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Howard Charney
Missouri Digital Government Summit
“The Future of the Internet”
June 18, 2009
Good afternoon!
And thank you. It is a great honor to be here.
My talk today is called “The Future of the Internet” – but it could just as well be
called “The Future of Missouri.” Because advanced communications technologies and
future prosperity go hand-in-hand… here in Missouri, in the United States, and all over
the world.
Now, you may think that I am a tiny bit biased. But economists have actually
been gathering this data for a long time and the jury is in: IT and the Internet boost
productivity.
Back in the 1980s there was a lot of debate about the actual value of computers in
the workplace – and even in schools. Then in the 1990s it was all about who should have
access to the Internet. Just the supply chain people? Just managers? Just top executives?
Was dial-up good enough? Did everyone really need broadband?
Today all of that seems very quaint. In fact, the University of Missouri just
became the first in the country to require freshmen journalism students to have an iPhone
or the equivalent in addition to a laptop. Why? Because rushing to a café to upload a
story isn’t good enough anymore. Now you need to fact-check online in real-time right at
the scene of event.1
Today it is clear that IT and the Internet are tremendous productivity boosters.
They are critical to prosperity and growth. But since this is the “Show Me” State – this
afternoon I am going to show you why.
In Governor Nixon’s Inaugural Address this past January he made the point that,
“The world around us is changing, and it’s happening quickly. The new economy is
upon us.” Well, I believe that it is our job – the job of everyone in this room – to prepare
Missouri to lead in that new economy.
Let me start with the big picture… and I mean the really big picture. All of us
here today are participating in the fifth great technology revolution since Arkwright’s
mill kicked off the Industrial Revolution in 1771. This timeline is from the work of the
1
The Durango Herald, “Missouri school goes high-tech,” June 3, 2009

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Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez. Dr. Perez was the first to discern the correlation
between economic cycles and technology revolutions.
According to Dr. Perez, each technology revolution builds on the one that
preceded it. Each is kicked off by a seminal breakthrough innovation – say, the
Bessemer converter or the internal combustion engine. Each one follows a pattern of an
initial boom, then a painful bust or series of busts, and finally a robust build-out that can
last for decades.
Maybe it is worth noting here that there are all kinds of booms and busts.
Missouri has seen its share: the early fur trade, lead mining, and the garment industry, to
name a few. The difference is that with a true technology revolution – the bust is
correction, not a collapse. The new technology dusts itself off and eventually goes on to
transform every aspect of society.
In the case of the Information Age, Dr. Perez believes that the big breakthrough
was the programmable microprocessor. The transistor and the telephone and the
telegraph all contributed, of course… but when Ted Hoff, a young engineer at Intel,
dreamed up the first programmable microprocessor, that changed the game.
We have all had occasion to ponder booms and busts recently. Personally, I have
often thought back to a conversation I had with Carlota Perez a couple of years ago.
What we talked about was the dotcom bubble bursting, among other things. And I
remember being pretty happy that the big bust of our times was already behind us.
But Dr. Perez was not so sanguine. In fact, she said to me, “Howard, you
business executives always think that the future is up – and never down. You want to
believe that the 2000 - 2001 bust was it. But I have to tell you that there may well be
more corrections – perhaps even dramatic corrections – as we go forward.”
Of course, I thought she was way off the mark. And that is why I am a business
executive and she is an economist.
Since she has been right so far, it is worth taking a look at what Dr. Perez says
should come next. Historically, it appears that each technology revolution takes about 50
to 60 years. This technology revolution began in 1971. That means that we are near the
halfway mark. And, historically, the second half has always been a period of sustained
growth and prosperity. And after that the next great technology revolution – whatever
that may be – kicks in.
Twenty to 30 years of prosperity would be good news. But we have to dig our
way out of the current hole first. And it already seems like it has been going on a very,
very long time. But that is just part of the process. Do you know what John Maynard
Keynes said when reporters asked him, back in 1929, if anything like the Stock Market
Crash had ever happened before? Maybe they got him on a bad day. Keynes said, “Yes.
