computer versus driving a car.

00:12:37 The number of crashes I get when I'm on the internet highway is a lot more than driving

00:12:44 my car.

00:12:45 And so I have a PhD degree.

00:12:48 I think I'm reasonably good on technical stuff.

00:12:52 But I'm still very frustrated about learning new software, user-friendly, and reliability.

00:13:00 That'd be my comment.

00:13:01 It's the software, not the hardware.

00:13:05 It's amazing how reliable the hardware components are, really.

00:13:12 The reliability of a processor with several hundred million transistors is about what

00:13:18 the reliability of a transistor was.

00:13:20 In fact, it's probably better, because at the one-volt operating level, a lot of things

00:13:25 that were problems previously disappear.

00:13:27 So the hardware is pretty good.

00:13:31 But I have to reboot my computer fairly regularly, too.

00:13:35 Fortunately, that nearly always fixes the problem.

00:13:38 I think we can actually blame Gordon for this.

00:13:44 While computers have gotten so much more memory, so much more processing speed, humans have

00:13:50 stayed the same.

00:13:50 And it's the humans who are designing the software.

00:13:52 And we have not come up with, and this is the computer scientist's fault, we have not

00:13:57 come up with better ways of developing software, fundamentally, than we had 40 years ago.

00:14:03 So I think we can build reliable software for a microprocessor with less than a kilobyte

00:14:10 of memory.

00:14:11 And that constrains our appetite from what we try to do, and the complexity of the systems

00:14:17 we try to do.

00:14:17 But because these computers do have so much memory and so much speed, software engineers

00:14:25 feel unconstrained and have been building systems without the right engineering tools

00:14:30 that have been developed in other disciplines to structure things.

00:14:34 And so we are not doing a very good job at it.

00:14:36 I think that that's talking about the reliability of the software.

00:14:41 Designing the user interfaces is a thing that I think we need to work on a lot.

00:14:45 The one technological device in the world which I think has the perfect user interface

00:14:50 is the refrigerator.

00:14:52 You plug it in, and that's it for 20 years.

00:14:55 There is actually a knob that you can adjust the temperature, but it's hidden behind the

00:14:58 milk carton, so you can't get to it.

00:15:01 And we need more devices like that.

00:15:03 The iPod has been wonderful in having such a simple user interface that people don't

00:15:08 get themselves into trouble.

00:15:10 So there's the user interfaces.

00:15:11 And then the last component is actually security.

00:15:15 And security from all the way down at the chip level, I think we'll see more and more

00:15:20 stuff built in down at the chip level all the way up through.

00:15:23 And we need to solve a lot of those problems, because a lot of our problems are caused by

00:15:28 viruses and malware.

00:15:30 And how we get around those is a big challenge.

00:15:34 And if only we could have done, you know, tracked as well as Intel and the semiconductors,

00:15:42 we'd be in great shape.

00:15:43 But we haven't done that.

00:15:45 We've been at fault.

00:15:50 I have two, not questions, but perhaps I'll describe those thoughts.

00:15:56 Not questions, but perhaps I'll describe those thoughts to you and you could maybe

00:16:00 comment on them.

00:16:02 One, I understand that the amount of energy needed to produce a chip of the complexity

00:16:09 we're dealing with today in terms of all the peripheral equipment that uses energy to do

00:16:14 that, especially as the number of elements from the table that we use in the fabrication,

00:16:21 the complexity is increasing.

00:16:23 The amount of energy is going up considerably, and it's pretty high.

00:16:27 If you add everything together, it apparently is a staggering number.

00:16:34 Would it be a motivation for different approaches, for example, molecular electronics and self

00:16:43 assembly to be strong motivations to developing that direction because of the amount of energy

00:16:49 could be that saved could be quite high?

00:16:52 My second question has to do with your mention of the Internet.

00:16:56 This is a far away idea.

00:16:58 I mean, it's way in the future, but the Earth, we understand it now with the Gaia theory

00:17:04 that it is a living thing.

00:17:07 When you think about the Internet, well, these are the elements maybe of a nervous system.

00:17:12 If we attach to it a lot of sensors and actuators, especially sensors, with all the information

00:17:18 that we could acquire about the environment, perhaps some central analyzer or something

00:17:23 like the brain prefrontal cortex can analyze this data and come up with information about

00:17:30 how situation, environmental situations all over the globe is changing that people can

00:17:35 accept as objective views, not tainted by politics or this government or that government.

