by Adam Fisher
Steve Wozniak: Hundreds of years downstream machines will be a superior species, but what will we humans be doing? Can a human be satisfied just being taken care of, like a family dog?
Kevin Kelly: I kind of reject the idea of this super-AI that becomes God-like as being unfeasible for a number of different reasons, but there will be aspects of it that I think may not be understandable, and that’s one of the definitions of the singularity.
Steve Wozniak: I have started feeding my dog filet steaks, because if I’m going to be a pet some day, with all my needs, my comforts, my entertainment, my shopping, taken care of by computers, well—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If they’re going to do it, I want to be taken care of well.
Kevin Kelly: Yet we’re already there in a sense; it’s already begun and we don’t even recognize it. The first part of it has already been completed in the sense that three billion people are online, so it has begun.
Steve Jobs: Humans are tool builders. And we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.
Kevin Kelly: We are making a set of tools that will allow us humans to collaborate and cooperate and to work together in making things and making things happen at a scale that was previously unimaginable, which is basically the scale of the planet.
Steve Jobs: And I believe that with every bone in my body—that of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near the top, if not at the top, as history unfolds and we look back. And it is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. And I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley at exactly the right time historically where this invention has taken form.
Alvy Ray Smith: I was in the middle of Mountain View the other day, astonished at how this suburban town, where graduate students at Stanford used to live in funky apartments, is now this booming city! Silicon Valley is now a city: downtowns that go all night long, restaurants as far as you can see, you can’t park anymore.
Marc Porat: Silicon Valley was Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, until it became Palo Alto, and then nobody lived in Menlo Park until they did. And Mountain View was a place you went to get some Asian food, until it wasn’t. Redwood City was a place that basically was working-class until now—in some parts of Redwood City you can’t afford it. Oakland was too dangerous to even contemplate going into, and now it’s the new Brooklyn.
Alvy Ray Smith: In San Francisco, I’ve never seen skyscrapers go up so fast. It’s completely changing the nature of San Francisco!
John Markoff: The Salesforce Tower—this vertical campus that they are building—has surpassed the Transamerica building, surpassed the Bank of America Center. It dominates the skyline in San Francisco in a really overwhelming way. That’s probably the strongest statement about how the Valley has changed. It’s certainly emblematic of a new era. We’re getting these billion-dollar corporate statement headquarters now. It’s not just Salesforce. It’s Facebook, Apple, Nvidia—even Google.
Marc Porat: Eventually one could see this Silicon Valley thing spreading up to Mill Valley, across to Richmond, down to Oakland and Berkeley, and then down through Fremont and Hayward and then back down to San Jose. So the entire San Francisco Bay Area would be Silicon Valley. And that’s a pretty good start.
Steve Jobs: And we’ve come only a very short distance. And it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes. I think that’s nothing compared to what’s coming in the next hundred years.
Scott Hassan: It’s happening right now. In a twenty-mile radius the next hundred years is being invented.
Charlie Ayers: And if you’re smart enough, you see the low-hanging fruit everywhere.
Scott Hassan: I know companies working on fusion power, that is going to be a thing. And when you have fusion power you can get water right out of the air. You can get food right out of the air. No problem. Fusion energy is going to make those things free, worldwide. Pretty much almost free. I think you’re going to be able to live as long as you want, in the relatively near future. That’s going to be solved.
Marc Porat: You take what you see and you extrapolate and you push incrementally on things. Size costs, capacity, functionality, whatever you push, until you push so hard there’s a paradigm shift and things break.
Scott Hassan: Economics is based on a certain number of people dying every once in a while, right? Well, that’s not going to happen, which is going to mess up everything. Fusion power is going to mess up a number of things.
Marc Porat: And there’s a discontinuity or more calamity and disruption, and then unintended consequences follow, which then produces another period of push and then, and so on.
Kevin Kelly: So when I think of the future of Silicon Valley I see it as still being the center of the universe as defined by having the least resistance to new ideas, and that’s just its cultural history of being tolerant of wild ideas.
Lee Felsenstein: Silicon Valley is a state of mind in a generalized physical area.
Charlie Ayers: Silicon Valley is an energy and a focus and a vibration that consumes you and takes you over, if you allow it to.
Marc Porat: So the IQ points come here, and IQ points are sort of radioactive in a sense that if you press them hard enough, they create fusion. We have the universities and we have the momentum and we have the fusion model, already working.
Charlie Ayers: And you could be part of it, or you can be against it.
Scott Hassan: If any one of the technologies that I know of that are being developed right now in Silicon Valley do really well, the world is going to be an amazing place. But the really amazing thing that I think is probably going to happen is that they all are going to do well. So, I’m a superoptimist.
Kevin Kelly: What we’re really making here is something that is humanity plus: It’s us, plus the machines, plus the planet.
Scott Hassan: I hope that these quantum entanglement systems will allow you to transmit information faster than the speed of light. If it happens, that’s going to allow us to colonize the whole entire galaxy, and other galaxies. If that’s actually, really possible, it’s going to be phenomenal, and that’s being developed right now.
