Tech talk show host Moira Gunn on clueless politicians, the Pierre Salinger syndrome, and the death of the corporation as we know it.
Ten years ago, Moira Gunn cleared her throat, leaned into a microphone at KUSF in San Francisco, and began the first broadcast of Tech Nation ... Americans & Technology, an innovative weekly program that explores the way technology reshapes our lives. After 400 interviews with everyone from Edward Teller to Scott Adams, Gunn, a former NASA computer scientist, remains the grand dame of tech talk, broadcasting over PBS to nearly 100 domestic radio stations and to millions of listeners throughout the world over Armed Forces Radio.
Wired: When you started, computer shows were pretty rare. Now we're overrun. Do you find it hard to compete, particularly with the influx of splashy tech TV programs?
Gunn:
Not really. To me, radio and TV are both visual mediums. On the radio, I'm having a private conversation with my listeners in which I try to draw pictures with my words. And this gives me many advantages over TV. We had Carolyn Huntoon, director of NASA Johnson Space Center, for instance, and she was telling a great story about what happens to astronauts when they're in space for long periods - loss of bone mass, things like that. Her voice, in isolation, was absolutely mesmerizing. But her face didn't move. On a television screen, she would have been dead meat. So I don't see the TV competition as bad. Right now, we're trying to make sense of an overwhelming wave of life-changing technology. People are desperate to make sense of it. There are so many computer shows out there because there's an underlying panic.
Panic about what?
Fundamental changes in the business world, for instance. The corporation as we know it is dying. There weren't a lot of great corporations before the industrial age, because they couldn't communicate plans up and down. Napoleon's army showed how to organize a big group of people to do anything. The key was command and control. You couldn't tell the whole plan to everyone, so you'd communicate only the part that was needed to get the job done. The first modern corporations modeled themselves on this. But now that doesn't work; all the data is networked and available to everybody. Decisions can be made at a far lower point in the organization. But people in their hearts still want to act like Napoleon.
How about on a societal level? Where can adjustments be made?
We can start by clearly differentiating between public information, which should be available to everybody, and private information, which should be available to no one. Information technology sometimes makes our lives a sieve. You should have to give permission before somebody like TRW starts selling information about your private life. My fear is that we're spreading a lot of wrong information. Just because it's online doesn't make it true. We're heading toward something called the Pierre Salinger syndrome, which is endemic to people who have not hung around the new technology and are fooled by its shortfalls.
Looking back, what promising technologies turned out to be the biggest disappointment?
I don't believe there are any dead-end technologies. It's just that their time hasn't come; they require other technologies to bloom. Twenty-five years ago, color graphics seemed to be the hottest thing ever. Everybody got real excited. But there just wasn't enough computing power around, there weren't enough applications, and so it didn't make practical sense. Today color monitors are a dime a dozen. Artificial intelligence hasn't died - its time hasn't come.
If you squint into the future, who is going to be on your 20th-anniversary show?
Definitely politicians, because they're so blatantly uninformed, both specifically and conceptually about technology and its impact. They need to be forward-thinking and visionary. I'm not talking about command-and control leadership so much as leadership about where we're going. What we can really do, how we can foster a society that is really good for everybody.
So you were not impressed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore yanking coax cable through a few high schools for NetDay?
Please. Don't come out here with your polo shirts and string wire through these schools when there are no computers to hook them to, when we're letting teachers go. It's insulting. I didn't hear enough philosophy of education or enough sense of where they're going to send these kids.
Any guests who stand out over the years?
Charlie Trimble, who invented one of the first handheld GPS devices, told me about traveling in Africa on the road coming north out of Nairobi. There's a big setup there - souvenir stands, food, a big sign saying you've reached the equator. Charlie's friends are taking a picture of him with the new GPS when he looks down and discovers they're not at the equator! The GPS is showing that it's up the road. So they find the mayor of this little hamlet, and they explain about these satellites going around the earth and everything and tell him that the real equator is a mile up the road. The guy says: Oh, we knew that. But the parking up there is terrible.
