Presentation for the Alpbach Technology Forum of August 2014 on Art/Science and Silicon Valley. I keep updating my presentations on Silicon Valley at www.scaruffi.com/svhistory
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Art/Science Interaction - Case study: Silicon Valley
1. " The Best Kept Secret in
Silicon Valley "
(Alpbach Technology Forum, August 2014)
piero scaruffi
www.scaruffi.com
4. 4
Why did it happen here?
• The technology, the money and the brains were on
the East Coast and in Europe (the great electronic
research labs, the great mathematicians, Wall
Street, etc)
• The great universities were on the East Coast
(MIT, Harvard, Moore School, Princeton,
Columbia), and in Europe (Cambridge)
• Bell Labs, RCA Labs, IBM Labs
• Britain and Germany won most of the Nobels
• Transistor, computer, etc all invented elsewhere
7. 7
Why did it happen here?
• The official history of Silicon Valley
– Defense/DARPA
– Fred Terman at Stanford and Stanford Industrial Park
– William Shockley’s lab
– Fairchild/Intel/semiconductors
– Xerox PARC, SRI Intl/computer-human interface
– Apple, personal computing, videogames
– Unix, Internet, Relational databases
– The dotcoms
– Google, Facebook, …
8. 8
Why Silicon Valley?
• Until the 1950s the Bay Area was mainly
famous for
– Eccentric artists/writers
• Student protests of 1964
• Hippies
• Black Panther Party (1966)
• Monterey’s rock festival (1967)
• "Whole Earth Catalog“ (1968)
• The first “Earth Day” (1970)
• Gay Pride Parade (1970)
• Survival Research Labs (1978)
• New-age movement (1980s)
• Burning Man (1986)
9. 9
Why Silicon Valley?
The first major wave of
immigration of young educated
people from all over the world
took place during the hippy era
(“Summer of Love”)
The first major wave of technology
was driven by independents,
amateurs and hobbyists (From
ham radio to the Homebrew
Computer Club)
10. 10
Why Silicon Valley?
• Anti-corporate sentiment
• The start-ups implement principles
of the hippy commune
• SRI Intl and Xerox PARC:
computation for the masses,
augmented intelligence
Xerox PARC
The first mouse
11. 11
Why Silicon Valley?
• The Bay Area recasts both Unix and the
Internet as idealistic grass-roots
movements
• Young educated people wanted to
change the world
• They did
12. 12
Why Silicon Valley?
• Dysfunctional synergy between two opposite
poles
– The rational and the irrational
– Technologists and anti-technologists
– Hippies and engineers
– Amateurs and corporations
– Nerds and outlaws (the "traitors", Jobs,
Ellison, Zuckerberg, hackers)
13. 13
Why Silicon Valley?
• Innovation is a vague word: everything is an
"innovation". What kind of innovation does
Silicon Valley specialize in?
14. 14
Why Silicon Valley?
• What Silicon Valley does best
– Not invented here: computer, transistor,
integrated circuit, robots, Artificial
Intelligence, programming languages,
databases, videogames, Internet, personal
computers, World-wide web, search
engines, social media, smartphones,
wearable computing, space exploration,
electrical cars, driverless cars…
16. 16
Silicon Valley 2013
• World's #1 company in…
– Internet services: Google
– Social Media: Facebook
– Semiconductors: Intel
– Personal computers: Hewlett-Packard
– Business software: Oracle
Most valued company in the world: Apple
Location with the most venture capital:
3000 Sand Hill Rd, Menlo Park
18. 18
Why Silicon Valley?
• Culture of failure: it comes from the artists
(risk inherent in being an artist)
• Culture of success: it comes from the artists
(congrats if you make a lot of money out of
the crazy ideas you had)
• Meritocracy: it comes from the artists
(industrial power is usually inherited)
• Casual work environment - just like an
artist’s studio
• Silicon Valley is about the garage (like the
artists)
19. 19
Why Silicon Valley?
