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What Else Is New?

The Wisdom Machine

Everyone's heard the term artificial intelligence, but few are aware of the drama unfolding in this rapidly advancing field. About ten years ago the Japanese announced plans to create a fifth-generation artificial intelligence computer to surpass anything known at that time. The project has since created new concepts and new hardware -- along with consternation, competition, and concern. Politicians, computer scientists, and industry leaders in North America and Europe feared that the Japanese would capture both an intellectual and industrial lead that would, for the next century, put them ahead of western countries.
For this project, "knowledge engineers" have been gathering information for expert systems. Reports say Japan now has two hundred knowledge engineers, and wants twenty thousand. A knowledge engineer practically lives with an expert for six months or so. The engineer feeds into the fifth-generation computer all books, tests, examinations, etc. that the expert has read or compiled in a lifetime. If the expert is a medical doctor, all the medical training is fed in, including diagnoses, patient histories, prognoses, and other relevant information. Patient histories do not include the names, but do include age, geographic locations, and other pertinent data. This includes data that we in the West might not consider, but which some Japanese think is important, such as children's growth as a function of the color and ceiling height of the rooms in which they live.
By the end of the six months, a great deal of information is in the computer. Discussions and diagnoses (with follow-ups) of all patients that the physician interviews during that period are also fed in. The computer, in effect, knows what the doctor knows: the doctor's intuition, observations, and medical facts. It does not stop there. The same procedure will take place a thousand times; the computer will eventually have all the known intelligence of one thousand physicians in its data bank. This will be made available to all Japanese hospitals. With a difficult case, hospital personnel can tap this fifth-generation computer and use its knowledge to interpret symptoms under study at some distant hospital.
It is not only in medicine that the intelligence of these experts is being mined. There is similar information being obtained from engineers, physicists, chemists, anthropologists, botanists, and so on. When the project is completed, "the wisdom machine" theoretically will be able to give an advanced and knowledgeable response to any question asked. Problems that today seem intractable will be approached in new and innovative ways by the fifth-generation intelligence machine. Its answers will be available in any language. The machine can already translate Japanese into English and vice versa at the rate of one thousand words a minute in voice or print.

The New Paper

Paper first appeared in 3500 B.C. in the form of papyrus. It was a boon to written communications right up to the fifteenth century. Then when Gutenberg developed his printing press, the paper explosion really took off. Today paper is everywhere. Its use has even grown in the early years of the computer age. But for how long?
For more than a hundred years now Canada has provided a good living for many of its citizens from the wealth produced by paper made from trees grown in its forests. Today pulp mills are working increasingly longer shifts, the price of pulp is rising, and labor unions are demanding ever increasing salaries. Now technology offers a new threat.
The name is kenaf (pronounced ka-naf). It's a tropical Asian plant of the hibiscus family. It looks similar to sugar cane or bamboo, grows in the same climates, and can be cultivated with many of the same growing techniques and equipment as cane or bamboo. It could, along with the now genetically altered loblolly pine (formerly known as "the weed of the forest"), provide devastating competition to present sources of pulp from the forests of the Pacific Northwest and indeed from any temperate zone woodlot.
Most trees take from seven to forty years to reach a usable size for pulp. Just making paper requires vast amounts of water and energy; in addition, roughly 10 percent of the wood cut is wasted. Paper is also rapidly depleting the numbers of oxygen-providing trees. The pulp-making process uses acid or alkali, depending on the class of pulp desired, to break down the fibers. That material pollutes rivers and streams, causing wide-ranging problems. Trees in Canada usually number about 100 to the acre. Loblolly pine is now growing in sandy soil in the southern states at 250 trees to the acre. With the loblolly pine, enzymes instead of sulfites break down the fibers. After the process is completed, that water goes back into the streams too, but it is totally biodegradable.
Kenaf is another magnitude ahead of this. It can produce 300 to 500 percent more pulp per acre per year than trees -- at half the cost. In four to five months it becomes high-quality newsprint paper. Such paper takes longer to fade, requires less ink, and provides higher contrast. Waste in kenaf production is double that of normal trees, but the relative total cost of the waste is minimal because kenaf is so cheap to produce.
Kenaf is already being planted in quantity in Mexico and southern Texas. In Thailand recent estimates say it is already providing 10 percent of the country's newspaper requirements. Look for a new kenaf plant to appear shortly near McAllen, Texas. It will be built by Kenaf International and is scheduled to produce 230,000 tons of newsprint per year. That alone would be one percent of the total U.S. paper production. Additional production is planned in another kenaf newsprint plant to be built by the Institut de Recherche in France.
With new environmental regulations coming into effect in 1994 in California, temperate forests that have been supplying a major portion of the world's newsprint will be in even deeper trouble. The new laws will not permit a newspaper to be sold in California unless it is at least 42 percent recycled fiber. Paper mills in Canada or even in the U.S. Pacific Northwest will no longer gather used papers in Los Angeles or New York or any other major North American city and truck those papers back to their present pulp or paper mills. It just won't be economically viable. It will, however, pay a Mexican company to send a barge to Los Angeles, gather up old newspapers, and take them back to Mexico, where they can be mixed with virgin kenaf to produce a superior, less expensive product.
Newsprint isn't the only thing you can make from kenaf. It also makes good carpet backing and molded auto parts. Canada's economy will feel its effects, but the country won't be producing kenaf of its own. It only grows in tropical or semi-tropical climates.

