2. The Second Law of Zero: Communication
History suggests that any expectations about benefits of advancing communications technology should be tempered. The advent of the telegraph, for instance, was expected to bring world peace. Seriously. In the 1840s, in the age of sailing ships, a message between the English government and Washington could take eight weeks or more to go round-trip, from communication to answer. But with the telegraph, an urgent exchange of messages might take just an hour or two. So, it’s easy to see how thoughts of a golden age might be enabled as people communicated quickly and freely. As things turned out, exchanging confrontational messages quickly didn’t make them any less bellicose, and the world marched right on toward World War I and then World War II.
The Internet created similar delusions in the 1990s. Clearly, no one imagined how much Twitter, Facebook and other social media could increase tribalism and exacerbate divides. Still, whatever winds up flowing through the pipes in our future — whether priceless data or raw sewage — the pipes will be almost infinitely wide, and the cost will be a flat, low rate. Draw the graph of cost vs. performance from today’s perspective, and the cost in the Future Perfect will be so low that, well, let’s call it zero.
As we continue the weekly serialization of “A Brief History of a Perfect Future,” by Paul Carroll, Tim Andrews, and me, we offer Chapter 2, the Second Law of Zero: Communications. Enjoy, and please help us spread the messages of hope, agency, and responsibility by liking, commenting, and sharing this series with your network.
CHAPTER 2
The Second Law of Zero: Communication
The first message that inventor Samuel Morse sent on his experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, DC, in 1844 was, “What hath God wrought?” Some form of that astonishment has been expressed time and again as communications have moved from the telegraph to the telephone to the ubiquitous texts, emojis, and other digital communications of today.
Within living memory, operators on roller skates manned huge boards (or, more accurately, “womaned” the boards, because most operators were young women). They needed the skates to speed up and down the boards to plug in long cords that completed analog circuits and physically connected the phones of two people who wanted to talk. Operators completing calls might grandly announce, “Hold for long distance,” and the cost could be dollars per minute. Today, while communication is hardly free — just look at your cellphone and internet bills — the marginal cost certainly is. That’s why we can spend all day on a smartphone, using apps and sucking up all kinds of data, even including streaming movies, for an all-you-can-eat, monthly fee. Those of us of a certain age remember how exotic Dick Tracy’s wristwatch video phone was in the comics. But, these days, what’s exotic about Facetime? Ho-hum.
We saw the drive toward zero communication cost up close and personal when we published a column in the late 1990s in Context, a magazine we produced while the three of us were partners at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants. The column, by our friend David Reed, noted that telecommunications firms were depreciating their copper-wire networks slowly, based on standard tables for physical assets like buildings, but that they should actually depreciate exponentially, based on Moore’s law, because the fiber networks that were replacing copper were essentially massive computers. Lots of telecom companies squawked about the column (including, awkwardly, some clients). Then, they wrote off almost the entire value of their multibillion-dollar copper networks.
Reach will keep expanding, too. The fifth-generation technology (5G) that’s beginning to be rolled out may provide greater wireless bandwidth than what the vast majority of the population gets via fiber today. No more messy wires and poles needed, just massive bandwidth everywhere. Even without 5G, Wi-Fi will continue to expand its reach and capacity, at no increase in cost. Satellites will provide bandwidth to everyone on the planet — Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched 895 satellites into low-Earth orbit by October 2020 and plans to launch 60 more every two weeks on its way to as many as 42,000[1], so the Earth will soon be blanketed with communications capabilities. Driven by the need to make sure everyone has access to broadband (so they can buy lots of goods and services), Microsoft and other companies plan land-based efforts, too, to reach rural communities.[2] So-called mesh networks will extend the reach both in rural America and in less-wired parts of the world by letting every device with communications capability act as a relay for any other device.
Communications will reach into every corner of the globe, as tens of billions of devices and trillions of sensors are incorporated into a tapestry of communication. In other words, we aren’t just talking about humans connecting with each other. We’re also talking about humans talking to devices and devices talking to each other — anywhere, because, with a little solar power, maybe a bit of battery, and a tiny antenna, any device can connect to the internet these days. Basically, you can assume that you, or any device affiliated with you, will be able to reach any person, any home, any device, anywhere in the world, at any time — at zero marginal cost.