00:17:42 These are just two ideas I have that maybe I'd like to hear your comments on.

00:17:48 Can we get an objective state of the weather?

00:17:58 I'd be very happy to have some self-organization methods to eliminate a lot of the work that

00:18:07 has to be done in designing these things, but I'm afraid we don't have any good path

00:18:12 on how to do it.

00:18:12 On the second question, I'll leave it to someone else.

00:18:24 Rodney, can we get an objective state of the weather?

00:18:29 Well, I guess I don't know that anyone will accept it as objective because whatever systems

00:18:38 we use, people will be writing them and people will be putting them in.

00:18:41 I think that there is the simple fact that the existence of the internet along with sensor

00:18:48 nets, which is starting to get deployed peripherally, will, I think, lead in the not too distant

00:18:54 future to much more better accumulation of data on the microclimate.

00:19:01 Right now, our weather, if we're going to stick with weather, our weather comes from

00:19:04 few observational sites.

00:19:06 As we get sensor networks spread throughout cities, that will be accumulated very quickly

00:19:10 and we may get very, very fine-grained micro-patterns or micro-analysis of the weather.

00:19:16 And so in the not too distant future, your jacket will understand that there's a rain

00:19:23 squall coming down the road and change its external qualities to, instead of it breathing

00:19:29 so much, to be waterproof.

00:19:31 So I can imagine that happening.

00:19:33 I'd like to hear your comments about the future of photonics and how that will change the

00:19:43 semiconductor industry and computing for that.

00:19:46 The future of what?

00:19:48 Photonics.

00:19:50 Photo-based computing.

00:19:52 Well, my view is that it's a great way to interconnect blocks, but it doesn't work very

00:20:01 well on the chip itself.

00:20:03 The structures we deal with are a lot smaller than the wavelength of light, and silicon

00:20:12 is not a very good light emitter, at least.

00:20:17 But it has tremendous advantages in connecting a block here with a block there.

00:20:23 There's no ground noise problems or anything like that, and it's very high speed.

00:20:30 I think it's used there quite a bit already and will be used increasingly, but I think

00:20:38 it's mainly to connect a chip to the outside world, not to use on the chip itself.

00:20:46 As far as doing optical computing per se, I have never been impressed with the advantages

00:20:53 it presumably offers.

00:20:55 It's a complicated way of doing things we can do easily with a piece of silicon.

00:21:07 Anyone else?

00:21:15 Mr. Chairman, I don't think you'll find a more intelligent audience than we have here

00:21:23 today, probably in the top 10th percentile of the United States.

00:21:28 And yet the most surprising thing to me, and I come from a different area than you do,

00:21:34 there's not one mention of molded plastic parts.

00:21:38 If you look at the PC, which is a driver of IT, your chips are covered in plastic, your

00:21:45 disks are in plastic, you put your information in with cassettes, with CDs, with DVDs, magnetic

00:21:55 tape is plastic tape.

00:21:57 You look at every part of the computer and it's all plastic, virtually all plastic.

00:22:03 Somehow you've overlooked it.

00:22:06 Now, I don't get insulted about that in any way, but this tends to answer the question

00:22:13 that was previously asked about why we have a government that doesn't really appreciate

00:22:20 what we're doing.

00:22:22 And we in the plastic industry, which you're part of it because plastics obviously are

00:22:27 chemicals, pure chemicals, have realized we've been so busy making parts that our public

00:22:34 relations is a total abysmal disaster.

00:22:38 We have allowed Greenpeace to make everybody believe that plastic is evil.

00:22:43 And I can remember a cartoon I saw where a man was on life support with vinyl tubing

00:22:50 supporting him, and his wife says, sweetheart, don't worry, I'm going to pull out the plastic

00:22:55 tube so you won't get hurt.

00:22:59 What we are doing now, and we are the newest members of the CHF family, is a group of members

00:23:07 from the Plastic Pioneers, from the Plastic Hall of Fame, have decided to do something

00:23:13 to change the public perception of plastic.

00:23:17 And most people don't understand it.

00:23:19 When they do understand it, it helps.

00:23:21 One brief example.

00:23:24 Our mothers or grandmothers would go to the baker, the butcher, et cetera, et cetera,

00:23:28 come home, prepare the food.

00:23:31 They spend a good part of their time washing clothes.

00:23:34 Now, only because of plastic packaging, you can buy a month's supply of food in a half

00:23:42 an hour, all cooked, ready to go, and all you have to do is heat.