Carbon Fiber

Stronger, lighter high-rise towers are being built using less reinforced steel, along with carbon fiber, a product that could replace cancer-causing asbestos. First to gamble on incorporating carbon fiber into reinforced cement were the architects and builders of the 150-foot-high onion-shaped domes of the Saddam Qadassiya Martyrs monument built in Baghdad in 1983. The showcase thirty-seven-story Ark Hills office tower in Tokyo is the latest display of the advantages of this unique material.
Carbon that can be spun into a fiber is the result of heating a pulp-waste product called lignin. Discovered and patented by Thomas Edison for use in incandescent electric lamp filaments, carbon fiber was again patented eighty years later by Union Carbide for use as a reinforcing material. In 1963, Dr. Sugio Otani of Gunma University (northwest of Tokyo) became excited by it as a result of another project. He patented a process for commercial-scale plants to transform pitch into carbon fiber.
Most promising new applications for fiber involve use in reinforcing cement. Kajima, the giant Japanese construction company, has been working with Otani to create a cement mixture using only 3 percent chopped fiber. It is claimed that building walls with this material are stronger by a factor of three to four and are up to 60 percent lighter than anything constructed with traditional cement.
The Ark Hills office complex has 170 tons of carbon fiber incorporated into exterior curtain walls. Despite costs three times higher than ordinary cement, the new mixture nets out cheaper because it uses 20 percent fewer steel reinforcing rods and does not require heavy, expensive cranes to swing the lighter panels into place.
As land becomes increasingly expensive in Japan, many new buildings are being erected on reclaimed land. This land is usually softer, so lighter-weight buildings reduce the chance of subsidence. Ten more buildings incorporating carbon fiber have been commenced in Japan since the Ark Hills project was designed. Several more buildings are planned for the near future.
Another new product is a long-lasting (fifty years) tile made from carbon-fiber cement, a modern roofing material produced in Europe in quantity. (Plant planning for U.S. manufacturing is already under way.) This tile was developed as a replacement for both the combustible wooden shingle and the carcinogenic asbestos-based shingle. The former has already been banned as a fire hazard in Los Angeles, and the latter is running into resistance everywhere from environmentally sensitive homeowners.
The carbon-fiber cement shingles are made in Switzerland with a slurry material that resembles pancake mix. Run through a roller press, the mixture produces large sheets that are dried and bonded in an autoclave. Cut, packaged, shipped, and applied like regular tiles, these carbon-fiber cement shingles are about half the cost of natural slate, with similar wear and fire-resistant characteristics. According to the Insurance Information Institute of California, some companies there give a discount for fireproof shingles and charge a higher premium for wooden shingles.
Although other uses for carbon fiber have been discovered, the big market would be as an asbestos replacement, although production costs must first be dramatically lowered. The Japanese government is restricting the sale of asbestos for health reasons (in the process putting eighty thousand workers in four hundred factories out of jobs).
Canadians, once well-liked everywhere as considerate, tolerant, responsible world citizens, now find that reputation at risk as their governments continue to push exports of asbestos to developing countries and promote the sale of combustible wooden shingles (yes, they are combustible even with fire retardants, for these reportedly evaporate within a decade, leaving the wooden shakes unprotected against fire).

