High Wired Act
It's 1975, the Pleistocene era of the Information Age, a time when nobody has personal computers and mainframes stalk the earth. The popular mind views the spread of data keeping with Orwellian dread. To deal with this issue, People Magazine seeks out Michael Dertouzos, who a year earlier had taken the reigns of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS).
After dismissing a half dozen queries about computers taking over the world, Dertouzos finally gets his chance to articulate a vision. “Will computers be widely used by the average person in coming years?” he is asked.
“In 10 or 15 years, one should cost about the same as a big color TV,” Dertouzos replies. “This machine could become a playmate, testing your wits at chess or checkers. If a computer were hooked up to AP or UPI news wires, it could be programmed to know that I'm interested in Greece, computers, and music. Whenever it caught news items about these subjects, it would print them out on my console.”
“Will they transmit mail?” the interviewer asks, obviously awed. “We are already hooked into a network,” Dertouzos says. “You can let messages pile up until you turn on your computer and ask for your mail.”
E-mail-in 1975? If anyone could see it coming, it was Michael Dertouzos. Whether it was the personal computer, the Internet, or e-commerce, for more than 25 years Dertouzos' futuristic prophecies have invariably hit the mark. The lingo has changed, but he was the first to tout what he called an “information marketplace,” a place where the maelstrom of electrons flowing through computers would become an engine not only for buying and selling goods and services, but, more important in his view, for exchanging information and ideas.
As director of MIT's Laboratory of Computer Sciences, Dertouzos was well-positioned to get a bird's-eye view of the revolution to come. After all, he recruited many of the scientists who helped make it a reality. And, as many of them point out, it was his vision that inspired them to launch an array of technologies that helped turn the information marketplace from a dream into the trillion-dollar engine of commerce that is transforming our economy.
During his tenure, Dertouzos' field of view has extended well beyond the geekdom of the computer world. During the 1980s, he headed a blue-ribbon panel of MIT scientists and economists charged with analyzing the downward spiral of U.S. industry. Today, with American corporations in the global catbird seat, the prescient prescriptions of the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity read like the road map for how U.S. business re-emerged as to pre-eminence.
Even before Dertouzos arrived at LCS, there were inklings of what was to come. The lab's scientists had pioneered in the development of applications like spreadsheets and word processing programs that were to become mainstays of the computer world. LCS in those early days also began the long march toward a world of free-flowing information by initiating time-sharing on its mainframes.
But under Dertouzos' leadership, LCS added immeasurably to that legacy. Early in his tenure, lab scientists created the first local area networks and the file transfer protocols that enabled communication between remote machines. Public encryption technology also emerged from LCS. While that may not be something that sparks the popular imagination, you wouldn't be able to safely send your credit card number across the Internet without it.
In fact, more than three dozen start-up companies have spun out of LCS. They range from 3Com Corp., the $6 billion networking company whose founder, Robert Metcalfe, began his pathbreaking work on local area networks at LCS, to Cambridge-based Akamai Technologies Inc., whose process for increasing the speed at which servers can deliver Web pages made it one of last year's hottest Internet start-ups.
Yet to the nontechies of the world, Michael Dertouzos remains a relative unknown. No great scientific breakthroughs are attached to his name. And even to casual observers of the technology scene, he is the “other Greek” on the MIT campus, the more prominent one being the glamorous, buzz-savvy Nicholas Negroponte of the Media Lab, who with his high-tech gizmos and extensive corporate sponsorships has been remarkably adept at winning media attention. To the fathers of the Information Age infrastructure, however, there is no doubt which lab has made the more lasting contribution.
Then I visited Dertouzos in his soon-to-be vacated office in MIT's Technology Square, his first response to a question about competition between his work and Negroponte's Media Lab was nervous laughter. “Media Lab? Who are they?” He quickly added: “I'm joking. Competition? Nah, nah. It is wonderful how human beings are looking for strife and trying to build it where they think it ought to be.”
A few years from now, Dertouzos and LCS will move to a building designed by ultra-modernist Frank Gehry. The angular designs of the new structure will undoubtedly remind visitors of the chaotic rush of the computer revolution itself. But for the time being, his office sits in a complex of squat concrete buildings that together resemble nothing so much as a room full of 1960s-era mainframe computers.