00:23:46 You take your clothes, dump them in a machine, wash and wear.

00:23:51 No washboards, no clotheslines, no irons.

00:23:54 And therefore, just because of plastic, we have changed the way women are attached to

00:24:00 the home and have made women's lib a workable event.

00:24:06 Now, what we have proposed to do is to change this.

00:24:10 And we're doing it in two ways.

00:24:12 We have organized a plastic museum called the Miracle of Modern Plastics, where we're

00:24:19 going to have a grade one museum, probably in Chicago, Washington, or New York, or Philadelphia.

00:24:27 And number two, we're going to turn to you people and we're going to say, plastics is

00:24:34 very important.

00:24:36 And the reason it's important to you is there are so many laws restricting plastic which

00:24:42 have been passed and which are on the boards that it's going to negatively impact what

00:24:48 we're doing here.

00:24:49 For example, New York State does not allow plastic pipe because, quote, it's dangerous.

00:24:57 And what we want to do is set up this museum.

00:25:00 We want to ask every company that uses plastic to publicize the value of plastic to their

00:25:08 employees and your annual reports and your advertisements.

00:25:11 And we're going to ask every college, every university to establish a course on plastics,

00:25:19 which is required for every student.

00:25:22 I remember when I went to City College years ago, every science major had to take art courses

00:25:27 and every art major had to take science course.

00:25:30 And I believe that politicians' main job is to get elected.

00:25:36 And they follow what people think.

00:25:38 And if we want to do what this gentleman suggested about changing the negative attitude of Washington

00:25:46 politicians about chemicals and plastic and science, we have to start educating people.

00:25:53 And this is a program that we hope to do.

00:25:56 We are the newest members, I believe, Arnold, of the CHF.

00:26:00 And I'm wondering how this appeals to your distinguished judgment.

00:26:09 Well, certainly plastics are an important part of about everything we do in society

00:26:14 these days.

00:26:16 The semiconductor industry is itself a very small consumer.

00:26:21 We do use plastic on some of our device packaging.

00:26:26 Our customers are the large users of plastic.

00:26:30 But still, were it not for plastics, our costs would be significantly higher with the alternatives

00:26:36 that are available.

00:26:38 You know, I hope that this kind of an effort has a real impact on getting people more aware

00:26:47 of what the science-based industries have done for them, of which plastics is an important

00:26:53 one.

00:26:55 Good luck.

00:26:58 Gordon, may I just add a little codicil to your broad statement, which is quite true.

00:27:05 I support the statement completely in the history of my chemistry work in semiconductors.

00:27:14 I can't think of a packaging material that became more important in integrated circuit

00:27:22 manufacture than plastic did, especially molded plastic.

00:27:28 When we got to where we did enough work on what the designs of such packaging should

00:27:34 be, we made some amazing strides forward.

00:27:39 And this is a work which started 30 or 40 years ago.

00:27:45 So I don't think that the integrated circuit industry is in second place relative to any

00:27:54 other industry in its need for low-cost, reliable, and I do want to accent reliable, packaging

00:28:02 which we did get in the molded plastic area.

00:28:07 Harry, when you call it glop top, though, it may take a little of the glop top.

00:28:13 We discarded that fast.

00:28:16 I want to invite the panel to comment on the future of R&D in the semiconductor industry.

00:28:23 I was struck by Raj Gupta's comment at lunch that for the chemical industry, the growth

00:28:28 of the semiconductor industry has meant really having to revamp and rethink how it does research.

00:28:35 So to be able to be responsive on a one-week turnaround, which was sort of a radical step

00:28:41 for the chemical industry to go, the semiconductor industry, we heard from the last talk today,

00:28:46 is a very parsed out, separated one, segregated, lots of little companies.

00:28:52 So I'm just curious about the future of research.

00:28:54 Will there be central research divisions?

00:28:56 Is it divided out?

00:28:58 Is it parsed out?

00:28:59 What's the kind of framework you envision research happening in?

00:29:03 Well, there I can talk rather specifically about Intel.

00:29:07 We set up Intel.

00:29:09 One of our initial premises was no central research.

00:29:13 Having run one of those in the previous organization and saw the increasing difficulty of transferring

00:29:20 technology from a research laboratory to production, we decided to do it the other way.

00:29:25 We do our research right in a production facility and take the inefficiency there rather

00:29:29 than in the technology transfer.

00:29:31 Of course, that's had to evolve over time.

