NEW, PIVOTAL TECH REVOLUTION IN THE OFFING?

San Diego Union-Tribune It’s a presidential election year. The economy is limping along. Real estate and the job market are terrible. Graduates are despondent. The big innovations that changed the world over the past several decades are behind us. Sound familiar? Welcome to America in 1980. Not a soul imagined then that technology would ignite…

The Coming Tech-led Boom

WALL STREET JOURNAL In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today. In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and…

Will Exxon Get Googled?

AMERICAN SPECTATOR The image of the oil industry is captured (admittedly, delicously) by Bruce Willis play the rough-and-ready character of an oil roughneck in the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon – driving golf balls off an oil platform aimed at a Greenpeace ship. Dirty, tough, old-world, almost Jurassic.  Oil, in short, is seen as old tech. So yesterday.

James Bond or Jack Bauer? Two Models for Security Tech Policy

Publicly and behind closed doors, an increasingly vocal faction of experts claims we need an Apollo-type program to create new technologies for homeland security and military force protection. Some may miss the days — and the model — of the Bell Labs. Some are unreformed Cold Warriors — the Manhattan Project is their analogy.

All are well intentioned, but all are quite wrong. These models are a mistake for two reasons: Today the character of the threats, and the nature of innovation, is vastly different.