Metal Logs

It looks as if another nail is being driven into the coffin of the Canadian forest industry. This time it's a Venezuelan company called Tronco with a product called Metalogs. That's right, metal logs that allow unskilled laborers to build what looks like a wooden log cabin in a quarter of the time required to erect the same-size building with logs or cut lumber from the forest. Also the material is 25 percent cheaper than wood. It doesn't burn and termites can't eat it.
This innovation is not limited to log cabins. Regular homes and two-story apartments or hotels can be constructed in the same fashion. Some recent Russian immigrants to Israel are now comfortably installed in a multi-unit apartment house completely built -- from starting the foundation to moving in the new tenants -- in six weeks!
How's it done? Picture a machine that forms steel tubes, accompanied by a generator and compressor, all together the size of a desk, which are loaded onto a small trailer that can be pulled up mountains or into the jungle, desert, or suburban lot by a small car or jeep. This is the "factory" for building a home, apartment, or warehouse. While some of the workers are pouring a slab foundation, the log machine arrives at the building site and goes to work. Rolls of strip steel or aluminum of varying small widths are fed into the machine. Instantly, out comes a "log" in the dimension and length required for a particular part of the building. This zero inventory procedure greatly minimizes the need for storage and transportation of building materials. When construction is completed at one site, the mobile production facility can be easily moved to the next.
When the foundation slab is dry, the logs are laid in horizontal fashion, just as in a wooden log house. However, putting these logs in place is much easier. They are light enough that two workers can easily handle the largest log and lift it into place. Smaller logs can provide the frames for the windows and doors, and these, along with widely spaced, thin metal studs screwed into all Metalogs, are installed vertically, giving additional structural support. The roof is made in the same fashion.
Electrical, fiber-optic computer, stereo, phone, or water lines can be run through the metal logs with ease. Other logs can serve as heating ducts or "sound corridors" for music. In mild climates thermal insulation is provided by the airspace within the logs. In colder climates the logs can be filled with fiberglass or other insulation for increased protection against cold or heat. Again, this is easily done with unskilled labor.
The home can be left with the log cabin appearance inside or outside, or it can be painted or sprayed with shockcrete, a form of concrete or stucco, and finished inside with gypsum board, wood paneling, or any kind of exotic finish the homeowner desires. When completed, the house can look like any other in the block.
Don't think these environmentally sound homes are flimsy. Building inspectors in Dade County, Florida, have found these unusual buildings strong enough to handle "killer" hurricanes. A patented hook-and-tie connector holds the logs firmly together at the corners to provide exceptional strength and stability. The system has been certified by major building codes in the United States. In Orlando, two large Tronco housing projects are under way, one a 354-unit apartment complex. In the well-to-do Coconut Grove district of Miami, Tronco houses even drew CNN and Time magazine to the scene to report on the "log cabin townhomes."
Now considered proven at home and in foreign test centers, this innovative building product is moving into other countries. In Venezuela there is now more than half a million square feet of space made with Metalogs, not only houses and apartments but also warehouses, schools, offices, and retail outlets.
The building industry, like any other, must stay keenly aware of what is happening around the world. In my seminars I tell corporate executives, "Set up your own Distant Early Warning line to spot technological changes that may wipe out your industry overnight. Every corporation that wants to survive into the third millennium had better put someone on this project today. If not, the company stands a good chance of being out of business tomorrow."