It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.”

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Well, it may feel like 400 years. And it may feel like this line from Yogi Berra.2
But if Dr. Perez is right, there are great things ahead. And our challenge is to make the
most of them.
Missouri should have no problem. You have always been on the “cutting edge”…
which, if you think about it, is just a fancy Information Age synonym for “frontier.” I’m
thinking here of Lewis and Clark, and Daniel Boone, of course.
But this State has led in science and engineering, too. Back in 1886, the
University of Missouri established the first department of electrical engineering in the
entire United States. Jack Kilby, who developed the first integrated circuit, was from
Jefferson City. A native of St. Louis developed the fiber optic wire. And, of course,
Missouri was the home state of Edwin Hubble, who startled the world in 1925 with the
discovery that our galaxy is just one in a universe of countless galaxies.
But here are two more-prosaic examples you may be less familiar with. Did you
know that the very first U.S. commercial mobile radio-telephone service was launched in
St. Louis back in 1946?3
A bit of a clunker, by our standards – but still a huge milestone.
This is the great-granddaddy of the billions of cell phones in use around the world today.
And here is another example I like a lot. Some of you are probably familiar with
the concept of virtualization, which is a virtual version of something… using components
that could be scattered all over the world. Instead of an actual data center physically
located in this room, for example, we could create a virtual data center by drawing on
servers and routers and storage systems in, say, St. Louis and Singapore and Santiago.
Today’s high-speed networks make that easy to do.
Years and years ago, Missouri was a hub for a nifty and very early example of
that concept. Back in the days of the Bell System, people who needed help with their
telephone service dialed zero and got a live operator. But it was expensive to keep
operator centers open 24/7. So the Bell System figured out how to shut down the
operator center on the East Coast when it got really late and send all that traffic on to
Missouri. Then when it got late here, the calls were sent further west.
2
“A nickel ain’t worth a dime today.” Yogi Berra is from Missouri.
3
“On June 17, 1946 in Saint Louis, Missouri, AT&T and Southwestern Bell introduced the first American
commercial mobile radio-telephone service to private customers. Mobiles used newly issued vehicle radio-
telephone licenses granted to Southwestern Bell by the F.C.C. Mobiles operated on six channels in the 150
MHz band. Bad cross channel interference, something like cross talk on a normal telephone line, soon
forced the Bell System to use only three channels. No more than 25 people at once could use the system.
Operators placed calls for each customer. Despite high costs and constant busy signals, waiting lists
developed in every city where radio-telephone service was offered. The chief problem was that the F.C.C.
would not make enough channels available for a high capacity mobile telephone system. Still, technology
and planning moves on, even if bureaucracies do not.”3

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Today, of course, those calls would go halfway around the planet. We live in an
entirely global world now. Sometimes we are reminded of that in funny ways. There
was a news story last week about a Missouri family whose Christmas card turned up as a
large poster in the Czech Republic. The Smiths live in a suburb of St. Louis and this past
Christmas Mrs. Smith had posted their card on her blog. Then, six months later, they turn
up advertising specialty foods on a grocery store window in Prague.4
Go figure.
And now here I am, visiting from the West Coast and talking to you about this in
Jefferson City. It’s a village. That’s all there is to it.
And what we want to be very clear about now is Missouri’s road forward in this
global village. Because, as Yogi Berra also said, “You’ve got to be very careful if you
don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”
In my job, I speak to governments all over the world about the road forward…
about how they can use IT and the Internet to literally transform their cities and states and
countries. Some of these places have massive unemployment problems. Some have
tremendous security issues. Some small economies are too dependent on one or maybe
two industries.
Something that I have found very instructive – and something that has resonated
everywhere from China to Chile – is this model developed by the U.S. Council on
Competitiveness. The Council on Competitiveness believes that the three pillars of
innovation are talent, investment and infrastructure.
There are actually several ways to foster talent. The traditional ones are education
and training. Not so obvious are access to information and collaboration. Of course,
there’s a fair amount of overlap among these four categories – and the Internet has
become critical to each one.
