Paul Baran

 

DATE: October 24, 1999 
PAUL BARAN: An Interview Conducted by David Hochfelder, IEEE History Center, 24 October 1999
Interview #378 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

The impact of communications on economic development, international stability, and peace
Hochfelder:
What about communications for the future? What do you predict?
Baran:
I thought that my 1967 paper on shopping in the Year 2000 was fun. There’s also one on AT&T with predictions after fifteen years that I described . That one also turned out to be surprisingly accurate. It is possible to look forward to the future. We do know about some things. For one thing, it will be an all-digital future. Analog is on its way out. It’s probably going to be primarily packet and cell switching, and the Internet is going to be everywhere. It won’t be our present version of the Internet, but higher speed, and more reliable and ubiquiteous. Everything is going to flow in synergy with that. Worldwide access to all information will have an important impact. My paper points out the increasing amount of the economy that is based on information. You can see the trends there where that is leading. About half of the economy is manufacturing, mining and distribution. The rest is sales and other things that can be automated. This is a big change. It’s probably the reason that we’re seeing a period of high economic growth, and it’s probably a byproduct of computer technology and the Internet finally beginning to be accessed on a significant scale. The payoff for society will in the long term be significant. With material goods like oil or steel, if you have it, I cannot also have it. But, with information the incremental cost of duplicating information for the next person is near zero. It’s a different model. It means that poor children in underdeveloped countries can have access to all the world’s information and education through access to the Internet at essentially just the cost of delivery.. God sprinkled the brains pretty uniformly. With the access to the Internet being widespread and pervasive and reaching the underdeveloped part of the world, it can greatly speed up the process of raising the standard of living for the rest of the world.
I believe that we are not going to see greater stability in this world until we have a greater of uniformity of income in the underdeveloped countries relative to the developed countries. This may take a hundred years or more. Almost of the small wars that we are seeing around the world are essentially all in the underdeveloped countries. 

source:
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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Paul Baran, an oral history conducted in 1999 by David Hochfelder, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA. 
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George P. Richardson, Feedback thought in social science and systems theory [ ]
[p.79]
vicious circle
Myrdals' "principle of cumulation"
    (Richardson, George P., Feedback thought in social science and systems theory, copyright © 1991 by the University of Pennsylvania Press)
(Feedback thought in social science and systems theory / George P. Richardson (1991), 1. social science--methodology., 2. feedback control systems., p.79)
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[pp.83-84]
self-fulfilling prophecy
     As Merton defined it, a self-fulfilling prophecy is an initially false perception of a situation that evokes new behavior that makes the originally false conception come true (Merton 1948).
    (Richardson, George P., Feedback thought in social science and systems theory, copyright © 1991 by the University of Pennsylvania Press)
(Feedback thought in social science and systems theory / George P. Richardson (1991), 1. social science--methodology., 2. feedback control systems., pp.83-84)
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pp.42-43
Or consider the normal mathematics curriculum, which continues relentlessly on its way, each new lesson assuming full knowledge and understanding of all that has passed before. Even though each point may be simple, once you fall behind it is hard to catch up. The result: mathematics phobia. Not because the material is difficult, but because it is taught so that difficulty in one stage hinders further progress. The problem is that once failure starts, it soon generalizes by self-blame to all of mathematics. Similar processes are at work with technology. The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can't do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can't so you don't even try. The result is that you can't, just as you thought. You're trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    (Norman, Donald A., The psychology of everyday things, 1. design, industrial--psychological, aspects, 2. human engineering, copyright © 1988, 620.82 Norman, pp.42-43)
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