Bee Technology

Seventeen years ago, when my houseboat home/office was under construction, a struggling company called International Structuralcomb in New Westminster, British Columbia, was producing what I thought was a product with a future -- one that would reduce the number of trees required to build a house yet still provide exceptional strength and rigidity.
I had the Structuralcomb panels incorporated, where feasible, into my floating home, mainly for the floor of the second-story bedroom, which also became the kitchen ceiling. The panels were perfect. They absorb sound and insulate well. If I were building a home today I would use similar construction, perhaps complemented with Metalogs in some parts of the building.
Unfortunately, financial problems forced the company to quietly fold its panels. It was ahead of its time. Today a similar concept called Bellcomb Technologies is thriving in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This company is having more success. Why? Because a factor has come into play that wasn't considered important two decades ago -- the environmental factor. Pressures against cutting wood, any kind of wood, are increasing. The "honeycomb" technology uses only seven cords of wood to construct a two-thousand-square-foot house instead of the twenty cords required by conventional construction.
To maintain a sustainable forest we are going to have to do "more with less," as Buckminster Fuller kept preaching for years -- with few listeners. It is not enough to plant a tree or even two for each one cut. With a waste reduction of at least 75 percent, we are going to have to do a lot more with what we do cut. The Bellcomb process provides one practical path to follow.
Early developments along this line included the Mosquito Bomber, built from Douglas fir in a paper-and-wood honeycomb. It was great during wartime since bullets went right through aircraft covering, and patching afterwards was usually a simple glue or fabric job. Although the same principle was used in American Super Fortress Bombers, the idea never really caught on except as a widely used substitute for corrugated cardboard in the packaging industry.
In the 1970s the aerospace industry took another look. These companies started to use honeycomb in airplanes and spacecraft because, pound for pound, it is one of the strongest, most rigid products on earth. It has been used, for example, on John Glenn's space capsule, the interior structures for Skylab, and the shock-resisting hulls of the world's fastest hydroplanes. Military housing has used honeycomb since 1960.
An Australian engineer eventually came up with a process that made small volume, or short-run, manufacturing cost-effective. Today a custom-built home, office, or warehouse can be erected quickly with relatively unskilled labor. A Structuralcomb building was erected in twenty hours at the United Nations Habitat Conference in Vancouver by a team of fifteen unskilled women.
Construction of the honeycomb panels starts with a matrix of hexagons, following the honeybee's original plans. Two skins are added to make a stronger, absolutely flat panel. These skins may be paper, plastic, metal, wood veneer, cement, gypsum board, granite, or marble -- almost anything as long as it is flat. Such beams can be tiny, or load-bearing, or adequate for three-story buildings.
Panels can be rendered water-resistant or fire-retardant, or, at extra cost, totally waterproof and fireproof. They can be designed to any specifications. Once you have the panels, only a glue gun and a screw gun are required to assemble the home. A honeycomb building costs considerably less than a traditional woodframe house, since it uses only two-thirds the wood, requires fewer workers, and has an uncomplicated construction. It may sound crazy, but technology at times can do amazing things. Just like the creatures that inspired it.

Virtual Vision

Ever throw something on the car dashboard and see the reflection in the windshield? Sometimes the reflection appears larger and out in front of the windshield, over the hood. This phenomenon is being turned into a new industry.
Private Eye is a device that tricks the eye into seeing something that isn't there. You wear a headband holding a tiny mono color video-screen about four inches in front of and to the right of your right eye. Your field of vision is only partly obstructed, allowing you to see outside the picture much as you would while watching a regular twelve-inch TV monitor. That's the purpose -- to provide a nonexistent TV screen that appears to be located about two feet in front of you.
Since Private Eye is a monocular display and does not occupy the full field of vision, the background environment can be viewed independently or integrated with the display in the mind's eye. Thus the viewer can receive information from the display while operating other equipment or performing additional tasks. My assistant and I have been using that device for some time now in producing my electronic books. It allows the wearer, at least in this application, to watch two computer screens and handle two keyboards simultaneously. It does wonders for productivity. It is another Communications Age skill that one develops while learning to use these new toys.
There is another advance in this field, Virtual Vision Sport, which allows people to view large-screen TV images through sport sunglasses. The unit consists of video eyewear and a belt pack containing a TV tuner, a battery, and an interface system that connects to VCRs, camcorders, a satellite dish, or cable TV. The viewer perceives a big-screen TV image floating in space. This virtual image is generated by a video system in the eyewear, but it appears to be up to five feet in size diagonally and eight to fifteen feet in front of the viewer.
While not really a virtual reality product, it is a step in that direction. Consider the possibilities. Instead of paying top prices at a sports event, take an inexpensive seat in the top of the stadium and watch big screen color images through portable, five-ounce eyeglasses, while also watching the distant game below! You can even catch the instant replays. At home you can water the lawn while watching auto races or a movie. Anything broadcast, taped, picked up on your home satellite dish, or sent via your local cable channel can be easily switched to these glasses. Parents could even have a camcorder trained on a sleeping child while they talk with neighbors over coffee. The clear picture of the child is always within sight. It would appear as a double exposure or color overlay on the normal field of vision.
The Virtual Vision Sport also can be used as a color viewfinder for camcorders. By connecting the beltpack into the camcorder, the user can record tight shots while simultaneously seeing everything else in the surrounding area. The possibilities, both amateur and professional, are limited only by the imagination.
Imagine a mobile personal computer that will project a display screen, larger in size than a standard computer display, inside a pair of eyeglasses as information is entered on a laptop. The system will allow users to work in almost any environment, such as a bus, plane, or in an easy chair at home. Or picture a surgeon wearing such glasses and operating on a patient; without moving his or her head, the surgeon could glance at charts, monitors, and other readout information displayed inside the glasses. Security systems would work in a similar way without curtailing social life. Security guards would no longer be restricted to the video monitoring room.
People who are hearing impaired could use voice recognition software now available and use the eyewear to have talk translated into printed words and displayed inside the eyeglasses. A recent test of this process by WGBH, the pioneering Boston PBS station, had hearing impaired people sitting in a movie theater wearing the Virtual Vision Sport glasses. They were able to watch the movie and glance down and see the captions in the eyewear. It was a successful and emotional trial. One woman remarked tearfully that for the first time she could share movies with her family.
A twist on that technique will allow travelers to communicate with people who speak a different language. Using the same voice recognition software, the eyeglasses will translate any human language into printed words that will be displayed inside the eyeglasses for the user to read.
Guess who else has been testing these glasses? Muppet puppeteers. Now they can see the Muppets in action and at the same time keep their eyes on the puppets as they work above or below them. This is much more convenient than the traditional method of turning their heads to watch a TV monitor as they produce the show. Now the puppeteers can junk the monitor and see the puppets as an overlay or double exposure on the actual puppets they are operating. They can see what the audience will see instead of having to imagine it, or glimpsing a monitor they can only glance at briefly.
I'm already enjoying my virtual vision glasses.

