Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (31 page)

In 1968, Moore and Noyce were bought out of Fairchild and used the money to create their own company: Intel. I joined the board of Intel in 1997 on the suggestion of Mike Spence, the Dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. I had been chairman of the school’s advisory board, having studied there. However, I wanted to stay involved in California’s thriving business sector and believed I could learn a lot at Intel. Before I joined the board, I met Andy Grove, Intel’s CEO, who had worked with Noyce and Moore at Fairchild. Grove remains one of the most impressive business thinkers I have ever met. He had the intellect and dynamism to execute successful strategic plans, again and again, in the fast-paced semiconductor industry. But Grove also deeply understood the science behind Intel’s products; he had written textbooks on semiconductor physics. With the veteran venture capitalist Arthur Rock as a member and the master engineer Gordon Moore as its chairman, the board was formidable; the company’s management was world class. Grove’s mantra was ‘only the paranoid survive’.
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He acted that way and he made the board and management follow his lead. In this fast-moving industry you had to be aware of what changes were on the horizon. More than that, you had to check that you were on top or ahead of them. Grove called the most important of these changes ‘10x forces’ because the change ‘becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to’.
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The invention of the integrated circuit brought about one such change. More recently, the invention of the internet has brought about another.

In the early 1990s, at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist, was trying to find a way to help CERN’s thousands of scientists work together more effectively. Each of their experiments on particle collisions created vast quantities of data, but without a communication network to share information it was impossible to collaborate substantively. A lot of research had already
been done on the theory and practical design of information sharing networks by the US military. In the 1950s, tensions in the Cold War called for a decentralised communication network. If communication relied on a single line running from one point to another it would be capable of fatal interruption. However, if that line formed part of a much larger interconnected network, messages between points could be easily re-routed along different paths, thereby providing diversified back-up.

Building on this work, Berners-Lee created a system to link the computers at CERN; this later became the World Wide Web. Those in academia and industry were the first to use it to link the work of many collaborators. They already recognised the importance of computers; the immense processing power of these silicon-based machines was used in complex tasks such as mapping oilfields and simulating climate models. But Berners-Lee’s invention also made possible a simple way of establishing an easy-to-use global communication network, whose use soon spread to the general public. That was the internet whose birth coincided with the rapid increase in the number of people owning a personal computer. By July 1995, 6.6 million computers were connected; the following year that number had almost doubled. Shortly after I joined Intel’s board in 1997, Andy Grove announced that Intel should lead the way in the creation of a billion connected personal computers around the globe; at the time it was difficult to believe that it would happen.

Today, the internet connects over two billion people, fulfilling and surpassing Grove’s vision. And the network even extends out into space, connecting astronauts on board the International Space Station to the Earth. The creation of the internet also added a new dimension to silicon, initially used just for computers but now also for communication infrastructure and devices. Berners-Lee’s innovation relied upon the silicon infrastructure laid down by Shockley, Moore and the other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It also depended on silicon in a very different format. Silicon optical fibres, a type of glass, were developed in the 1970s and 1980s, replacing copper for long-distance telecommunication lines. As a result, the capacity of these lines was expanded hugely, which enabled the internet to transmit information across the world at the speed of light.
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As the backbone, the internet was a necessary means of meeting the
increasing demand by people in business and everyday life to communicate with each other in real time. However, something else was needed to satisfy this demand fully: the interface between the human and the machine which needed to be made simpler and more pleasurable to use. This very need was recognised by Apple and that has made its name over the last couple of decades. In May 2012, I met Sir Jony Ive, senior vice-president of industrial design, in the Silicon Valley town of Cupertino, the home of Apple.

I met Jony Ive outside, in a sunlit courtyard. We sat down for coffee and he began to elaborate on the process of design. ‘At its core, my job is to think about the relationship between function and form,’ he explained, before pointing to the table in front of us: ‘Look at this cup. When we drink from it, we don’t think about it because we know exactly what to do with it Its form is intrinsically tied to its function. But around the time of the Industrial Revolution, this began to change. Mechanised objects created a disjoint between function and form, to the point where, in the smart-phone today, there are an extraordinarily large number of functions with no intrinsically associated form.’

A smartphone is powered by electrons zipping across atomic layers of silicon, but its complexity is hidden away behind a shiny metal case and sleek graphical interfaces. This exterior is as critical as the technology inside; it ensures smooth and flawless functioning that makes our interactions with computers as easy as those with a teacup. The first personal computers looked threatening and scared off many potential users. They looked like laboratory equipment, beige and black boxes, designed by scientists for scientists. That created a barrier between the user and the computer, a barrier that Jony has spent his career at Apple breaking down. Later in the day, he took me into the entrance, but no further, of his design studio, where he directs the small team that creates the designs of the future. Frosted glass windows keep prying eyes out of the hushed and calm environment. Here ideas are plenty, but masterpieces, his standard, are few. Days, weeks, even months, are spent designing, modelling and
re-forming each and every button and curve to create objects that transcend utility; they are attempting to create objects of desire. That desire and power have spread throughout the world, with truly revolutionary consequences.

In the middle of December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi was selling fruit from a street stall in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, when he was confronted by two police officers. He did not have a licence, or the money to pay the usual bribe expected by the officers, and so his cart was confiscated. He tried to lodge a complaint at the local governor’s office, but they just laughed at him. Helpless and in despair, he returned with a can of petrol, doused himself with its contents and lit a match. The news of his death spread quickly and triggered a series of protests, many of which were organised through the use of social networking sites. The president fled the country shortly after.