On his spacious walls, four clocks offer the times in Tokyo, Athens, Boston, and San Francisco, the four cities where he either spends the most time or makes the most calls. A T-shirt proclaims “World's Great Guano Harvest.” (In the early 1980s, when he needed several hundred personal computers for students in his lab, he approached the chief engineer at Digital Equipment Corp. for support. Asked how many he needed, he brazenly sought 5,000. He got 3,000 and outfitted the entire university. His reward was the T-shirt.)
When asked a second time about the competition between the two labs, the academic entrepreneur, now 63, slumped his six-foot, four-inch frame deep into his chair, and ran a hand through his thinning gray hair. “There is a different mindset in the two labs and that is healthy,” he said. “We have the mindset here that neither social purpose nor technology should drive what we do for the future. It should be a mixed salad. So pour into the salad bowl equal amounts of social utility and technological capability and don't be too smart about what you're going to do. Just watch the salad bowl. If something pops, and it looks exciting, follow it. Everything we do combines technology with social utility.
“Our friends at the Media Lab,” he continued, “are more interested in highly imaginative, stunning innovations. They have high excitement value. Sometimes those things can lead to wonderful discoveries like wearable computers, paperless ink, or whatever.”
He paused for a moment, as if trying to imagine the usefulness of such devices. His own book had touted the possibility that eyeglasses would one day serve both as computer screens and communication devices. He looked up. “There is no formula that says which is the path.”
Dertouzos' path to MIT began in Athens in 1936. His father, a deeply religious man and a disciplinarian, was an admiral in the Greek Navy. His mother was a concert pianist, and in Dertouzos' words, loose, creative, and offbeat. “For many years, I felt I had a switch in my head where I could switch from one to the other, [becoming] extremely disciplined or extremely crazy on demand,” he said. “In the last decade, they have come together.”
His earliest memories are of a war-ravaged city, where at night he watched starving people huddle over subway grates for heat, and the next morning he saw trucks come by to pick up the frozen bodies. During the war he attended public school. But from fourth grade, he attended the elite Athens College, which had been established in the 1920s by Greek-Americans to combine the best education methods of both cultures.
Though he had to pass a rigorous exam to get in, young Dertouzos was hardly the model scholar. He got Cs in math and Ds in composition. But when a seventh grade math teacher demanded better performance, pulling Dertouzos' suspenders for emphasis, an academic career was launched. “The pain was palpable,” Dertouzos recalled. “I went home petrified, but I started studying that night. I became a math standout.”
In his senior year, he won a Fulbright scholarship. Although his first choice of colleges was MIT, he accepted placement at the University of Arkansas. So at 17, he went from Athens to the Ozarks, and threw himself into 1950s American college life with its “beautiful girls with white bobby sox and flaring skirts. I loved it.”
He received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in three years. He also worked, first selling Cokes in the stadium and then as a solderer in the engineering lab, a task at which he proved completely inept. Just before getting fired, Dertouzos began fiddling with some experiment results that no one else could explain. Two days later, in a scene straight out of Good Will Hunting, he emerged from his room with graphs and equations that solved the problem. The professor was impressed and made him a researcher the next day, complete with an office and a salary large enough to send money home to his parents.
After graduation, a friend from Cincinnati landed him a job at Baldwin Piano, which was working on shaft-angle encoders, a glass printing technology with defense applications. He earned several patents in the field and quickly rose to director of research, overseeing the work of 10 scientists. But the work bored him.
He applied to the MIT doctorate program, which he completed in three years. His Ph.D. thesis was on threshold logic, a field he now calls “totally worthless.” But he had found a home. “It was like being back at Athens College. There was nothing but brilliant people here,” he said.
In 1964, he became a faculty member and soon launched an experimental electrical engineering course that for the first time combined the traditional analog curriculum with the emerging digital world. “It was long overdue, the introduction of computers into the curriculum” said Robert Metcalfe, an early student who went on to make his fortune by starting 3Com. He now practices high-tech punditry for InfoWorld, the bible of information systems professionals[Double check, I think he writes for Technology Review, maybe both/CU]. Dertouzos' course, says Metcalfe, began “the movement away from the device world to a systems world.”