Kevin Kelly: Not only will our tools tell us about ourselves, but they also will inform us as we invent new versions of ourselves. And it’s going to have a huge effect on our own understanding and our own identity of who we are as humans.
Scott Hassan: The world is going to be an amazing place. But it’s going to be a pretty weird world.
Kevin Kelly: And it won’t ever end—we’re just going to keep layering on more and more layers of connection and tools and abilities and intelligences to this thing that we are making. And that networked thing is the main event.
Scott Hassan: It’s going to be like nothing you see today. Realistically? Nothing.
Kevin Kelly: That’s the big story. Am I going big enough for you?
Cast of Characters
Chris Agarpao used to go to see Jackie Chan movies with his brother-in- law’s best friend, Pierre Omidyar, who happened to mention that he might need a little help in this side business that he had started. So Agarpao became the first employee of eBay in 1996—where he still works, even today.
Al Alcorn was Atari’s first engineer. In his first week on the job he produced Pong—the arcade video game that put Atari on the map. Atari was the first modern Silicon Valley company, and set the stage for virtually everything that came after.
Mitch Altman was an early employee of VPL, Jaron Lanier’s pioneering virtual reality company. Today Altman travels the world visiting and promoting “hackerspaces”—community centers where the tools and expertise needed to make just about anything can be found.
Marc Andreessen and a group of young computer science students in Illinois hacked together Mosaic—the first browser to really take advantage of the just-developed hypertext transfer protocol—in 1993. A year and a half later he and his buddies were in Silicon Valley buildin
g an industrial-strength version: Netscape. Andreessen’s browser was the most important piece of software to ever come out of Silicon Valley.
Don Andrews was a software engineer who worked with Doug Engelbart in SRI’s Augmentation Research Center and was a participant in Engelbart’s famous 1968 demo. He stayed with Engelbart until nearly the end, leaving in 1985 to work for Adobe.
Joey Anuff, aka the Duke of URL, is one of the founders of Suck, the first meme factory of the emergent web, and its most prolific poison pen. Suck’s specialty was exposing the pretensions of the day—which Anuff did with untrammeled glee. The sarcasm and snark that fills the web today is, essentially, Anuff’s personality writ large.
Bill Atkinson was the software wizard responsible for the Macintosh’s breakthrough look and feel. His program, HyperCard, was the first really successful example of hyperlinked “hypermedia” before the world wide web.
Ali Aydar was a twenty-three-year-old programmer and the guy that a fifteen-year-old Shawn Fanning looked up to and asked for advice. A few years later, Adyar found himself working for Fanning, as Napster’s first employee.
Charlie Ayers is a Deadhead and a chef. Ayers even cooked for the band, on and off, after Jerry Garcia died. But by 1999 he had joined Google as their first chef. Ayers brought a lot of the Dead’s distinctive culture to Google with him and it was a good fit—until the IPO in 2004.
Ralph Baer was awarded a patent for the “television gaming apparatus and method” in 1969 and throughout much of his life battled Nolan Bushnell for the honor of being called “the Father of Video Games.” Baer died in 2014.
Karel Baloun was voted “most likely to be found under a desk” at one of the first Facebook awards gatherings, because he would sleep at the office two or three times a week just to avoid the hour-long commute back home.
Jim Barksdale was the first CEO of Netscape. He was recruited by Jim Clark, who put up the money and gathered the talent, but it was Barksdale who took Netscape public in 1995 and then kept the company alive while enduring constant attack from Microsoft, until Netscape’s eventual sale to AOL in 1999.
John Perry Barlow wears many hats: rancher, activist, writer, lyricist. But if you ask him, he’ll tell you that he’s really a homesteader—in cyberspace. He was probably the best and certainly one of the most prolific writers on The Well, Stewart Brand’s early experiment in social media. In the nineties he was instrumental in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation and still serves on the board of directors.
Guy Bar-Nahum was one of the original engineers on the Apple’s iPod project and, then again, on the iPhone. These were the key products that turned Apple around from a near-bankrupt also-ran in the personal computer market to the most valuable company in the world.
Hank Barry had been a rock drummer before he reinvented himself as, first, a lawyer; second, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist; and then finally the CEO of Napster. He took over from the first CEO, Eileen Richardson, when the legal challenge from the record industry started to heat up.
Ryan Bartholomew was the first person to buy an AdWord on Google. He bought the phrase “live lobsters.” Bartholomew didn’t manage to sell any lobsters, but he saw the potential of AdWords arbitrage. The strategic buying and selling of words (and their associated traffic)—was soon earning Bartholomew tens of thousands of dollars a day.
Carol Bartz is foul-mouthed, Republican, and the first woman to blast through Silicon Valley’s glass ceiling. Though she retired in 2001, she is still revered as one of the Valley’s most accomplished leaders—of either sex—having served as CEO at both Autodesk and Yahoo.
John Battelle was hired right out of Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism to be Wired’s first managing editor. Soon after, he founded his own, more business-focused magazine, the Industry Standard. After that, it was a book on Google, an online advertising network, and a popular conference series. Today he’s hard at work trying to reinvent traditional magazine journalism for a new, online age.