Light from Sludge?

Sewer sludge, the bane of municipal engineers, has been building into a monumental problem over the years. In many cities it has become a real financial, administrative, and political headache.
How to deal with it? One technological advance that may accomplish the impossible will be given the ultimate field test in Houston, Texas. Houston hopes to get rid of its sewer sludge by pumping it into the ground -- 4,500 feet into the ground. But it will not be left there. It will come back as a refined product -- sterile ash -- which looks like sand and can be used as aggregate for concrete or asphalt paving material. Even as ash it will have reduced the volume of solids in the sludge by about 95 percent. Picture a huge vertical pressure cooker running almost a mile underground. As the sludge material reaches the bottom, gravity and hydrostatic pressure create heat. Temperatures rise to between 500� and 700�F. This heat in turn triggers chemical reactions that activate an oxidization process.That turns the chemicals and micro-organisms into a concentrated sterile ash. Continued pumping of new, raw, wet sewage sludge into the pressure cooker forces the now-harmless, inert, ashlike sludge-substance back to the surface. It might even be hot enough to heat water and generate electricity!
Houston will have the world's first commercially operated plant, but this is not the first try. The process has been used for smaller quantities of toxic wastes for about a century, but the cost for above-ground containers and the cost of energy to heat the process were more than a commercial operation could bear. Underground, such costs almost disappear.
The Oxidyne Corporation will build and operate the plant for the city of Houston. Their present operation has involved oven-drying their sludge into pellets and selling these to Florida for fertilizer. Now the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to stop that game by ruling the procedure illegal. The proposed regulations will affect existing landfill sites as improved capping and sealing systems will have to be implemented. All this adds to the costs of old-style dumping of such materials as sewage sludge.
In the Netherlands a company called Vertech has been operating a similar process, but near the surface, by adding oxygen. This company is planning a wet-oxidation process plant for the town of Apeldoorn. The Dutch, with the most intensive livestock-raising system in Europe, have tons of pig manure on hand. This has been recycled as fertilizer, but the smell never made the process a big seller and the fertilizer was regarded as a potential health hazard. Pathogens in the fertilizer could also infect pigs. Such pathogens are destroyed completely by the wet-oxidation process.
In Great Britain the Water Research Centre is investigating the process for England and other parts of Europe. Additional advantages to the process are that, unlike conventional methods, it gives off no emissions. Toxic and other hazardous wastes can be treated. Heavy metals, it is believed, will be bound to the ash, but even if this proves not to be the case the savings in volume alone could extend landfill site volume by a factor of twenty.