Twitter and Facebook had provided a platform through which Tunisia’s despairing youth could communicate their shared grievances and coordinate political action. Around the Arab world, similar extraordinary protests followed, with the eventual demise of rulers in Egypt, Libya and Yemen. This was not the first era in which silicon has been used as an enabler of political revolution. Transistor radios were used during the Cold War by Radio Free Europe to broadcast anti-communist propaganda across the Soviet Union. A revolutionary group always tries to take control of state radio stations in an attempted
coup d’état
as, for example, Hugo Chávez did in the early 1990s. Whoever controlled these controlled the country.

Mobile communications and the internet, with their ability to spread information very widely, allowed the revolutions of 2011 to build momentum far more quickly and with greater effect. Silicon enabled this to happen by providing the tools to have debates and discussions. That is a noble purpose, but these tools also enable surveillance, snooping and persecution. In Tunisia authorities used the internet to target and arrest prominent bloggers before the revolution. In China and Russia much of the information accessible online is censored and those using social media to voice opposition to the government are kept under surveillance, usually for a
bad purpose. Just as with other of the other elements considered here, silicon can make the good and the bad happen. And it can do so very rapidly without geographical boundaries.

‘What news on the Rialto?’ asks Shylock in Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice.
During the Renaissance, the Rialto was the financial and commercial centre of Venice, and to find out what was going on there you had actually to go and see for yourself. Local communication was limited to a walking pace, while international communication occurred only as fast as a ship could sail. Centuries later, during the Industrial Revolution, humanity harnessed the energy in coal and oil to power steam trains and ships, and then cars and aeroplanes. By transporting people further and faster, carbon expanded our geographical horizons and our capacity for communication.

But it is silicon that has enabled the most recent and dramatic step change in our power to communicate. Just as with carbon-based transportation, silicon has transformed our individual daily lives, giving us greater choice over who our ‘friends’ are and enabling us to keep in touch with a much wider social network. The power of silicon, though, extends far beyond that of carbon. Even today around only 15 per cent of the world population has a car; far fewer have ever flown by aeroplane.

Silicon is far more pervasive in its use in mobile phones. These have dramatically changed the way societies are developing. They have existed for a long time but, just as with the early computers, they were expensive, bulky and used a lot of power; the batteries were so large that they had to be placed in the boot of a car. Individuals can now access computing power that was once only available to universities and big business: a smartphone contains more computing power than that at the whole of NASA when man landed on the Moon in 1969. By the 1990s, mobile phones had become so cheap that they were affordable to many in the developing world. By 2002, there were over one billion mobile phone subscriptions, a milestone which took fixed telephone lines 128 years to reach. Today, around 75 per cent of the world has access to a mobile phone. By connecting so many previously isolated voices, silicon has shifted the balance of power within
society. One only needs to look to the growing influence of NGOs and internet-based lobby groups to see how political change in nations across the world is being catalysed by silicon.

To find out the important news of the day, you no longer have to go to the Rialto; you just simply reach into your pocket. Silicon has enhanced our ability to understand the world, doing for the human brain what carbon and iron did for human muscle.

The futurologist Ray Kurzweil points to ‘a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed’.
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At this point, humans, machines, physical reality and virtual reality will be melded together. Computers, he believes, will free us from the processing constraints of our biological brains, opening up the frontiers of human knowledge. They are, though, not yet as powerful as the human brain, which carries out around 100 to 10,000 trillion instructions per second. Nor may we ever be able to construct a silicon machine that could work in the same way as a human brain, for example, handling the frequent ambiguities of life.
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However, Kurzweil believes this watershed could be reached by 2025. There might not be a single grain of sense in all these incredible speculations, but it is grains of silicon that have caused them. Using readily available sand, the human mind has created something that might one day exceed itself. But we need to be very careful not to exaggerate the potential of current technologies. As Gordon Moore said: ‘I do not see an end in sight [to Moore’s law], with the caveat that I can only see a decade or so ahead.’
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So what can we expect in the next decade? At Intel, one silicon innovation is already coming to fruition.

In May 2012, Mario Paniccia, a researcher at Intel, led me through a maze of office cells at the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California. We reached his desk, the same size as all the others, in the far corner of the room. ‘The bosses get the windows,’ he explained. While I waited for him to find the small silicon device I had come to see, I looked at the photographs on his wall. Next to the portraits of his family and friends, Paniccia
was pictured several times with a man I recognised from the ten years I had spent on Intel’s board: Gordon Moore. ‘We finally got to play the full eighteen holes,’ he said pointing to a picture of him standing side by side with Moore, dressed in golfing gear. Moore has clearly been an inspiration to Paniccia, one of a new wave of innovators pushing the limits of silicon technology. His current research is attempting to extend the exponential trend of Moore’s law to the technology of data transmission. Having at last found what he was looking for, he opened a box and took out two small silicon chips connected with a cheese-wire-thin translucent optical fibre. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the future of communication.’

Optical fibres can carry more data faster and further than copper wires, yet they are rarely used. The fibre itself is made from glass, and so is cheap, but the lasers used to generate the light signals sent down the fibre are expensive. So, too, are the light boosters placed periodically along the fibre and the light decoders at the receiving end. These components cannot be mass-produced, and the system cannot be mass-assembled, making silicon communication a costly alternative to copper wires. The use of optical fibres has generally been restricted to the giant ‘information highways’ that link continents and countries, and which every second carry tens of terabytes of data (about one hundred times the information stored on your computer hard drive). Each connection can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.