These are exciting times to be an engineer. I never thought I'd see the day when industrial, financial, and pharmaceutical interests would take a back seat to electronics on the evening news. This year, from microchips to software, the NASDAQ's technology-heavy investments have nearly steamrolled all other funds in terms of returns.
Our corporate presidents and fellow engineers have taken the leap from geekdom to stardom as reporters scramble for interviews or quotes that will shed light on what companies will do next. You can't go into Starbucks for a quiet cup of coffee without hearing someone waxing lyrical about the latest virtual startup.
What's going on here? Yes, I was surprised when my friends and family started quizzing me about Windows all those years ago. It was the first time anybody outside of my field had asked me anything even remotely related to what I do for a living. Before our friend Bill Gates came along, no one knew what to ask. I learned to keep my answers short, though, after receiving only a few of those glazed looks.
Then Intel took over the show, with its cool guys in jumpsuits dancing to the latest Pentium jingle. That's my reference point when trying to figure out when everyone and their uncle began asking me about bytes, megabytes, megahertz, V.90, baud, active-matrix LCDs, digital TV, and the many other tools of the technological wordsmith.
So what happened? Why is everyone so techno-aware? Why are my morning paper and evening news becoming more and more like the tech journals and company-profile videos I thought I had left at the office—with some fluffy human-interest stories thrown in? The answer, in short, is communications. Extrapolate upon that and you get its lovechild, the Internet or World Wide Web.
But why? Why are so many companies throwing billions of dollars into shoring up the communications infrastructure? Why are we so quick to invest our hard-earned money in a self-perpetuating fashion, into the companies supplying the terabit backbones and multi-gigabit routers that make up the behemoth? That question can only be answered by looking to the near future to define what will feed the monster's huge backbone, which is currently under construction. Also, we must pin down which technologies will be used to feed it. But first, we must examine ourselves and our past.
Why Communications?
From grunts to crude symbols, hieroglyphs, elaborate texts and letters, and ultimately to photography and the moving picture, our ability to engage each other has advanced steadily through time. Then, in the 20th century, all frames of reference were suddenly lost. Steady advancement gave way to rapid technological development on an exponential level.
Now, we stand at the dawn of a new millennium with gaping excitement tempered by wary trepidation. Where is our communication technology taking us? How will it affect our day-to-day lives? Will we have a life worth affecting? All are fair questions that, to the technophobe, must be answered before we take another step. But for every technophobe or Luddite, I'll show you 50 tech-savvy entrepreneurs who are throwing caution to the wind and jumping headfirst into the fray.
The technophobe does have a point, though. The rate of change might be too rapid. While technology has advanced exponentially, we haven't. Physiologically and psychologically, we're still back in the Renaissance. Until recently, that wasn't a problem. But the rapidity of change, the information overload, the overstimulation of the modern environment, and the movement from active to sedentary lifestyles have taken their toll. Everything from odd behavior and total nervous breakdowns to medical ailments, such as premature diabetes in our obese children, has been attributed to the stresses and lifestyle changes incurred by our love of technology.
I'm convinced that it's not the technology itself, but the manner in which we interface with it that's mostly to blame for at least the stress aspects. We have a basic need to identify and categorize everything in our lives, both animate and inanimate. But the information that we base our everyday decisions on is changing so fast that the frames of reference we use to make those categorizations become blurry. Hence, we lose our ability to make the necessary decisions and "information overload" becomes the disorder of the day. This leads to everything from vague symptoms of stress to nervous breakdown, especially when the decisions that have to be made are critical to your job or the welfare of you and your family.
I can safely assert, then, that the man-machine interface and information handling will be the next killer research field. In the meantime, the question as to what will be feeding the enormous infrastructure now being built remains to be answered. From the previous discussion, you may have guessed the answer: information. Information was the hot commodity at the close of the last century. The gathering, brokering, and transportation of that information stand to become boom industries at the beginning of this century.
From a purely altruistic standpoint, our goal is to make the gathering and transportation of that information as simple and efficient as possible. Of course, in reality, our real job is to make money to feed our family. But let's not go there. Words like "altruistic" sound much more noble.
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