Harnessing the Ocean

The question I am most often asked is: "What would you suggest my kids do to survive in the future?" My suggestion: get them into something you have never heard about before. Look for those fields that no school trains them for. Where do you find these "invisible" industries? There are hundreds. Let me describe just one.
Look at energy, but in a different way. Where does energy cost the most, in normal circumstances? Answer: on islands. If you can find a more efficient, lower-cost method than any known today to supply energy to islands, you would have a chance of replacing their existing sources of energy -- and there are thousands of islands around the world.
Back in 1984 a Norwegian company, Kvaerner Brug, started researching such a possibility. About five years later it succeeded, and a coastal wave generator on the west coast of Norway began pumping electricity into Norway's national grid system. The company burned no oil or natural gas and used no coal; it used the energy from the waves. These units can be used at almost any shoreline location. The sea does not need to have huge waves or pounding surf, although those would produce even more power. The natural surge of the sea has huge power-generating potential, and it can now be harnessed.
As in all such research, fate sometimes steps in and reminds everyone of the risks inherent in any advance into the future. In this case a rogue wave of gargantuan dimensions swept onto the Norwegian coast and destroyed the entire apparatus. As of mid-1993, the decision of whether to continue or give up has not been made. It may be difficult to obtain funds for the continuing research. It may be that such once-in-a-century mishaps will have to be factored into construction costs and covered by adequate insurance, an item sometimes hard to obtain in the development and research fields.
Regardless of the outcome, the company did prove that the principle was sound. An invisible industry was made visible, and we took another step into the future.

High-Tech Security

Twelve-year-olds can eavesdrop on computers by picking up signals emitted by electron sweep beams crisscrossing video screens. Imagine the embarrassment of bank managers when kids knew as much about their largest loans as they did. Now a company in England, Pilkington Glass, has come up with an answer.
Most home and office windows are transparent to white, infrared, and ultraviolet light; to gamma rays; and to data signals. Political and industrial spies and terrorists using off-the-shelf "kiddy" equipment can intercept confidential data through such window panes. I've spoken to highly placed members of government in rooms that were public billboards to people who know how to read them. Governments are generally unaware that it's possible to detect such electronic signals miles from the source without physically penetrating any property, and that computer-radiated radio signals also reveal information to the initiated.
Pilkington's datastop glass blocks electromagnetic radiation (EMR) "broadcast" by both picture-tube displays and microcircuits. Such shielding is similar to that provided by a Faraday cage, a metal-enclosed room that protects people inside from outside EMR emission. Pilkington coats its glass with a metallic film via an electrochemical process that provides signal attenuation up to fifty-five decibels. The film, which reduces light entry by about 50 percent, appears as a tint. This tint also acts as thermal insulation to reduce glare and solar heating. Besides protecting corporate secrets, these windows reduce air-conditioning bills by keeping out half the heat that normally enters along with sunlight.
Datastop windows are double-glazed and protected against EMR emissions by conducting gaskets around an aluminum frame which is grounded to a metal screening tied into room walls. Computer operations don't have to be changed at all. Only building windows are changed. Secrets that previously leaked through the windows now bounce harmlessly around the room. Outside signals that previously entered the office now also bounce back outside before they enter.
And what about unauthorized people gaining access to a building? Many buildings, construction sites, research laboratories, and radio and television studios have superficial security checks. Usually these consist of a commissioner who has you sign a book and list the person you are going to see and then issues a lapel badge with a number on it. The idea is that you sign your real name and do have a legitimate purpose in entering the building.
You are supposed to turn your badge back in at the front desk, but you may not. To avoid this not-infrequent occurrence, a new type of time-limited self-destructing "smart" badge has been produced. It can be set for a four- or eight-hour life. Your name is put on the badge, and from the moment you receive it, the badge is silently (and chemically) ticking away. As you spend time inside the building, the badge gradually darkens. When your time is up, your name on the badge is obliterated.
The badge also has another feature. Suppose you sneak out with it, pass it to an accomplice who puts it on outside, and he walks back into the building. The badge reacts instantly to outside light and will turn dark in a few minutes. (This does not happen when you are inside the building, where the natural light passes through glass, thus filtering out the ultraviolet rays.) The price? About thirty cents each in small quantities. An even less expensive model, available for use in museums or by tour operators, costs only a few cents.

Ferrofluids

Almost everyone knows about solid-state technology, which greased the tracks for the high-speed growth of the computer and microchip industry. Now prepare for liquid-state technology, a new class of materials unknown in nature. Ferrofluids are a completely new type of material. They give us liquid magnetism.
Ferrofluids have unique properties. They contain microscopic magnetic particles, each about 6,200 times smaller than a human hair. When these particles are influenced by a magnetic field they defy gravity and can take the shape of their container, go upward, turn corners. Manipulation of the magnetic field directs the flow. A fluid in a dish can jump out toward a nearby magnet!
If an object heavier than the fluid itself is placed into a ferrofluid, instead of sinking to the bottom the object becomes buoyant and drifts toward the center of the container. There are considerable advantages to such a material. In South Africa one innovative company is using this "selective buoyancy" to pick out diamonds from beach sand.
Liquid magnetism is an answer just waiting for the right questions to be asked. As a sealant a ferrofluid appears to have no competitors. Just the thing to have around entrances during chemical or biological warfare attacks. In a solar heating system a ferrofluid could drive its own circulation. In medicine ferrofluids may be the new drug-delivery system. A ferrofluid carrying a site-specific drug could be guided to its location directly and held there by a magnetic field until its timed dispersal.
This could be more than a new discovery -- it could be the start of a new industry.

