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Democracy & Technology Blog Exaflood, Zettaflood

Hance Haney
September 8, 2008
Broadband

From an interview by Peter Day, of BBC Radio 4’s “In Business,” who notes that “nearly everything that George Gilder has been predicting about communications is now in the process of coming true,” with George Gilder:

George Gilder: … you have video conferencing widely used and suddenly you move from petabytes to zettabytes … two human eyes do more image processing than all the supercomputers in the world put together.
Peter Day: What? Now? Today?
Gilder: Now. Today.
Day: No wonder it’s so difficult to get to a video conferencing that’s convincing.
Gilder: That is true. … .Anya Hurlbert Ridley … says that vision is not a sense, it’s an intelligence. And so, in understanding vision, it’s not enough to reproduce the biology and biochemistry of the retina — or even the circuitry of the retina — it’s the whole enigma of consciousness that is engaged in understanding vision, and so the move of the network to a global vision system does entail some sort of deeper and richer intelligence than is comprehended by many people who try to mechanically reproduce various vision technologies.
Day: So we need an exaflood, or more than an exaflood…
Gilder: We’ve got an exaflood — we got that now —
Day: So we need to build for…
Gilder: Zettaflood, I guess.
Day: George Gilder predicting an intensitity of Internet use we can only marvel at at the moment.

Hance Haney

Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project
Hance Haney served as Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute, in Washington, D.C. Haney spent ten years as an aide to former Senator Bob Packwood (OR), and advised him in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Communications Subcommittee during the deliberations leading to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He subsequently held various positions with the United States Telecom Association and Qwest Communications. He earned a B.A. in history from Willamette University and a J.D. from Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.