Dertouzos' early years as a bench scientist showed great promise. Then, as now, MIT encouraged its faculty to look for outside business opportunities, as long as they didn't shortchange students or take more than one day a week away from academic research and teaching. In 1968, married with the first of two children on the way, Dertouzos started Computek, which sought to commercialize graphical interface patents he'd developed that used computers to quickly display curved drawings.
The firm ultimately grew to 120 people. But the responsibilities associated with keeping people employed and trying to sell $12,000 machines weighed him down. He sold the business in 1974 when offered the LCS job. “I remember walking down the street jumping like a free bird because I didn't have this chain around my neck,” he said. “I promised myself that never again would I ever own a big chunk of a company. I get involved in start-ups, but never more than a few percent.”
Sensing neither business nor research were his ultimate callings, Dertouzos leaped at the chance to take over Project MAC, which stood for Multiple Access Computer, the main project of what would soon be called the Laboratory for Computer Science. In those days, running the lab wasn't the plum job it is today, and there was little competition for the post. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), in an effort to save money, was pressuring the lab to reunite with the group that had spun out to form the Artificial Intelligence lab. The professors who remained behind were resisting Pentagon efforts to broaden the LCS mission beyond time-sharing of computers.
Some AI veterans still refer to Dertouzos' initial actions in those days as a power play. “I thought we could do a lot more together,” Dertouzos recalled, “but we ran into a lot of resistance so we dropped it.”
He admits now it was a good thing he failed to carry out the Pentagon's program. “In the end, the objectives of AI are very different,” he said. “They are trying to understand how the human brain works and trying to make machines that are as intelligent as people. In this lab, we have always seen information technology as a very important tool, not as an end in itself.”
Dertouzos soon found himself at odds with the Pentagon. In 1997, Ronald Rivest, still on the faculty at the lab, had with two colleagues developed an RSA encryption algorithm for secure computer transaction that would later become key to commercial uses of the Internet. But Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who between 1974 and 1982 served as director of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, director of the National Security Agency, and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, became afraid it would be used by U.S. enemies to create code that would be unbreakable by the government's own spies. He asked Dertouzos and the lab to submit all scientific findings to National Security Agency censors before being submitted to academic journals for publication.
The LCS scientists rebelled against the ham-handed attack on academic freedom. After a series of high-level meetings, Dertouzos and LCS agreed to submit papers to the government at the same time as they were given to colleagues for peer review. The government could then seek an order barring publication on national security grounds if it thought the technology warranted it.
Government efforts at intrusion didn't stop there. Dertouzos resisted Inman's suggestion that lab personnel remain open-minded about informal requests from government officials that they not publish “sensitive” matters, which are sometimes called gray controls. “We said no, either get a national security order or we're going to proceed,” Dertouzos recalled. “We do not accept your authority to control us through persuasion.” This issue remains a touchy one on the MIT and other campuses. “Gray controls have completely overtaken the universities of this country,” Dertouzos said. “Sometimes it is the government; sometimes it is private enterprise. Hell, the NIH [the National Institutes of Health, which has numerous cooperative research programs with pharmaceutical firms] is putting on a lot of these controls.”
While the early 1980s was an exciting time for computer scientists and electrical engineers, the same could hardly be said for the core of the industrial sciences. U.S. firms were losing competitiveness to their overseas rivals in industry after industry. Government, industry and academic officials were floundering in their efforts to identify the reasons why.
In 1986, John Deutch, then the provost of MIT and later head of the CIA in the Clinton administration, pulled together dozens of MIT faculty members from a range of academic disciplines into a Commission on Industrial Productivity. The group included Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert M. Solow and Lester C. Thurow, head of the Sloan School of Management at the time.
Deutch asked Dertouzos to chair the group. “There was only one person who I thought could do it,” Deutch recalled. “He had a wide ranging set of intellectual interests, a willingness to lead people with humor and grace, and a willingness to track down all the issues.”
Scientists who've worked with Dertouzos for decades like to quote his favorite aphorism for running LCS. “He says 'It's like herding cats,'” said Clark, citing a favorite catchphrase of management consultants. Others mention his willingness to give researchers their independence, yet give them a good kick in the pants when their projects get bogged down. And all use the word “vision” to describe how he sets the tone for their joint endeavors.