• Crowdfunding, peer-to-peer file
sharing, the gift economy and the
sharing economy are NOT natural
consequences of capitalistic society
• but they are a natural consequence of
the artists' way of life
20. 20
Why Silicon Valley?
• Immigration of young educated people from
all over the world (Note! USA gets brains,
Silicon Valley gets YOUNG brains)
• Young people are less specialistic (narrow
minded? parochial?) than older people
• Computer geeks and nerds are actually
more likely to absorb the influence of artists
(and even to become polymaths)
21. 21
Why Silicon Valley?
• Lots of art is not enough, otherwise Europe
(and the East Coast) would easily outclass
Silicon Valley
• It is “who” created the spirit of the society
that matters: was the spirit created by the
artists, by the industry, by the aristocracy,
…?
22. 22
Art/Science in the Bay Area
• Leonardo ISAST leonardo.info (Frank Malina, 1967)
• YLEM (Trudy Reagan & Howard Pearlmutter, 1981)
• UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium (Ken
Goldberg, 1997)
• Zero1 zero1.org (Andy Cunningham, 2000)
• LASERs lasertalks.com (Piero Scaruffi, 2008)
• UC Santa Cruz's OpenLab (Jenifer Parker and Enrico Rameriz-Ruiz,
2010)
• Codame codame.com (Bruno Fonzi, 2010)
• BAASICS baasics.com (Selene Foster and Christopher Reiger, 2011)
• UC Santa Cruz's Art/Sci Institute (John Weber, 2013)
• Life Art Science Technology (LAST) festival lastfestival.com (Piero
Scaruffi, 2014)
• Djerassi's Scientific Delirium Madness (Margot Knight, 2014)
25. 25
LAST Festival
Life Art Science Technology festival
June 2014: Silicon Valley - October 2014: San Francisco
www.lastfestival.com
26. 26
Replicating Silicon Valley
The rest of the world consistently failed to create
their own Silicon Valleys:
• Sophia Antipolis (France)
• Munich (Germany)
• Oulu (Finland)
• Skolkovo (Russia)
• Israel
• Hsinchu (Taiwan)
• Singapore
• Cyberjaya (Malaysia)
• Bangalore (India)
• Zhongguancun (China)
27. 27
Progress does not need SV
• The Silicon Valley dogma:
– Progress has never accelerated so fast
• Case study #2: “Western World 1880-1910”
28. 28
Progress does not need SV
• One century ago, within a relatively short period
of time, the world adopted:
– the car,
– the airplane,
– the telephone,
– the radio
– the record
– cinema
• while at the same time the visual arts went through
– Impressionism,
– Cubism
– Expressionism
29. 29
Progress does not need SV
• while at the same time science came up with
– Quantum Mechanics
– Relativity
• while at the same time the office was
revolutionized by
– cash registers,
– adding machines,
– typewriters
• while at the same time the home was
revolutionized by
– dishwasher,
– refrigerator,
– air conditioning
30. 30
Progress does not need SV
• while at the same time cities adopted high-rise
buildings
31. 31
Progress does not need SV
• There were only 5 radio stations in 1921 but
already 525 in 1923
• The USA produced 11,200 cars in 1903, but
already 1.5 million in 1916
• By 1917 a whopping 40% of households had a
telephone in the USA up from 5% in 1900.
