http:^^www.cs.washington.edu^homes^lazowska^faculty.lecture^innovation^gore.html

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<p>
        And the funding for Mosaic itself came from the High-Performance
Computing and Communications Initiative, a federal research and development
program I helped pass into law while I was a Senator.
<p>
        Of course, I had no idea at the time that this investment would
lead to hundreds of thousands of home pages on everything from smashing
atoms to the
Smashing Pumpkins . . . from Albert Einstein to Jennifer Aniston.  Nobody
had any idea this investment would uncork an amazing fizz of T-shirt-to-riches
stories.  But that wasn't the point.
<p>
        The point, as I'm sure you're understanding by now was this:  You
can't start a fire.  You can't start a fire without a spark.
<p>
        That's how it has worked in America.  Government has supplied the
initial flicker -- and individuals and companies have provided the creativity
and innovation that kindled that spark into a blaze of progress and
productivity that's the envy of the world.
<p>
        For much of this century, Americans have benefited from this
process -- this virtuous circle of science and success.  As the nation generated
wealth, a portion of that wealth was invested in research, science, and
technology.
Those investments helped solve tough problems -- and eventually spawned still
greater wealth, which was then invested in still more research.  On and on it
went.  Prosperity generated investment, investment generated answers, and
answers generated further prosperity.
<p>
        But now there are some in Washington who seem intent on snuffing out
this spark with the largest cuts in science and technology and education in a
generation.
<p>
        In their most recent budget, the Congressional leadership proposed
reducing federal funding for science and technology by one-third by the year
2002, adjusted for inflation.  And get this:  several years after the
Cold War ended, defense R&D is going up, while civilian R&D is going down.
More for
Star Wars, less for environmental research.  At the very moment global
economic competition and global environmental degradation demand civilian
research and
the technologies it often produces, this Congress is proposing the sharpest
cuts in nondefense research since America was fighting World War II.
<p>
        The only investment the Congress wants to increase was in health
sciences.  And that's great.  But in almost every other realm, they're
approaching technology with all the wisdom of a potted plant.
<p>
        This crowd talks like George Jetson.  But they support policies more
appropriate for Fred Flintstone.  They promise to boldly go where no Congress
has gone before.  But their flight plan will take us straight into the
ground. They sing tunes about moving America into a sunny future.  But
really . . . they're just dancing in the dark.
<p>
        We can do better than that.
<p>
        We can invest in new technologies -- not suffocate the fires of
creativity in a crazy quilt of misguided savings.
<p>
        We can invest in education technology and link our schools to the
information superhighway -- not pull the plug on our classrooms and
disconnect them from the world.
<p>
        We can invest in student loans to open the doors of college to
all our young people -- not shut the university gates to all but America's
wealthiest
families.
<p>
        That's what President Clinton has been fighting for.  Because he
understands that the ENIAC changed not only how send valentines, but how we
think about our world.
<p>
        For years, much of our thinking was shaped by the metaphor of the
factory.  Our elementary schools were built according to the principles
of the assembly line.  Government's approach to the economy was to "tinker," to
"shift gears," or to "step on the gas. And most of our businesses pursued
the same
Holy Grail: cranking out more and more of the same thing at lower and lower
costs.
<p>
        But the ENIAC -- and the revolution it ignited -- altered that. It
changed our world, and demanded a new vocabulary to describe it.
<p>
        Yet years after the change began, we're still standing on the
floorboards of Industrial Age metaphors that are creaking with age, groaning
under the weight of a new reality.
<p>
        I think there's a better metaphor . . . a sturdier metaphor, more
appropriate to our times.  It's the metaphor of distributed intelligence.
<p>
        In the beginning of the mainframe computer era, computers relied
almost totally on huge central processing units surrounded by large fields of
memory. The CPU would send out to the field of memory for raw information
that needed
to be processed, bring it back to the center, do the work, and then distribute
the answer back into the field of memory.  This technique performed certain
tasks well -- especially those that benefited from a rigid hierarchy or that
depended on the outer reaches only for rote tasks.
<p>
        Then along came a new architecture called massive parallelism.  This
broke up the processing power into lots of tiny processors that were then
distributed throughout the field of memory.  When a problem was
presented, all of the processors would begin working simultaneously, each
performing its
small part of the task, and sending its portion of the answer to be collated
with the rest of the work that was going on.  It turns out that for most
problems,
this approach -- the distributed intelligence approach -- is more effective.
<p>
        But somehow this metaphor, and the idea it contains, never migrated
into our public conversation or our common vocabulary -- even though it's
profoundly re-ordered our lives.
<p>
        Distributed intelligence offers a pretty coherent explanation for why
democracy triumphed over governments that depended on all-powerful central
processing units.  And it helps explain why American businesses are pushing
power, responsibility, and information away from the center -- and out to the
salespeople, engineers, and suppliers who know the product best.
<p>
        Here's a question that might prove my point.  It's for the Penn
students in the audience.  How many of you, when you graduate, hope to climb
the corporate ladder . . . rung after rung . . . same company . . . for the
next 40 years?  Let's see your hands.   Or how many of you hope to maybe
start your own business, move from project to project, or navigate whatever
exciting webs of commerce present themselves?
<p>
        The ladder is a factory metaphor -- one path, one destination,
step by step.  But the web is a distributed intelligence metaphor -- innumerable
paths, unimaginable destinations, any route you choose.
<p>
        Just look at the changes in our economy and our culture.  Your
parents probably read Life Magazine.  So did the rest of the country.  But
now almost
anyone can publish a magazine, and many are.  At last count, there were
as many as 50,000 'zines in America.  Distributed intelligence.
<p>
        Investment advice used to come from the gray-suited Wall Street
expert -- font of all wisdom, source of all information.  Now, investors are
going
online with services like the Motley Fool, comparing notes with thousands of
other investors, building a pool of information far deeper than any experts
have.  And in the process, they're beating the pants off the big money
crowd. Distributed intelligence.
<p>
        So let me bring this full circle.  Because of that clunky old machine
in the Moore Building -- which required more than 17,000 vacuum tubes and
drained enough electricity to light three houses for an entire year -- how we
work has changed, how we organize ourselves has changed, how we think has
changed.  The ENIAC didn't accomplish that directly.  And if all its
inventors were here today, they would probably be astonished by what they
wrought.
<p>
        But the ENIAC -- funded by a small investment from Washington  --
provided the spark  . . .  just as ARPANET helped sparked the Internet,
and the High Performance Computing Initiative helped spark the World Wide Web.
<p>
        Two days ago, Iowans cast their votes in party caucuses that
signal the beginning of the 1996 elections.  This is the last presidential
election
of the 20th century -- and the first presidential election of the distributed
intelligence era.
<p>
        Our choice is pretty clear.  Do we snuff the spark that helps ignite
innovation, new businesses, and better jobs?  Or do we keep providing that
spark -- and rely on the brains and sweat and vision of people like you
to keep America's fires blazing?
<p>
        You don't have to rely on distributed intelligence for that one,
do you?
<p>
        So, Happy Birthday, ENIAC.  Happy Valentine's Day, Penn.  Let's
get to work. 

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