Take education. The Internet can bring world-class education to every person
who wants it, no matter where they are or who they are. As my boss, John Chambers,
likes to say: “Education and the Internet are the two great equalizers.”
And education has a big multiplier effect. According to one expert, in the U.S.
every dollar we spend on education returns five dollars to the economy. And the World
Bank says that just one additional year of education could ratchet up a country’s GDP by
three percent. That is huge.
Education and the Internet are also great stimulators. We all know that George
Washington Carver5
revolutionized agriculture in the South. Carver believed that, “Since
new developments are the product of an active mind, we must therefore encourage and
4
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/06/10/national/a165656D58.DTL
5
Missouri native

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stimulate that mind in every way possible.” Well, just think what he could have done
with the tools available to him today.
For example, one global project is using the breakthroughs in genetic research and
the power of grid computing to develop a better strain of rice. I think Carver would have
loved that. Grid computing uses the network to tie far-flung computers together into one
virtual super-computer. That means that even someone in Arrow Rock, Missouri, which
has a population of 79 people, could conceivably have a supercomputer at his or her
fingertips.6
Of course, that person would need to know what to do with a supercomputer.
That is where training comes in. As Carver also observed, “There is no shortcut to
achievement. Life requires thorough preparation – veneer isn’t worth anything.”
That’s why Missouri’s Next-Generation Jobs Team is so important.7
The Next-
Generation Jobs program is giving young people the skills they need for the 21st
Century.
Our thinking with the Cisco Networking Academy is the same. We currently have 49
Networking Academies serving some 25-hundred students in the State of Missouri.
Because the network is everywhere. Employers everywhere need this expertise.
Now, the additional beauty of training is that as individuals improve their earning
potential, they also improve the macroeconomic outlook. When people improve their
skills, their organizations do better. Their communities do better. Training builds what
economists such as Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT call “organization capital.” And that pumps
up the economy as a whole.
To put it another way: Economic gains kick in as people learn to use a new
technology. A case in point: A Vermont blacksmith named Thomas Davenport, along
with his wife, Emily, developed that electric motor in 1834 – but its breakthrough
application was the industrial production line some 90 years later. Our challenge today is
to recognize the potential of each new innovation – and put it to use a lot faster than that.
So: education and training. And then there’s access to information. Give a man
a fish and you feed him for a day. But teach those people to use the Internet, and they
will not bother you for weeks.
And that is a third way we actively nurture talent today: through an astonishing
new access to information. Ready access to information, and the ability to interpret it, is
possibly the greatest gift of the communications age. These tools are transforming the
arts, business, government, education, R&D, the sciences, and medicine. That is why
6
Wikipedia: Arrow Rock is a village in Saline County, Missouri, United States. The population was 79 at
the 2000 census. The musical "Tom Sawyer" (1973) based on the novel by Mark Twain was filmed here.
Arrow Rock Historic District, a U.S. National Historic Landmark is located here.
7
Jobs training program announced by Governor Nixon on April 20, 2009, to create summer employment
programs in high-growth, high-tech industries. Funded by the U.S. Department of Labor through the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

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Missouri’s goal of 95 percent broadband access over the next five years is so
commendable.
In fact, access to information is one way we measure the disparity between States
or nations or regions – as “information rich” or “information poor.” And the disparities
can be mind-boggling. According to the OECD, in 2005 the entire population of Liberia
shared the equivalent of what would be one residential broadband connection in Europe.
That has got to change.
So access to information is critical. But the fourth way we can nurture talent is
through collaboration. That is what the very early Internet was all about. Academics
used it to exchange research papers. By the way, that is the original diagram for the first
two nodes on the ARPANET, which was the progenitor of the Internet. Node one was at
University of California at Los Angeles and Node 2 was at the Stanford Research
Institute.
Of course, back then the Internet was text-only. Today it is broadband,
multimedia, and global. I tell people that it doesn’t matter today where you live or work
or travel. Thanks to the Internet, you can always find like-minded people with whom to
collaborate.
Let me share a dramatic example of that. This is known as mass collaboration.