He needed all those skills and more to run the Commission. The economists believed the problems of basic industry could be solved by adjusting the macroeconomic variables of the country; the academics thought industry had ignored the marvelous breakthroughs lying fallow in their labs; and industry types blamed the unions, the Japanese, their workers, and anyone else they could point a finger at.
The cats needed herding. “Michael ran the meetings very crisply,” said Richard Lester, who served as director of the Commission. “He was terrific at identifying the key issues.” The final report, Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge, became one of the most influential business books of the 1980s. It outlined programs for eight leading industrial sectors, and highlighted the importance of education and training in restoring manufacturing productivity. At several points the report stressed that industry should begin integrating the new information technologies into their operations to gain efficiency, a nostrum included in the report only because the chairman insisted. It would become crucial to the triumph of U.S. competitiveness in the 1990s.
“It was one of the high points of my life,” Dertouzos said. But it was a difficult two-year process. At the outset, he quickly realized he was dealing with a room full of opinions and few facts. “We went around the table. Les Thurow would say, 'It's a thousand cuts. There's a thousand different reasons for why we're suffering.' What's the cure, Les? He would say 'A thousand Band-Aids.'” Dertouzos split the group into task forces to look at specific industries and issues.
“The most fascinating day was on Cape Cod,” he recalled. “We brought them all together, and each reported on their sector. Then it started popping in your face. There was one big answer, which centered around the human element. It was the realization that the Fordist era had come to an end, and that human beings were no longer a cost factor to be minimized as parts of the assembly line.”
Dertouzos' visibility on the Commission thrust him into contention for the presidency of MIT when that job came open in 1990. The previous year, he had flirted with taking the top post at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but “I did not feel passionate about that. I would have liked to be president of MIT. That I had passion about,” he said.
The job went to Charles Vest, an outsider. “The MIT faculty did not want an aggressive, determined president, someone with an agenda.” Dertouzos said. “They wanted someone who would listen to the faculty, and Chuck Vest has done a fantastic job.”
All the while, Dertouzos has had a smoldering competition with Nicholas Negroponte, MIT's other Greek native who runs the Media Lab. Both Dertouzos and Negroponte deny that it exists, but the rivalry between the two Greek Geeks, as they are sometimes called, became evident through the publication of their respective visionary outlines-Negroponte's Being Digital, in 1995, and Dertouzos' What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives, in 1997.
David Clark, a senior research scientist at LCS who's been there from the outset of Dertouzos' tenure, called the competition “friendly, but explicit. We are interested in fundamentals. The guys in the Media Lab say, 'You work in the boiler room. How can you have a view?' We say, 'Without us, how can you make it work?'”
The rivalry “is real,” said Metcalfe, who sits on the MIT Board of Trustees and is a regular columnist for InfoWorld. “These guys are always stabbing each other in the back in different ways. But it goes much deeper than Negroponte versus Dertouzos. Their two personalities are microcosms of the differences in the two labs.”
In What Will Be, Dertouzos clearly appropriated some of the more hyperbolic rhetoric of the Information Age futurist crowd that is typical of Negroponte's world. The overall message reflects a pragmatic awareness of both the possibilities and limitations of digital technology. He predicts quite logically that computers of the future will not sit like lumps on desktops but instead will be embedded in all the appliances of our lives, seamlessly communicating with their masters and one another to improve exponentially the productivity of our daily interactions.
Yet some of his examples read like a blurb from the rival Media Lab, or as one reviewer pointed out, like an episode of The Jetsons. “Brush your teeth in the morning,” Dertouzos wrote, “and a pleasant voice will update you on the status of your gums based on an analysis of what went down the drain.”
Negroponte seems to have noticed how Dertouzos incorporated some Media Lab glitz into his latest book, and isn't shy about taking an occasional dig at its cross-campus rival. “Mike's personal contribution, in my opinion, was seeing the electronic marketplace early,” Negroponte wrote in an e-mail to me. “While he and LCS missed the importance of the consumer, they were and are nonetheless central to today's e-commerce.”
