COSM2024 Will Highlight Technology Advances
In the saga of technological change and convergence, this is a COSMic moment.
We will hold our COSM2024 technology conference in Bellevue, Washington, Oct. 31-Nov. 1, to celebrate and illuminate this moment. At COSM2024, you will learn the critical paths and paradigms, and meet the visionary leaders of a movement of epochal change and luminous promise.
For some 50 years and some 20 books, I have been studying the key inflection points in the history of technology. I began with Wealth & Poverty nearly 45 years ago, pointing to the silicon technology of integrated circuits— “turning the world’s most common matter, the substance of sand, into an incomparable resource of mind: a silicon chip the size of a fly, with computing powers thousands of times greater than a million monks adding and subtracting for millennia”— an infinitesimal marvel that extends the reach of the human brain incomparably further than oil, steel, and machines had multiplied man’s muscle in the industrial age.
As I wrote, “There is no way to fathom the full potential of this technology, now in its Promethean infancy. In conjunction with other advances, it is already transforming the world of work and forging at last the long-predicted age of computers, just as the steam engine and the railroads inaugurated the industrial age… Unlike nuclear energy…for example, the chip does not simply improve an existing capability… It creates radical new capabilities applicable in all industries, including its own, making possible a vast diffusion of applied knowledge and technical logic…If small is beautiful, that mandate is fulfilled not chiefly in windmills and solar cells, but in California’s vale of cubistic new factories across the bay from San Francisco—Santa Clara’s Silicon Valley where worlds indeed unfold in grains of sand.”
That was the first silicon revolution, which I dubbed the “microcosm.” It was followed 20 years later by a second silicon revolution, the “telecosm,” which I celebrated in a book by that name in 2000. The telecosm transformed the same essential sand—silica—into “worldwide webs of glass and light,” fiber optic lines opening the way to a realm “after bandwidth abundance,” realized in the creation of the Internet and what I predicted in a speech to a conference at Microsoft in the early 1990s as the “teleputer”, ushering in a “wireless new world… as portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet… more powerful than your PC…”
COSM2024 will unveil a new inflection point as momentous as the advent of microchips, fiber optics, and teleputers. Indeed, it signifies the next step of convergence beyond microchips and giant datacenters, AI “singularities” and machine minds. In technical terms, it is summed up as “wafer-scale integration of graphene on silicon carbide.” But I like to call it, in the words of the visionary poet of the future, Neal Stephenson, “The Diamond Age,” a new age of incandescent carbon.
Wafer-scale ultimately will enable the eclipse of chip technology and its cumbersome packaging, the worldwide supply chains chips entail, and the labyrinthine datacenters they empower. It will make possible the creation of datacenters on eight-to-12-inch sheets of graphene that you can fold into invisible films that open fabulous new opportunities for every industry.
Stephenson wrote “The Diamond Age” in 1995, a decade before the so-called “discovery” of graphene by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novelosov in 2004, which won them the Nobel Prize in 2010. As a single atomic layer of graphite, familiar as pencil lead, graphene was known long before the British researchers peeled it off a graphite lump with scotch tape. The new discovery by the Nobel winners was its miraculous properties: 200 times stronger than steel, a thousand times more conductive than copper, switching in the terahertz (a trillion times a second, or a thousand times faster than silicon) all while being as flexible as rubber and more invisible than glass. As I like to say, you could bounce on it like a trampoline and appear to be dancing on air.
The real prophetic moment came in 1995 with Stephenson’s book and his description of a diamond material so abundant that it could replace glass in windows and concrete in buildings and nerves in humans or skin on robots, and be made ubiquitous by “matter compilers.” Stephenson envisaged humans bouncing, perhaps on two-dimensional carbon sheets, “two or three stories into the air.”
A real diamond age of graphene is now at hand. Key contributions are coming from Israel and in the United States from Rice University and from Georgia Tech. All will be represented by key visionaries at COSM. By coming to COSM2024, you can lead and outleap the world in understanding the new diamond age and even in investing in it. See you for a COSMic haunting Halloween.
Readers of this Gilder’s Guidepost will receive a discount of $200 off the current registration price (from $1,450 to $1,250). Simply visit www.cosm.tech/register and enter the promotional code EAGLE-GG at checkout.
P.S. COSM Technology Summit, October 31-November 1, Bellevue Hyatt, Seattle, Washington: This conference is sponsored by the Discovery Institute and me. I’ll be one of the speakers and will address the latest technology trends, including the rapid rollout of artificial intelligence and the huge opportunities that will be provided by graphene. To register, go to https://cosm.tech/. Use Promotion Code EAGLE-GG to save $200.