Goldcorp is a mining company headquartered in Canada. A few years ago, the
company realized it had a big problem. It had 55-thousand acres of holdings in Canada –
but it took less and less gold out of the ground every day. In fact, it really had no idea
how much gold was left or where it was.
So they did something radical. Goldcorp’s CEO, Rob McEwen, published the
company’s proprietary information on the Internet. All of it. For anyone to see. And
then McEwen offered half a million dollars in prizes for telling him where his own gold
might be.
And here is what happened. People from all over the world used math and
physics and geology and intelligent systems to pinpoint 110 likely targets on its property
– 80 percent of which were pay dirt. They used new tools and techniques that Goldcorp
did not even know existed. Through mass collaboration, Goldcorp’s collaborators
identified 8 million ounces of gold, which at that time was worth well over $3-billion
U.S. Today it would be worth a lot more. That is not so bad for a company that had been
going out of business.
At Cisco we use Web 2.0 collaborative tools to find gold of a different sort. For
example, we do all of our training online – which saves several billion dollars a year.
Our financial systems are all online – which drives costs out of our business. You know,
it takes most companies two weeks to two months to close their books. At Cisco, we can
close our books in just four hours.

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And some of you may have seen Cisco TelePresence, which has been another big
conserver of cash. Since we launched TelePresence and WebEx a couple of years ago we
have saved millions of dollars on travel – not to mention thousands of hours of employee
time.
Our CEO, John Chambers, used to be on the road – or in the air, rather – more
than 80 percent of the time, visiting customers all over the world. Now he often comes
into the office in San Jose and meets with customers or employees in, say, Nairobi and
Geneva and Buenos Aires and New York. And that is all before lunch. It has been a
tremendous productivity tool… not to mention a big improvement in quality of life for
John and his family.
But advanced applications such as Cisco TelePresence don’t just happen… which
brings me to the second pillar of the innovation model: investment.
There is a direct correlation between investment in IT and improvements in
productivity. We saw that after the dot-com bubble bursting n the year 2000. That was a
major market correction. Productivity could have dropped… but it did not. And many
economists believe the sustained productivity during those years was thanks to
investments in IT and Internet technologies made during the 1990s.
Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, thinks the Internet bubble actually did us
all a favor -- because it drew billions of dollars into building out the infrastructure of the
Internet. Massive amounts of fiber were rolled out worldwide. Of course, many of those
networks were sold off later at fire-sale prices -- but that investment today supports
business models that would have been absurd 20 years ago.
It is now pretty common for a radiologist on one continent to review the x-rays of
a person on another. The Reuters news agency keeps a team in India to handle routine
financial reporting. And where do reservations agents for the U.S. airline JetBlue work?
From their homes in Salt Lake City -- because commercial Internet technology gives
them instant access to the advanced systems necessary to run a modern airline. And I
could go on. Banking, travel, manufacturing, shipping, retail, call centers… are all
completely dependent on the networks.
So investment in new technologies is really key. That is why Cisco spends about
5-point-2 billion dollar U.S every year on advanced technologies. That is why Missouri
must invest in, develop, implement and apply new technologies: because new
technologies are critical to sustained innovation.
And the third pillar of the Council on Competitiveness model is infrastructure.
The railroad industry only picked up steam after a critical mass of track had been laid.
The U.S. auto industry only roared to life after the massive interstate highway system was
built-out during the 1960s. And shipping, of course, is quite literally dead-in-the-water
without deepwater harbors and mechanized ports.

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And today we have the opportunity to make the first breakthrough improvements
to basic infrastructure in hundreds or even thousands of years. I am talking now about
smart infrastructure.
Wireless sensor technology is one aspect of that. We are all familiar with some
kind of wireless sensor technology. You know those little Radio Frequency
Identification labels? They are on high-end goods here in the U.S. And if you have
flown through Hong Kong International Airport in the past few years, you may have
noticed that HKIA slaps one on every piece of luggage that goes through the system.