But some of the key architects of the Internet and the World Wide Web make it clear who they think is the biggest star. Vint Cerf, who is considered a founding father of the Internet, headed the Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency's information processing techniques office in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From that perch, he gave out most of the grants that created the network. About Negroponte, he said: “It's sometimes good to be jarred by someone willing to be outrageous.” But of Dertouzos and LCS, Cerf, who is now senior vice president of Internet architecture and engineering at MCI WorldCom, said: “There is some more lasting value there.”
In the early 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee-the British computer scientist who conceived the World Wide Web and wrote a language to make it reality-wanted a new place to hang his hat, he chose LCS. “Our visions of how technology can help humanity were very similar,” Berners-Lee explained. “That has been his role for many years,” said John Hennessy, the provost of Stanford University who has served on numerous government committees with Dertouzos over the years. “He has a great way of creating the great vision.”
Unlike the Media Lab, which gets most of its funding from private industry, the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science gets 61 percent from government sources, largely from the Pentagon. The government built the Internet, the infrastructure of the Information Age, just as it built the interstate highway system before it.
It's also worth noting that both the World Wide Web and the browser, arguably the two biggest computer science breakthroughs of the 1990s, emerged from research centers that depended on government funding. Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web at CERN, the Geneva-based physics lab; and Mosaic, the forerunner to Marc Andreessen's Netscape browser, was a government-funded product of the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana-Champaign. While the browser world immediately raced in the direction of commercialization, Berners-Lee focused on setting standards for this vital new medium to ensure no one would ever require licenses for using “the Web.” He went public with his concerns at a major computer conference in early 1993.
“Evidence was mounting that the Web could splinter into various factions-some commercial, some academic; some free, some not,” Berners-Lee wrote in his new book, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web By its Inventor. “This would defeat the very purpose of the Web: to be a single, universal, accessible hypertext medium for sharing information.”
Dertouzos, with his vision for a universal information marketplace at stake, also saw the threat posed by private ownership of the technology behind the Web. His initial inspiration 15 years earlier had been drawn from the Greek agora, a marketplace where participants sat around the periphery and no one controlled the center where transactions took place.
Dertouzos and Berners-Lee fretted the issue through e-mails for nearly a year. In early 1994, during one of Dertouzos' frequent trips to Europe, they met in Zurich over a dinner of veal and Rösti. Together they mapped out plans for a nonprofit consortium housed at MIT that would set standards for keeping the Web a universal medium.
The stakes couldn't have been higher, even though neither man would be among the major financial beneficiaries of the trillion-dollar industry they were about to launch. The Big Dig and its soaring tolls not withstanding, Imagine what would have happened to postwar development in the United States if the highway builders decided to collect a royalty from every car that drove on their interstate highway system. Large parts of it would probably never have been built, and the vast expansion of America's suburbs would probably have been set back for decades.
The same could have happened to the World Wide Web if some private firm had gotten its hands on a patent for hypertext markup language, or the postal address system reflected in the now ubiquitous “www” and “.com” routing codes that Berners-Lee had created. Berners-Lee understood that only his proposed nonprofit consortium could enforce common standards on the new medium, and in Dertouzos he found his soulmate. “I didn't have to lecture to Michael about the problems of interoperability,” recalled Berners-Lee. “He'd seen how time-sharing could dramatically change the way people use computers. He understood the excitement of the World Wide Web and the idea of the consortium.”
Berners-Lee knew he couldn't do it on his own. He needed someone with clout to convince the Intels, Microsofts, and IBMs of the computer world to sign up for his consortium and commit to its common Web standards. Dertouzos, who frequently consults with the biggest companies in the field, had that kind of clout. “There is a very big difference between Tim Berners-Lee of CERN announcing there will be a consortium and Michael Dertouzos announcing it,” Berners-Lee said. “The fact he would host it gave the whole project a lot of credibility.”
Dertouzos went to work to bring the Web's creator to MIT. “When everyone was asking, “How can I make the Web mine?' he was asking, 'How can I make the Web yours?'” Dertouzos said. “He is very altruistic, very idealistic. Here he was barely making ends meet while all the ones benefiting from his work are making billions. There was something of the Greek in me that was very offended by that,” he said.
Dertouzos asked Metcalfe to endow the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT for Berners-Lee, who became the first nonfaculty member in MIT history to hold an endowed chair. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today claims almost 400 companies and institutions as members.