Nanotechnology

Here's a real-life version of the old movie Fantastic Voyage: a "submarine" courses through the blood system correcting damage, removing debris, and generally surveying the human structure -- from the inside -- and reporting on unusual deviations from the norm. Tokyo University plans to develop a microscopic "submarine" designed for internal human travel. It could revolutionize medicine. Possibly such a mobile device could remain in the body more or less permanently. After all, the internal thermometer already has the capacity to remain in the body for a full year, constantly reporting thermal conditions.
Nanotechnology is the science of the inorganic invisible. (Nano is the prefix in the metric system for one-billionth; it refers to something extremely small.) K. Eric Drexler, author of Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, might be termed the inventor of this whole field. Nanotechnology is based on the manipulation of individual atoms or molecules to build structures to complex, atomic specifications. At the molecular level things act differently than they do when grouped together in the much larger clumps we see in everyday life.
This "submarine" is extremely small, not like the "bulky" silicon motor made recently by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, which has the thickness of a human hair and can spin at only 500 rpm. Transistors were originally about one-third the width of a human hair. Today's transistors are one-hundredth the width of a human hair. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, experimental transistors are down to twenty-five nanometers, about 0.003 the width of a human hair -- about one hundred atoms wide.
It's a new world when things get this small. For instance, researchers at AT&T found that a cluster of twelve silicon atoms reacts up to a thousand times faster than a cluster of thirteen atoms. The potential is monumental. Computers in a pencil may serve as translators and as robots that can see, talk, and react to your commands. Nanotechnology can probably be applied to both metal and ceramic materials, which could result in longer-lasting engine parts and higher efficiency power units.
A few years ago most scientists, including Drexler, thought it might be decades before nanotechnology made major advances. That time frame appears to be compressing. Advances in this field are accelerating much faster than believed possible in 1990. Positive effects of nanotechnological innovations in medicine and environmental restoration are now perceived as actually possible. For instance, the design of protein molecules has been followed by the design of a working enzyme unlike anything in nature. This could herald the concept of evolution-in-a-drum, methods for producing molecules that self-assemble to form larger structures.
The manipulation of individual atoms at IBM proves that precisely positioned atomic-level control can be accomplished. DNA has been fabricated into a cube. Designed and fabricated molecules are part of today's -- not tomorrow's -- technology.
As Drexler works toward building the first crude molecular assembler, Dr. Ralph Merkle, founder of Xerox PARC's Computational Nanotechnology Project, is working on proposed molecular devices, including bearings and other mechanical components. This is reminiscent (under a microscope) of Henry Ford's building his first car. With nanotechnology, the "submarine" could be built to cruise through arteries cleaning out plaque and cholesterol.
The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) in Japan lists nanotechnology as among the most critical developments for the twenty-first century. When the Japanese invest heavily, something is usually about to move. When Drexler first announced his theories in this field, North America's general response was, "Interesting, maybe we should look at this twenty-five years down the road." MITI looked at it and dedicated $185 million to develop nanotechnology during this decade. The journal Nature recently convened a conference in Japan on nanotechnology, in conjunction with the Science and Technology Agency, to focus on building molecular structures, materials, and machines. Drexler's book Engines of Creation has been translated, published, and distributed in Japan.
Media worldwide eventually noticed the growing interest, and such publications as the New York Times, The Economist, Science, Time, Business Week, and Popular Science wrote about the possibilities in this emerging field. In Japan, Nippon Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) produced a three-hour television series exploring nanotechnology research and its implications for the future. In Britain there is now a professional journal called Nanotechnology. A recent conference in Monterey, California, featured ecotechnology with nanotechnology as a popular segment. Once again, tomorrow has arrived on our doorstop today.