Even hospitals are using them to identify patients and procedures. That leg up
there with “Yes” written on it? Writing “Yes” on the leg that was going to be operated
on is old technology. And maybe there is still room for that. But the RFID tag with all
the patient information can’t hurt.
One of the exciting things about wireless sensor technology is that we can now
deploy it to monitor major infrastructure in ways we could only dream about just a couple
of years ago. Imagine bridges and highways and dams that report back on changes in
conditions and loads.
And then there are smart utilities. We are very fortunate here in the U.S. to have
on-demand water and gas and electricity. Those are all vital systems. But they are
essentially “dumb” systems: You turn them on and you turn them off. But now suppose
you could take a fourth utility, the Internet, and overlay it on those legacy systems.
Suddenly you have smart utilities that are flexible and efficient… that can be managed
better… and that make better use of scarce resources.
I was in Germany last year and learned that the Germans are even toying with
using electric cars as emergency batteries. The idea is that when the power grid needs to,
it would just suck energy out of cars that are plugged in and put it back into the system.
Now that is pretty clever.
Everything I have been talking about this afternoon boils down to improved
productivity. And productivity matters. Productivity and the quality of life move in
lockstep. Say Missouri’s productivity goes up one percent a year. At that rate, it takes 70
years to double. That’s two generations: the working lives of you and your children.
That is much too slow. But at 10 percent per year, productivity doubles in just seven
years. Clearly, rapid productivity gains could make an enormous difference in the
standard of living for people here and all over the world.
Infrastructure is simply critical to growth and productivity and, ultimately, to
prosperity. And today the new, critical infrastructure is … the Internet. In fact, take the
Internet away and things crash to a halt, worldwide. Why have telecom and finance and
travel and manufacturing and distribution all migrated to the Internet in just over 20
years? Because the Internet is really, really cool? No. They did it to stay in business.

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According to Forrester Research, since 1975 the productivity gap in the United
States between companies that have integrated leading technologies and the ones that
have not has more than doubled. If you are 40 percent less productive than your
competitor – maybe you don’t know it yet, but you are going out of business.
And improved performance is very strongly correlated with investment in IT. A
study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that technological change – rather
than a more-skilled work force or capital investment – was the main driver for the
productivity improvements in the U.S. between 1948 and 2001. And if we compare data
from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, we
see an almost 99 percent correlation between IT investment and improvements in
productivity. That is not coincidence.
Or let’s focus on commercial Internet technologies. To date, there have been
three distinct waves. The first was the automation of the back office. The second was
the integration of the supply chain. The third – which is where we are now – is
consumer-driven replenishment. Well, the first two waves map exactly to
macroeconomic improvements in productivity.
By the way, there is an undeniable correlation between productivity and
connectivity. When those first desktop computers came out – sure, they were useful. But
when they could send information to each other and around the world, they became
critical. That is when they became truly productive.
And now Web 2.0 is giving us an entirely new generation of productivity tools.
Web 2.0 is all about collaboration. As social networking technologies such as video and
file-sharing and mash-ups proliferate throughout the business environment we should see
another big boost in productivity. If you can communicate seamlessly with a distributed
team using voice, data, video and mobility tools, in real-time – you get a lot more done.
And if the systems in use by your police and fire and medical responders talk the same
language – your communities are better off.
I mention emergency responders. One of my favorite examples in the medical
arena is Inland Northwest Health Services, a nonprofit based in Spokane, Washington.
Inland uses a very interesting business model. It is an IT-driven joint venture owned by
competing hospitals. I will say that again: A JV owned by competing hospitals… in
order to share data and applications across 38 healthcare providers in five different states.
And they have transformed rural healthcare in the Pacific Northwest.
For example, a stroke victim needs treatment in 120 minutes or less. Accident
victims may need care more quickly than that. Inland has the ability to provide remote
services – what they call tele-ER or tele-Emergency Room – for small clinics throughout
the Pacific Northwest. The clinics and hospitals can share patient records throughout the
system, and they can push services to remote locations using video, biometric readings,
tele-images, and streaming radiology. Within minutes they can make a remote
diagnosis and dispatch an air ambulance if necessary.

