HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018316.jpg

constantly. But when Gordon Moore left the office, he left the work. Mostly he’d go fishing.” Moore had the certain confidence of a man who had spotted one of the fundamental laws of our age, the compression of computing power and cost. He had the “Let’s go fish” air of aman who had seen the inevitable. Grove, who as CEO had to match the wild speed Moore’s Law suggested, had the total unease of a man aware of just how fast a pace the inevitable was setting. Competition was everywhere. One mistake sustained for six months could kill the entire, multi-billion dollar business. It had happened to other firms. Often. Grove’s motto was best captured in the title of one of his books. Only The Paranoid Survive. Each man was right in his way. Moore’s law makes ever cheaper and more functional devices spread. But Grove’s famous anxiety was honestly earned too: So much speed. So much connection. Paranoia does seem the best reaction. You have to wonder what that eye-rolling AT&T senior telecommunications engineer who so mindlessly lectured Baran would have made of this new world. The old New York City temple of phone switches where they met in 1961 has been remade into a luxury condominium now. The company’s impregnable billions of dollars of long distance revenue were eroded and then basically destroyed by free packet-switched services running along the Internet. Son, let me tell you how a phone works. What must Baran have really thought? Massive, widespread connection changed everything. Including how a phone works. Baran eventually left RAND. He founded several of the most important (and lucrative) companies of the early Internet. Years later he understood with more precision what exactly had happened: The real risk to those vulnerable AT&T systems wasn’t Russian missiles. It was an information bomb of sorts, a concatenating desire for constant connection that exploded many old tools of control. Yes, it took out the old structures. But, because of the very way it was architected, for survivability, it had a remarkable feature that even Baran had not quite expected: It enabled each of us to create too. 3. We're surrounded by so many networks now where relations and ties of all sorts produce a constant, hard-to-predict, “I never thought of that before,” dynamism. Of course you have to pity those AT&T wizards a bit. Let me tell you how a stock market works. Or let me tell you how a biologist works. None of these have quite the same answer as they would have two unconnected decades ago. Economies, ecosystems or our politics or immune systems are charged with this energy of expanding complexity. Innocuous looking devices or people take on peculiar, sometimes dangerous aspects when connectedLinked networks of money or people or bugs tumble into wildness over and over, in ways we can’t quite anticipate or explain.. “There are systems of crucial interest that have so far defied accurate simulation,” the scientist John Holland observed in a famous paper that helped establish the discipline of “Chaos Science”. 11° Holland spent years considering these puzzling, hard-to-model systems and spotted at least one regularity: Whether it was webs of 110 “There are systems”: John Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems”, Holland, John, Daedalus; Winter 1992; 121, 1, p.; Research Library pg. 17 84 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018316