• The Wright brothers flew the first plane in 1903:
during World War I (1915-18) more than 200,000
planes were built
32. 32
… but it may need the arts…
• Accelerating progress happened
simultaneously in the sciences and the arts
Monet Stravinsky Einstein Gaudi Edison
34. 34
Another case study: East Asia
• 1954: Sony's transistor radio
• 1970: Japan's Sharp and Canon introduce the first pocket calculators
• 1973: Japan's Canon introduces the first color photocopier
• 1979: Japan's Sony introduces the portable music player Walkman
• 1980: Japan's Yamaha releases the first digital synthesizer
• 1982: Japan's Sony introduces the compact disc
• 1983: Japan's Sony releases the first consumer camcorder
• 1984: Fujio Masuoka at Japan's Toshiba invents flash memory
• 1988: Japan's Fujitsu introduces the world's first digital camera
• 1992: Japan's Fujitsu introduces the world's first plasma display
• 1996: Japan's Toshiba introduces the first DVD player
• 1997: Japan's Toyota introduces the hybrid car Prius
• 1997: Japan's Panasonic introduces the first flat panel television set
• 1998: South Korea's SaeHan introduces the first mp3 player
• 2000: Japan's Sharp introduces the first mobile phone & camera
35. 35
Another case study: East Asia
• There are more than 2,000 startups in
Seoul's Teheran Valley, and 69% of them
are in IT
• Japan accounts for 21% of all patents
awarded worldwide
• Taiwan's companies produce 80% of all
personal digital assistants, 70% of all
notebooks and 60% of all flat-panel
monitors
41. 41
Europe vs SV
• Europe: no trust in a young person
starting a business
• SV: young people are the ones who
found new music genres and become
rock stars
• Europe: frightened by new technology
• SV: what kind of party can I throw with
this new technology?
TechCrunch Disrupt
September 2013
The first LAST festival
June 2014
42. 42
Europe vs SV
• Europe: fear of “Big Brother”
• SV: please take my privacy and make
me cool and famous (just like an artist)
Viviane Reding,
EU’s justice commissioner
Steve Jobs Sergey Brin
"It is better to be absolutely ridiculous than
absolutely boring“ (Marilyn Monroe)
45. 45
Creativity
• Creativity's peaks often correspond with periods
of great instability: classical Athens (at war 60%
of the time), 12th-13th century Venice (built on a
mosquito-infected lagoon by homeless refugees),
the Renaissance (Italy split in dozens of small
states and engulfed in endemic warfare), the 20th
century (two World Wars and a Cold War).
47. 47
What is unique about humans?
• Animals live the same life of their parents
• Humans are the only species whose life
style changes from generation to generation
48. 48
What is unique about humans?
• Children disobey, teenagers are rebels
49. 49
What is unique about humans?
• Animals only “innovate” when there is a
genetic mutation
• Humans innovate all the time
Beaver civilization over the millennia
Human civilization over the millennia
50. 50
What is unique about humans?
• Art is pervasive in nature (eg birds make nests and
sing, bees dance, spiderwebs, humpback whale
songs, etc)
• Each animal has the same aesthetic, generation
after generation
• Human aesthetic changes from generation to
generation
51. 51
What is unique about humans?
…….
Human aesthetic over the centuries
Spider aesthetic over the centuries
52. 52
What is unique about humans?
• Being creative is the natural state of the human
mind
• Creativity is what truly sets humans apart from
other living beings
• It is unnatural for the human race to be creative
only in one field
53. 53
Welcome to the 21st Century
• From Descartes to Relativity and Quantum
Mechanics: how can Religion and Science
coexist
• CP Snow (1959): how can the Humanities
and Science coexist
54. Matrix algebra revised
• Solving a large system of linear equations
with a large number (millions) of unknowns
Images by Margot Gerritsen, Tim Davis & Yifan Hu
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/sparse/matrices/
And it reveals the elegant structure of the graph that was previously hidden when the nodes were jumbled randomly on the page.
The goal is to compute the best solution to an optimization problem.
This matrix comes from the frequency-domain simulation of a complex semiconductor circuit. The green lines underneath the fuzz are the circuit, and the fuzz coming off that describes what happens to the circuit at different frequencies.
Here is another linear programming problem.
This elegant mesh represents the fluid flow in a shallow bay of water. It could be used to simulate where pollutants would flow.
This graph is from a student of mine who now works at Amazon.com. It's a social network, where each node is either a person or a web page, and an edge is drawn between a person and each web page they like. Not surprisingly, the graph is very irregular.