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Of course, Inland has made a big investment in communications technologies.
But if you think these solutions sound expensive, believe me: They are not. Providing
quick and effective healthcare is a fraction of the cost of caring for stroke or accident
victims in skilled nursing facilities homes for the rest of their lives.
Over the next few years collaborative technologies like these will spark new
waves of innovation and productivity. These technologies make geography almost
irrelevant. They mean that any community with a bit of bandwidth suddenly has many
new opportunities to be productive and to prosper.
We are already seeing that. Indian villagers check the weather forecast online
before they head out to sea in their little boats… collectives in Botswana and Peru sell
their baskets and alpaca goods online. Even the most isolated places can begin to
participate.
For example, there is a string of villages in Cambodia that has no electricity and
no telephone service – but they do have email. They have creatively leapfrogged from
zero communications infrastructure to wireless. Several times a week, motorcycles fitted
with wireless routers head out into the jungle. As the bikes cruise through a village, they
exchange messages wirelessly with the school computers. Back in town, everything gets
sent out over the Internet.
Think about what that means for a truly isolated village – no matter which country
it is in. The educators can enrich the school curriculum. The entire community can get
news and medical information, check crop prices, and contact their government officials.
It means that they can get the “big picture.”
And when you can get the big picture, you can participate. You can compete.
That is what drives Malaysia, which is another interesting example. Malaysia is
about twice the size of Missouri but with almost five times as many people.8
Historically, the area produced tin, rubber and palm oil, and the nation as we know it
today didn’t even exist until 1963.
A little more than 10 years ago, the government decided to recreate Malaysia as a
center for high-tech innovation. They launched an enterprise zone known as the
Multimedia Super Corridor, enlisted global expertise, recruited leading companies, and
invested heavily in training and infrastructure.
And this was all from scratch. They literally hacked the Multimedia Super
Corridor out of the jungle. One of the big issues in the early days was that the guys who
pulled the fiber-optic cable never knew what kind of snake was going to slither out of the
conduit in the morning. And you think you had a bad day at work!
8
2008 population estimates: Malaysia 27.5M, Missouri 5.9M. Square miles: Malaysia 127,315, Missouri
68,885.

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But three or four years later – Malaysia had the world’s first smart identity card.
This is MyKad. It’s an ID… and a driver’s license, and a passport to neighboring
countries, and storage for personal health information, and an e-cash application, and it
works in an ATM. And any Malaysian can walk into the appropriate government office
with this card and get a passport within 30 minutes.
I tell you, there is so much that can be done with information technology. There
is so much that needs to be done. All it takes is an unswerving focus on talent,
investment and infrastructure.
Let me leave you with a few thoughts about where Internet technology is headed.
The evolution of the Internet has been a journey that has to do with fidelity – from
email that was slow and black-and-white… to today’s multimedia Web with full-motion,
full-sound and color. It is an experience that is increasingly rich.
If the early Internet was one-to-one… and 2.0 is one-to-many… then Web 3.0
will be truly many-to-many. We are probably in the middle of Web 2.0 right now. When
we see an explosion of dazzling new capabilities, that probably signals Web 3.0 or the
Semantic Web.
Now, no one really understands what that is yet or when we will have it. But one
thing I can guarantee: New capabilities will evolve very quickly, and then just as quickly
become commonplace. That is the way this thing works. I think Aldous Huxley got that
right. Two years I couldn’t even imagine TelePresence. Today I feel truly
inconvenienced that my doctor does not have it yet.
Just think if someone had said to you, 15 years ago, “Look, if I can find a hotspot
I’ll go online, find the URL and text it to you with my cell.” It would have been
gibberish. Today your only question would be: Why don’t you go online using your cell
phone in the first place – and give me that URL right now?
That is what the workforce of tomorrow would say, too. They are driving a lot of
this change – and we need to be able to provide them the challenges and the tools that
will enable them to contribute.