Electronic Publishing

With a computer, everyone can learn to write, edit, print, and publish. Once people become publishers, they can serve as their own dispatch office, sending their electronic books to the world via fax, E-mail, laser printer, computer disk, and even CD-ROM. All this can be done at a cost that is magnitudes lower than the cost of producing the book you now hold in your hands. It is the intellectual equivalent of a front-end loader replacing the ditch-digger.
Power is leaving the hands of traditional publishers and empowering those with the right attitude -- people with initiative, motivation, inquisitiveness, and determination. With direct costs of an electronic book limited to owning or renting a computer, a modem, and a fax, the cost of the final product is mainly those fifty-cent floppy disks. Naturally, time is important and valuable, but that is your contribution. After your book is put on a disk that is virtually indestructible (although it still pays to put one copy in a safe deposit box), it can be duplicated in as little as forty-two seconds, again and again and again. If you listen closely you might catch the sound of cash registers ringing. This is just what Bill Gates, president of Microsoft, did to make himself the richest man in North America. He's an electronic publisher who sells for hundreds of dollars per copy a product that costs very little to produce.
With electronic books, control of the end product resides with the writer. The computer that produces the manuscript can produce the finished product, right in your home office. The author now controls his or her own destiny. Authors who can publish the books they write have moved to another level. What is perhaps the biggest advantage over a printed book? Access to a market traditional publishers have never considered: that 40 percent of the population that can't read. (In North America about 20 percent of the people are totally illiterate and another 20 percent are functionally illiterate.) People who cannot read can still benefit from hearing your book. How? Electronic books can read themselves -- in male, female, or robotic voice. People who cannot read have no trouble with the spoken word. Nor do those other billions of people around the planet who have never been exposed to vast amounts of knowledge because traditional publishers never gave them a thought.
A printed book like this one costs up-front money to develop and produce. A "manuscript" on hard drive, however, can be easily duplicated on inexpensive, almost indestructible disks. Make as many as you can sell. Notice I said "as many as you can sell," not �as many as you think you can sell." Make exactly what the market will buy. That's a luxury that the publishers of this book didn't have. They had to estimate sales and order a print run accordingly.
Set your price high. It will still be low compared to printed books. I sell my collected work as an electronic book, and my profit margin lies in the realm of the glorious, compared to what the publishers of this book can hope to realize. With my better margin I can do promotion, deals, and quantity pricing that is impossible in this Gutenberg format. Mailing in the United States, I can send my book -- a ten-disk set -- around America for under a dollar. In Canada it costs over eight dollars to send the same disks from Vancouver to Toronto. I can also manufacture the disks in Washington state at one-third of Vancouver's prices.
One joy of electronic self-publishing is that with little capital required to produce the books you can take a new approach to marketing. Consider your disks as samples, and give them to computer stores, to any wide-awake bookstore owner, or to the growing number of electronic publishers. The possibilities, because of dramatically low production and delivery costs, allow sampling on a scale no traditional publisher can afford. Imagine you have a new seed. Where is the fertile environment for it to grow? The disks are small enough and light enough to be mailed in ordinary envelopes or padded disk mailers. Mail disk copies to book reviewers. Be generous. At a direct cost of $1 plus postage, the first hundred copies are no big deal. To a traditional publisher, such marketing is costly.
Print a nice label. Present the dust jacket on the beginning of the disk. If the book sells, invest in better packaging. Good profit margins permit better packaging and better promotion. If the book clicks, go to direct mail order, where you get all the profit. Many buyers come from small towns that probably wouldn't hear of your book for years through traditional channels; or your buyers will be cutting-edge "teckies" who will buy anything they think will keep them riding the crest of the information wave. There are thousands of data banks, hundreds of computer networks, and millions of ardent fans lusting to soak up information by the gigabyte.
If successful, consider putting your book on the new flopticals. These floppy disks hold a massive twenty-one megabytes, from twenty to twenty-five times more data than the present standard floppy disk. My ten-volume electronic book, Lessons from the Future, is all on one floptical. That's in English. There are another ten volumes translated into Spanish and the floptical will shortly hold still more ten volumes in kanji script for Cantonese and Mandarin viewers.
If sales go well, consider a CD-ROM. This is similar to the 4.5-inch CD that rock stars make their millions on. To get a low cost per copy for CDs, you need to order several thousand. If you want to make just one, you can do that through a breakthrough in CD-ROM production that allows you to make a single disk for around $300. (A new chain-outlet company called One-Off CD Shop is sprouting up throughout North America. This outfit made my gold CD-ROMs.)
We're now at the early stage of electronic publishing, and the late stage of traditional book publishing. An early edition of a Gutenberg Bible is worth $1 million today. Its value is as a collector's item. Increasingly, that will become the fate of printed books. They will be superceded, for economic reasons, by electronic books. And they'll become, like most of what you find in an antique store, relics of an earlier age.