Michelle Battelle was Wired managing editor John Battelle’s fiancée when she first walked into the magazine’s offices in San Francisco. She soon found herself working there, helping to get the first issue of the magazine noticed by the media elite that she had left behind in New York City.
Andy Bechtolsheim was getting a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford when the school gave him a mandate: Build a network-connected computer for every researcher and student at the university. The design he came up was called the SUN—short for Stanford University Network. The design was commercialized, and SUN swiftly became the brand of choice for scientists, engineers, and other power users. A decade or so later, Bechtolsheim paid it forward by giving some seed money to a few Stanford PhD students with a promising idea—Google, as it turned out.
Yves Béhar is an industrial designer who specializes in making high-tech beautiful. Béhar moved to San Francisco’s South Park in 1993 but was only discovered by Silicon Valley after Steve Jobs demonstrated—with the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad—what good product design could mean for a company’s bottom line. Béhar’s company, fuseproject, is one of the most important design firms in technology today.
Brian Behlendorf was Wired’s first webmaster. On the side, he created a free alternative to the software that Netscape was planning to sell. This project morphed into the open-source movement. Today Behlendorf is directing the open-source Hyperledger project, which is devoted to perfecting what may be the next revolutionary data-storage technology.
Marc Benioff is the cofounder and current CEO of Salesforce.com. The Salesforce Tower is the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco.
Patty Beron was the “it” girl of San Francisco’s dot-com bubble. She always knew where the party was, and you did, too, if you checked her website, SFGirl.com.
Nick Bilton is the author of Hatching Twitter, a journalistic deep dive into the company and its turmoil that reads like a thriller. His latest book, American Kingpin, does the same for Silk Road, an illegal online marketplace specializing in drugs, guns, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons, and the like.
David Boies made the government’s case in United States v. Microsoft Corp., and—rather famously—won. A few years later the celebrated trial attorney took on the defense of Napster—and lost.
Jack Boulware is a veteran of the little magazine explosion that came in the wake of desktop publishing in the late eighties and nineties. He had his own magazine, the Nose—a kind of West Coast take on Spy—and wrote for most of the others. Boulware is now the executive director of Liquake, San Francisco’s literary festival, which he cofounded in 1999.
Stewart Brand dreamed up, organized, and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, which became the bible of the hippie movement. A few years later he coined the phrase “personal computer” in his book Two Cybernetic Frontiers, which helped spark a revolution of a different kind. He’s still at it: leading crusades to use the tools of synthetic biology to resurrect extinct species, and the tools of engineering to erect a massive, subterranean monument to time that will ticktock for ten thousand years.
Larry Brilliant is best known for his role in hunting the smallpox virus to extinction, but his true genius may be his gift for human connection. He amassed a pretty weird Rolodex in the course of saving the world: Ram Dass, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Wavy Gravy, not to mention various high government officials. And they stuck with him through all his later incarnations: hippie professor, high-tech entrepreneur, and finally advisor and confidant to Silicon Valley’s most powerful.
Sergey Brin is the cofounder of Google. A hunch about the deep structure of the internet, backed up by some of Brin’s PhD-level mathematical voodoo, was what turned the web from a whopping mess into the world’s most important information resource.
Po Bronson wrote a novel about the financial markets and then another about start-ups before he turned to nonfiction. It was the perfect windup for his subject: the great internet gold rush of the late
nineties. The Nudist on the Late Shift is still, in this writer’s informed opinion, the best book ever written about that era.
Paul Buchheit was a very early Google employee. He coined the phrase “Don’t Be Evil,” which became Google’s corporate motto. He built the AdSense prototype—the software that, even to this day, generates much of Google’s corporate wealth. For an encore he hacked together a little experiment that he called Gmail.
Nolan Bushnell founded Atari, the company that started the computer game industry and put Silicon Valley on its modern path. Mentor and friend to Steve Jobs, he famously declined to invest in Apple Computer.
Orkut Büyükkökten had a campus-wide social network up and running at Stanford three years before Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook at Harvard. As an engineer at Google, he rolled out another one—named Orkut—six months before Zuckerberg moved to Silicon Valley. He’s still at it, having launched Hello.com, a social network optimized for meeting people with similar interests, in 2016.
Chris Caen worked at Atari every summer as a high school student, and by the time he was eighteen was a product manager with a hard-walled office and a good salary. By the end of that summer, Atari had collapsed and Stanford seemed like an attractive alternative. After graduating he worked in VR, and then PR, and now writes about technology.
Heather Cairns was hired to do everything that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t want to do—that was the actual job description. As Google grew, so did Cairns’s job title. She eventually became head of HR, but at the end of the day Cairns was Google’s agony aunt, the grown-up whom people confided in.
Ezra Callahan was a Stanford student who, by chance, ended up sharing a house with Sean Parker who, post-Napster, had fallen on hard times. Then Parker discovered Facebook and Callahan got in on the ground floor. Now he owns a very chic hotel in Palm Springs.