00:29:35 But we still mix a good portion of the research very heavily with the development in complete

00:29:43 control of major facilities where the new technology gets done.

00:29:47 Our more speculative research tends to be parsed around the world, actually, but not

00:29:58 in permanent organizations.

00:29:59 They kind of get together for major products, major projects, work for a while, get reapportioned

00:30:08 in other divisions.

00:30:09 It doesn't become an isolated research operation.

00:30:12 And it's worked pretty well.

00:30:14 It's an ongoing problem, though.

00:30:17 But the real thing is it doesn't all happen in the U.S. anymore.

00:30:23 We've got significant operations in China, India, Russia, Israel, and probably some I

00:30:31 don't even know about.

00:30:32 I have a question regarding the history of Moslow.

00:30:43 And I was wondering when Moslow became a tool for management and what were the effects of

00:30:49 that tool, if you will, on the industry?

00:30:53 Well, you know, it depends on what management.

00:30:57 But my view is that the Japanese semiconductor industry really became effective when they

00:31:07 understood the progression of DRAMs.

00:31:12 They saw the 1K, the 4K, the 16K coming down the road.

00:31:17 And for the first time, they could see where the industry was going.

00:31:20 Before that, it seemed to move more or less in random directions.

00:31:24 And they set up this very effective VLSI program aimed at intersecting the memories with equality

00:31:32 at the 16K level and superiority at the 64K level.

00:31:37 And it really drove their industry.

00:31:38 That was the equivalent of a Moore's law thing.

00:31:43 More broadly, certainly by the time the Semiconductor Industry Association set up a technology

00:31:51 committee, which started doing the roadmaps.

00:31:54 And once these roadmaps were published to the world, everybody saw the same exponentials.

00:31:59 We were all moving in the same direction.

00:32:01 And then I think it really became more of a driving force broadly.

00:32:11 I have a few questions.

00:32:12 The first one is, I like to use my parents as an example of the average consumer because

00:32:16 they don't have PhDs and they just kind of use your average computer.

00:32:20 I think that my mother bought hers in 2000.

00:32:23 And over the years, both my parents have been interested in updating their technology because

00:32:27 there have been delta changes in the capabilities.

00:32:30 But I think the average consumer now sees more epsilon change.

00:32:35 They can take all their digital photographs and burn them to a DVD.

00:32:39 I think that as we move into having more than, say, two gigabytes of memory, which is what

00:32:47 my parents probably use right now, do you see any lowering in consumer interest in advanced

00:32:53 technology?

00:32:54 There's really a very small portion of the population that can use the amount of computing

00:32:58 power, for example, you were talking about in your talk.

00:33:00 So that's my first question.

00:33:03 And then the follow-up to that is, I wonder if we'll see a situation where we move from

00:33:09 right now, or at least in the past, say, 10 years, I think cell phones were only made

00:33:13 to last about two years because a contract for your cell phone company was about a year

00:33:17 and they expected the...

00:33:19 And you get a free cell phone with a new contract, right?

00:33:22 And they expect that you will update your cell phone technology.

00:33:24 Right now, I have a camera phone and it holds, I think, more addresses and phone numbers

00:33:29 than people I will ever know.

00:33:31 So I wonder when do we see a lowering of consumer interest in very advanced technologies?

00:33:38 And I'll wait for that quick answer.

00:33:43 You know, I forgot the first question.

00:33:48 Well, they're in the same territory.

00:33:51 And I think it's been a challenge from the word go, isn't it?

00:33:54 To understand what all this computing power is to be used for.

00:33:57 Well, it's always the next application.

00:34:00 Get into video editing and I think you'll be happy with all the power.

00:34:07 Maybe I'm a techno-optimist, maybe.

00:34:14 I remember when the first Altairs came out.

00:34:19 And I remember around 1980 and they were going to be home computers.

00:34:24 And people were saying, well, these are going to be great, these home computers.

00:34:28 People are going to use them.

00:34:29 They're going to do their taxes on them.

00:34:33 And they're going to store recipes.

00:34:35 Yeah, that's what people are going to use home computers for.

00:34:38 And of course, the first, you know, those computers meant for the consumer at that stage

00:34:43 were not convenient to do taxes on or to store recipes.

00:34:47 Today they are.

00:34:48 So there was a long step there.

00:34:50 So I think it's always hard to see exactly how the technologies are going to be useful.

00:34:56 But I remember my predecessor, director of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT

00:35:03 in 1983, Michael Dertouzos, with Bryant Gumbel on Good Morning America, one of those programs.