Communication will become richer, too, as having bandwidth to burn means video can be part of every connection.[3] Think of how easily the world moved from voice calls to Zoom calls during the pandemic. Now imagine having thousands of times more bandwidth available by 2050. And think about what even a bit of video can add. Poker has been around for a long, long time, but it only became a major spectator game with tournaments broadcast on ESPN when cameras became so tiny they could show the two down cards as each player inspected them in a game of Texas Hold ’Em. In the past, all you could watch was the betting and the faces of players as you tried to figure out what was going on. But the players had spent years learning to show zero emotion, and there was no rule that players had to show their cards at the end of a hand, so a lot was left to the imagination of the TV viewers. Now, with the increased use of cameras, you can see whether players are bluffing, can see whether they are bluffed out of a hand, and can generally play along with them. Poker became a huge TV event, and interest in the game soared, all because of a little (literally) video.
That richness of bandwidth will allow for such fast response times that it will be possible for many decisions to be made in real time. Cars, for instance, will communicate with each other and with infrastructure that monitors and controls traffic, coordinating their actions in milliseconds. No human involvement needed. To see the potential ramifications, think of the profound changes in your own behavior that occurred when the world of personal computing went from dial-up to “always-on” some 20 years ago. You used to have set times when you’d go to your computer, dial in to a server, and check your email, maybe visit a news site, and perhaps poke around in other ways. Then you’d log out, maybe for hours. Now, you not only have a computer but a phone that keeps you immersed in the online world at all times, and your use of texts, consumption of alerts and TikToks, etc. have transformed the ways in which you communicate. Super-fast response times will have the same sort of profound — and rather unpredictable — effects for the coordination among devices in the IoT.
Before too long, response times will be so fast they’ll create novel issues, such as new types of warfare. Today’s fighter planes are amazing, but some uses are limited by the pilot — he or she has to be able to withstand the G-forces and still control the plane, and a plane won’t be sent into a situation that carries too much risk for the human pilot. But if computers, sensors, and communications create a fast-enough cycle for gathering and processing information, planes no longer need a pilot — removing lots of physical limitations for the plane, while raising all sorts of questions about when or whether a machine should be able to act in certain ways, in particular being authorized to kill a bad actor without approval from a human.
History suggests some of our expectations about communication should be tempered. The advent of the telegraph, for instance, was expected to bring world peace.[4] Seriously. In the 1840s, in the age of sailing ships, a message between the English government and Washington could take eight weeks or more to go round-trip, from communication to answer. But with the telegraph, an urgent exchange of messages might take just an hour or two. So, it’s easy to see how thoughts of a golden age in communication might have let people get carried away. As things turned out, exchanging confrontational messages quickly didn’t make them any less bellicose, and the world marched right on toward World War I and then World War II.
The internet created similar delusions in the 1990s. The line of thought went that we’d all understand each other better and communicate more freely, so everything would be rainbows and unicorns and…. Clearly, no one imagined Twitter in those early days. No one realized how much Facebook and other social media could increase tribalism and exacerbate divides.
Still, whatever winds up flowing through the pipes in our future — whether priceless data or raw sewage — the pipes will be almost infinitely wide, and the cost will be a flat, low rate. Draw the graph of cost vs. performance from today’s perspective, and the cost in the Future Perfect will be so low that, well, let’s call it zero.
What hath God wrought, indeed?
Other parts of this serialization (Subscribe to be notified of upcoming chapters as they are released):
A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the world we can proudly leave our kids by 2050
by Chunka Mui, Paul B. Carroll, and Tim Andrews
Part One: The Laws of Zero
Chapter 1 The First Law of Zero: Computing
Chapter 2 The Second Law of Zero: Communication
Chapter 3 The Third Law of Zero: Information
Chapter 4 The Fourth Law of Zero: Genomics
Chapter 5 The Fifth Law of Zero: Energy
Chapter 6 The Sixth Law of Zero: Water
Chapter 7 The Seventh Law of Zero: Transportation
Part Two: The Future Histories
Chapter 8 Electricity
Chapter 9 Transportation
Chapter 10 Health Care
Chapter 11 Climate
Chapter 12 Trust
Chapter 13 Government Services
Coda What is the Future Isn’t Perfect?
Part Three: Jumpstarting the Future (Starting Now)
Chapter 14 What Individuals Can Do
Chapter 15 What Companies Can Do
Chapter 16 What Governments Can Do
Prologue: Over to You
Notes:
[1] https://spacenews.com/spacex-submits-paperwork-for-30000-more-starlink-satellites/
[3] Results will be unpredictable. The telephone grew out of an effort to let wires carry more telegraph traffic and was initially viewed as a way to broadcast into homes, but the capability for exchanging audio turned out to be more important than anyone initially imagined.
[4] “The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers,” by Tom Standage