The Computer Lab's close working relationship with private industry got dragged into the courtroom last year when Bill Gates, who donated $20 million toward construction of the Gehry building, asked Dertouzos to testify as an expert witness in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial. Dertouzos agreed but only if Microsoft attorneys could not brief him nor review his testimony. Nor would he take compensation. Since he had written that operating systems and browsers would one day merge, Microsoft attorneys agreed to the deal.
During a six-hour deposition, Dertouzos testified that today's browsers were more like software applications, but tomorrow's browsers would be more like operating systems. Both sides used his testimony at trial to argue their cases. “When Joel Klein [head of the Department of Justice's antitrust division] came up [to Cambridge], he asked to meet with me,” Dertouzos laughed. “He wanted to know who was this guy who was being quoted by both sides.”
The explosive growth of the Internet and its rapid commercialization has created new tensions for LCS, as it has for other university-based information technology labs across the country. Professors have watched their colleagues and students desert the academy to become overnight millionaires, while their funding source, DARPA, is being challenged by the Department of Defense to justify spending money on academic projects that could just as easily be funded by venture capitalists in the private sector.
“A lot of people are asking, 'What are universities about and why am I not starting a company,?'” said David Gifford, whose own field at LCS, computational biology, looks to NIH for research funding. “One has to be thinking pretty far out to find things that a university can do better than a start-up.”
“While the tensions were always there, it never really hit us until now,” said Dertouzos. “It has become such a hype. It has become so expected. People say, 'Why should I stay here when I can start my thing and come back?'”
The lab has always granted liberal leaves of absences. So far, it has worked in its favor. “Every single person who has gone and made money has come back,” Dertouzos said. “I have a theory. These are people who love ideas. And when they make a big chunk of money, they say, fine, I've made my money, now I want to go back to the thing I love, which is ideas.” Tom Leighton, the researcher behind Akamai Technologies, maintains his ties to MIT, as does Ron Rivest, one of the original brains behind RSA Data Security Inc., the Bedford-based firm that commercialized his encryption technology.
But keeping faculty motivated and attracting young scholars to stick to basic research requires new visions. Dertouzos' latest is called Oxygen, a five-year $40 million joint research endeavor that Dertouzos hopes will define the future of personal computing. It seeks to combine voice recognition, task automation, and information exchange into a seamless whole. “It's a radical change that will take computing away from the low-level machine commands which are unfit for human use, and take it up to the human level,” he said.
He spun around and dialed the phone. A male computer voice answered: “Hi. Welcome to Jupiter. The MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Weather Information System. How can I help you?” Dertouzos asked for the Boston weather forecast. It responded with a standard weather report. “Is there anything else?” the computer asked. Dertouzos asked for two other cities before bidding Jupiter goodbye. “Thank you for calling. Have a nice day,” the computer responded.
At an age when many contemplate retirement, Dertouzos did not shy away from the touchy subject of succession at LCS. When I mentioned Victor Zue, the laboratory's associate director and one of the world's leading speech recognition researchers, he quickly added the name of Anant Agarwal, the computer architecture specialist who gave Oxygen its name.
When he does decide to retire, he won't lack for hobbies. He enjoys boating, woodworking, driving his 12-cylinder BMW, and spending time at his second home in Newfound Lake, New Hampshire. He remarried recently to Catherine Liddell, who plays the lute, and has one granddaughter.
It's a time of life given to ruminating about the deeper meaning of the computer revolution he played a major role in shaping. In his book, he referred to the split between “techies” and the “humies,” the technologists and humanists whose world views have taken sharply divergent paths since the Enlightenment. It's his dream to use technology to bring them back together.
Dertouzos' latest vision foresees information technology increasing productivity 300 percent over the course of the 21st century, an advance comparable to the century just ended. This projected third wave of the industrial revolution will be the subject of his next book, tentatively titled Doing More By Doing Less.
But amid that plenty, Dertouzos the humanist frets about a growing digital divide that could breed economic chaos if the less developed world and large parts of U.S.society do not participate in the information marketplace, and find themselves falling farther and farther behind. “We cannot cope with this new world that way,” he said.