
“I’m constantly asked to predict what’s going to happen in the computer field,” said Dr. David Farber, the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications Systems, during his talk for the Provost’s Lecture series in February. Several years ago, he recalled, he was asked to make a 20-year projection. “I said, ‘That’s nonsense—if I’m lucky I can do five years.’”
Farber, who served under President Clinton as chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), combined reminiscences about his long career in technology with an insider’s view of the increasingly complex role of computers in society.
At the FCC, he recalled, his job was to explain relevant technologies to the rest of the staff, most of whom were lawyers and economists. “The FCC is a very powerful organization,” Farber stressed. “It has the fabric of our whole society potentially at its regulatory arm’s length.” Yet few in Washington seem to understand science or technology.
“Nobody [in Washington] knows the truth—the technological truth,” Farber lamented. “So you’ll see things come out of the Congress which make no technical sense because nobody … has any idea what they’re passing legislation on. They hear from a lobbyist, ‘Do it my way—it’s the right way’; the next guy through the door says ‘Do it my way—it’s the right way’; and usually it’s just who has the most political influence that wins.”
Farber may have left the FCC, but he still thinks about the issues facing it. “We all basically use the airwaves assuming that there’s an infinite supply,” he noted. “But in fact it’s been divided into lots with barbed-wire fences, and that has produced a scarcity of room in the spectrum.”
The real hot-button issue now is regulation of the once-unregulated Internet. Congress has found it “irresistible to come in and start micromanaging a lot of the critical issues on the ’net,” he noted, “and that may have long-term severe damage.”
It would have been difficult to foresee many of these problems 25 years ago, when the idea of computers talking to each other had no practical, mass-market application. Farber was then employed at Bell Laboratories, where he was instrumental in developing the electronic switch [“Wired Man,” March 1997]. “It’s been a wild ride, the past 25, 30 years. This whole thing started out back in the 60’s. [Computers] were rooms full of vacuum tubes, and communication with them was largely over teletype lines.”
This same technology went on to create the Internet. “The Internet as we know it is a collaborative effort,” said Farber. “Many more people claim to be the father of the Internet than there were contributors to it. I never claimed to be a father; I just claim to be a grandfather.”
Since the 1960’s, innovation hasn’t slowed for a minute. “We’re about to go on another joy ride,” Farber remarked. “It’s going to be brought on by a simple change.”
The change will affect the way we transmit data. “Right now, we ‘go electron,’ and then we light a little LED, a laser, and we create light; the light goes down a fiber; the light gets turned into electrons; it gets switched back to optical space—back and forth, back and forth. In the next five or six years, we’re going to go into the light world very early. You’ll go into a light-wave system, and you’ll never go back to electrons until you reach the destination.”
That could have a profound impact on our capacity to receive and transmit information, he suggested. “Rather than one stream of data on a piece of fiber, you’ll now have a lot of streams of data, each at a different wavelength. And you maybe have numbers like 300 or 400 wavelengths on a strand of fiber, and a strand of fiber is roughly the size of one of my hairs—if I had one I could pull.”
Such an innovation has the potential to alter not only networking technology but also the ways in which companies build both computers and basic software systems. “Things can change quite rapidly,” Farber mused. “The impact on software systems may unseat some large companies, may reseat some large companies. It’s going to be very volatile.”
That volatility is already occurring in places like Chicago and Milan, both of which have incorporated high-speed data transmission into their infrastructures. “If I have high-speed data coming into my house, why do I want a telephone?” he asked. “Why do I want a cable? If you want to hear screams of agony, you ought to go over and listen to the cable industry and telephone industry in Milan.”
While optimistic about the power of technology to improve the world, Farber cautioned that it can sometimes act as a double-edged sword. For instance, our private lives are becoming less private all the time.
“[Technology] enables us to look over everyone’s shoulder,” he noted. “Inside their bedroom, inside their living room—and potentially inside their minds. In the future, we are enabling people who would like to be Big Brother.”
On a global scale, computers have helped to create a serious digital divide. “When you go around the world, it’s dramatic,” he said. “It’s them and us, in a world where access to information is just as important as access to jet planes and tanks.
“How are we going to bridge that gap?” he asked rhetorically. “That’s something that your generation is going to have to worry about.”
—David Perrelli C’01