Technology

In this issue of Discovery Institute’s online technology newsletter, Senior Fellow John Wohlstetter addresses two decisions of the United States Supreme Court, both released June 27. The first held that cable providers, unlike telephone companies, cannot be forced to offer Internet access to their competitors. The second held that “peer-to-peer” network providers who knowingly aid copyright infringement can be held Read More ›

The state of Indiana ranks a lowly 40th in the number of homes with broadband Internet connections, but new legislation based in part on ideas from Discovery Institute and its “Technology and Democracy Project” could change that. The Indiana House of Representatives on April 11 passed a bill that would prohibit the regulation of broadband and other advanced services and Read More ›

The Silicon Eye is the soon to be released title of bestselling author and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder. The Silicon Eye tells the stirring and at times tragic story of an unprecedented invention that sprung from a Caltech effort to simulate a human retina in electronic form. This one-chip imager captures all three primary colors in each pixel Read More ›

Publishers Weekly published a review of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder’s book The Silicon Eye.

Known for weaving engrossing stories from material knotted with numbing complexity, Gilder (Telecosm; Microcosm) delves once again into the world of high-tech business, this time focusing on the company Foveon and its efforts to develop a device that will allow digital machines to see as the human eye does. “Computers can perform instantaneous calculus… and search the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a disk-drive database,” he writes. “But they cannot see. Even today, recognizing a face glimpsed in a crowd across an airport lobby, two human eyes can do more image processing than all the supercomputers in the world put together.” The book traces a circuitous path in its investigation of Foveon’s “silicon eye” — leading through discussions of the magnetic codes on paper checks and of notebook computer touchpads — but Gilder is a competent, eloquent guide.

They wanted to understand the mind. To do that, Carver Mead and his associates, ensconced at Cal Tech, decided that they had to understand the brain. That search for knowledge led to madness and suicide, as one researcher delved too deep into pharmaceutically assisted research, and to unexpected discoveries. In the end, understanding the brain turned out to require understanding vision.

George Gilder’s “The Silicon Eye” (Atlas Books, 318 pages, $22.95) traces the history of Foveon, the ground-breaking digital imaging company that grew out of the Mead team’s efforts, and finds it to be nearly as tangled and interconnected as the axons and dendrites of the brain itself. The complexity accounts, in part, for the story arc of the book or, perhaps more accurately, for the lack of a story arc, for this is no straightforward tale of innovation. Mead’s group started out in the 1980s with neural networks, took a detour into check-scanning machines, made a good deal of money with touch-pad technology and wound up, around the turn of the millennium, producing the Foveon imaging chip, which itself may wind up in a different class of devices than its inventors imagined.

Foveon is itself a story in search of an arc. The chip — which can image all three colors in a single pixel instead of relying on the Rube Goldberg array of filters and post-processing techniques employed by conventional digital cameras — is far more elegant than the technology it’s slated to replace. In a conventional story, this superiority would translate into commercial success. But Foveon hasn’t managed to find it yet, and the application of its technology to cameras has turned out to have a lot of rough patches. The first consumer-grade camera employing Foveon technology was recalled last month for poor image quality.

The muddled nature of Foveon’s story, in fact, led me to wonder why Mr. Gilder chose to build a book around the company. I’m a digital photography fan (I own five digital still cameras, ranging from a superb but balky Nikon D70 to a rugged but mediocre Olympus 520, and two digital video cameras), and even to me Foveon seems an odd choice. The technology is great in theory but nowhere near as revolutionary as the book’s subtitle proclaims: “How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete.”

SBC’s purchase of AT&T, if approved, would create a vertically-integrated communications firm with nearly 35 percent of the total revenues of the five largest wireline carriers ($75.4B of $217.7B).1 Consummation of the deal would end more than two decades of federal telecom policy delusion, one that cost the domestic telecom marketplace untold billions in shareholder value and frustrated advanced infrastructure Read More ›

With deflation under control and President Bush’s supply-side tax cuts taking hold, the case for a U.S. economic comeback gets stronger every day. But the conventional wisdom is that two of our most important and hardest hit sectors, technology and telecom, have so much capacity and so little confidence that it will be many years before they return to health. Read More ›

In this issue of Discovery Institute’s online technology newsletter, Senior Fellow John Wohlstetter addresses the future of telecom, focussing on industry movement in VoIP, Fiber and Wireless and the relationship these have with FCC regulatory habits, past, present, and future. Click here to access past issues of Bandwidth, and to subscribe or unsubscribe to the newsletter.

With markets at last recovering from the turn-of-the-century crash and the attacks of September 11, it is an opportune time to debate America’s future in a rapidly changing world economy. America’s establishment of liberal economists and media pundits, however, are joining in a cramped new nationalism that jeopardizes the future of American technology and prosperity. Like reactionary jingoes of the past, they are priming John Kerry with the delusional view that the U.S. and its workers are somehow victims of global trade and capital movements. But as the presidential debates turn to domestic policy and economics, voters need to recognize the realities of world economic transformation and the real threats to American dominance.

In a popular image, “Benedict Arnold CEOs” are seen to be offshoring factories and outsourcing jobs. Once-prestigious economists such as Paul Samuelson and once-responsible analysts such as Paul Krugman and once-sensible financial pundits such as Lou Dobbs are adducing twisted new theories of how free trade is no longer a win-win proposition. The alleged victims of expanding trade and globalization run from low-wage American workers to Third World environments, from aging American software engineers to overall U.S. competitiveness. Mr. Kerry is showing a disturbing receptivity to this alarming turn among his economic allies and advisers.

In this issue of Bandwidth, Senior Fellow John Wohlstetter examines the proposals from the 9/11 Commission’s report, and provides strong arguments against typical privacy and civil liberties advocates’ concerns.