At Cisco, we are focused on capturing these kinds of market transitions. We have
to be. Some of the trends we are following closely include mobility, smart connected
communities, the smart grid, collaboration, virtualization, and green. We expect to see
exponential use of video and unified communications. Cloud computing and grid
computing will continue to move work and computation off the desktop and onto the
network. In fact, we believe the network will be the platform for innovation.
And meanwhile the new possibilities will continue to astound and amuse. Take
telepathy, for example. I have read that computer-mediated telepathy is almost inevitable

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by 2020. Several months ago there was a news story about a monkey at Duke University
who had learned to control a robot in Tokyo, via the Internet, using just her thoughts.9
It
was fascinating and amazing. Of course, for those of us who don’t have monkeys or
robots, it did not seem life-changing. Not yet.
But then a story last week made me rethink that. And, once again, the Germans
are on the cutting edge.10
Another technology that is probably on the horizon takes us back to Star Wars.
Remember when a holographic message from Princess Leia popped out of R2D2’s head?
Well, REAL holograms are probably not that far off. We already have hologram-like
communications. That is John Chambers chatting with an image of Marthin De Beer,
who is part of our Emerging Technologies Group. John was in Bangalore and Marthin
was at our headquarters in Silicon Valley.
This is really cool stuff – but you know, it is still only Web 2.0. Actually, it
predates Web 2.0, in some ways. These so-called holograms are actually based on a 19th
Century theater trick called Pepper’s Ghost. The image is projected onto a screen made
from glass or gauze, and because you can see through it, it gives the illusion of three
dimensions. With a REAL hologram, we will be able to walk around the person and see
him or her from all sides.
Of course, real holograms will require certain infrastructure upgrades. Cisco
TelePresence takes about 4 to 6 megabits of bandwidth. Real holograms are likely to
take 60 to 100 times more than that. That is a lot of bandwidth. But the good news is
that we will have that kind of bandwidth at our disposal at some point in the near future.
And to anyone out there who doubts that, remember what Mark Twain said: “A
person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.” History is full of ideas that
seemed really dumb – until they succeeded. And then they went on to transform the
world around them. We saw this fellow Thomas Davenport on an earlier slide. Do you
know that the U.S. Patent Office actually rejected his patent application the first time
around? They basically said, “Look, give it up. Everybody knows you can’t turn a wheel
using electricity.”
The technologies that evolve over the next 20 to 30 years are going to help us
transform Missouri… and the U.S… and the world. Now, no one knows what the
technology revolution after this one is likely to be. Will it relate to biotech or genomics
or nanotechnology? Will it be something to do with microscopic medical devices or
9
This monkey has a sensor implanted in her brain and she has learned to walk on a treadmill. In front of
the treadmill is a monitor that shows a humanoid robot in Tokyo. The monkey’s sensor is connected to the
robot via the Internet – and she earns treats by making the robot walk when she walks. . One day the
researchers turned the monkey’s treadmill off… and the ROBOT kept walking. Part of the monkey’s brain
controllED her own walking on the treadmill. Another part was consciously making that robot go through
its paces so that she could earn more treats.
10
Slide shows kid in Germany who has learned to play pinball using telepathy.

13. Missouri Digital Government Summit
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super-light, super-strong materials? Those things are in production or on the drawing
boards already… so it is probably something else. Something that none of us can begin to
imagine. Something that will change the whole equation.
But if history is any guide, some engineer or inventor or scientist out there is
already dreaming it up. And that person could be anywhere: in Jerusalem or Geneva or
right here in Jefferson City.
The bottom line in all of this is information… having it, using it and sharing it to
improve productivity and to make the world a better place. That is powerful. It is
transformational. It is something that can help people all over the planet collaborate and
contribute and compete. It can help us build a better future.
And we can do that. We have no good reason not to. To quote George
Washington Carver again: “Ninety-five percent of the failures come from people who
have the habit of making excuses.”
I have talked quite a bit about the history of technology this morning. In closing,
I’d like to share with you a very short video that beams us at warp speed through many of
the technology advances of the past several centuries – and perhaps give us a little taste
of the future.
Thank you.
[ROLL CLOSING VIDEO]