00:35:10 And him telling Bryant Gumbel that people were going to have computers in their home.

00:35:14 And Bryant Gumbel saying, yeah, what are they going to use them for?

00:35:17 And Michael said, oh, they're going to use them to buy things.

00:35:21 And Bryant Gumbel looked at him like he was nuts.

00:35:24 And he said, so how many people in the US are going to have computers in their home?

00:35:28 And Michael said, could be as many as a million.

00:35:31 And Bryant Gumbel just laughed at him as being a complete madman.

00:35:35 So I think, you know, we can never quite see what people are going to do with things.

00:35:40 And so it's really easy to say, no one will want this stuff.

00:35:44 No one will want more memory.

00:35:46 You know, Bill Gates, of course, is famous for saying no one will want more than 640K.

00:35:52 So I don't put much stock in people saying it's not going to happen.

00:35:55 It's not going to be wanted.

00:35:56 And I'm even suspicious about Gordon saying,

00:35:59 photonic computing is never going to really work.

00:36:06 We are at 5 o'clock.

00:36:08 So I'm going to follow on Rodney and just ask the rest of our panel

00:36:12 if they have any last word on this or other territory.

00:36:18 Could I ask one last personal question?

00:36:20 If it's very short.

00:36:21 Okay.

00:36:23 Dr. Marwen, do you ever see step and flash imprint lithography happening?

00:36:27 Ever what?

00:36:28 Step and flash imprint lithography.

00:36:29 Do you see that happening?

00:36:32 Coming into production.

00:36:34 What kind of photography?

00:36:36 Step and flash imprint lithography.

00:36:39 Lithography.

00:36:40 I never heard of step and flash imprint photography before.

00:36:44 I don't know.

00:36:46 Okay.

00:36:48 Harry, any last?

00:36:49 No, none particularly.

00:36:52 They've all been asked.

00:36:54 Calver?

00:36:56 I would like to say that I think our ability to see the evolution of capability

00:37:06 is much, much clearer than our ability to see the uses to which it'll be put.

00:37:13 And certainly it's been my experience that down through the years,

00:37:18 we always get asked to speculate about what the next hot thing is going to be.

00:37:22 And I personally have been absolutely miserable about that.

00:37:26 And I think if people are honest,

00:37:31 Gordon could see 40 years ago that there would be wireless things

00:37:36 and there would be and that you could see.

00:37:39 But which ones were going to hit when and how big they were going to be

00:37:45 was just much, much harder.

00:37:47 Because these things tend to come in waves

00:37:49 and they tend to be enabled by other technologies.

00:37:53 A good example is a web today being enabled not just by semiconductors,

00:37:58 but by somebody mentioned photonics.

00:38:01 The fiber optic technology is on a steeper curve

00:38:05 as the semiconductor technology is.

00:38:09 And it has been essential in order for us to get the kind of internet

00:38:14 that we have and will have.

00:38:17 And nobody saw that coming.

00:38:20 So and on and on it goes like that.

00:38:23 And there tend to be constellations of capabilities

00:38:26 that get to a point where it enables a kind of coalescence of an application

00:38:32 that you just couldn't have...

00:38:34 That the example was given earlier of what a cell phone would have been like 20 years ago.

00:38:42 And it's so things get to a point where there's a constellation of things

00:38:48 that are possible and then someone seizes that as an opportunity

00:38:53 and the product area takes off and people get to make it part of their lives.

00:38:59 And I think if we're all really honest,

00:39:03 where we don't see what the next one's going to be

00:39:07 nearly as well as we see the individual capabilities.

00:39:11 But they'll be there.

00:39:14 Gordon, any last...

00:39:18 Okay, in that case, let me do three things.

00:39:21 Let me thank our panelists and speakers for their participation

00:39:27 and for their wonderful insights.

00:39:30 Let me say that I think we've had a tremendously interesting set

00:39:35 of different perspectives on the past, the present and the future.

00:39:41 And ultimately, the Chemical Heritage Foundation is all about perspective.

00:39:47 And I think we're all going to be reflecting for days and weeks to come

00:39:50 on different aspects of different things that we've heard during this past 24 hours.

00:39:57 And thirdly, I thank you for being such a wonderful audience

00:40:02 and say, I hope like me, you're looking forward to returning in 10 years

00:40:08 when we shall have the 50th anniversary, the same panelists

00:40:11 and totally transformed technology.

00:40:14 Thank you.

00:40:15 Thank you.