Breakpoint by Richard A. Clarke Read Free Book Online Page B

‘crazy stuff,’ as you call it, is happening. Of course, the fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim, really hate it.”
    â€œThat’s not the only thing they have in common,” Susan said, and laughed.
    â€œTrue, but because of the political power of the fundamentalists in this country, stem-cell research was delayed and all sorts of rules imposed on federally funded research that prohibited work in genetics to enhance humans.” Myers lifted a big publication from the National Institutes of Health. “Nonetheless, it is happening quietly in labs all across the country and overseas. Private research money, people skating around federal rules. A lot of it is now done in secret, or offshore.”
    Susan Connor was intently studying the large foldout chart, the arrows showing milestones of progress in genetics, nanocomputing, robotics, pharmaceuticals, information science, brain studies.
    â€œThat chart you have there is already out of date. Many of the key breakthroughs have taken place experimentally. Now it’s a matter of scaling and integration. It’s just that most people don’t know how far the technologies have come, or don’t see their implications.” Professor Myers seemed almost weary. “Most people are focusing on the latest Hollywood murder scandal or on what’s going on in Iran. Most Americans may know only about one or two scientific fields and don’t see the combined effects of the several sciences that are now racing through advances.”
    â€œRacing?” Susan asked skeptically.
    Myers seemed to get renewed strength when challenged. She rose quickly and went to the whiteboard and began sketching lines that were at first parallel, then intertwining, then spinning out in all directions. “This is what you have to internalize. Knowledge builds on itself, always has. Now armed with cheap, highly capable computers, the rate of progress in all of these fields is accelerating, building on itself, speeding ahead. And these fields are merging, reinforcing, enabling each other. The rate of acceleration today is five times what it was forty years ago when the internet was creeping out of the BBN labs up the street. In three years, 2015, scientific engineering will be blindingly fast, and in eight years, humans may not be able to keep up with it.”
    Susan’s head was spinning; there were details, concepts that Myers was assuming she knew. “Okay, okay…there’s a lot of catching up I have to do. But let me bring you back to the internet bombings. Any thoughts on them? Who actually did them? What will they go after next?”
    Myers sat back down. “The attacks will slow things down enormously. China may be able to catch up. We have been moving out faster than China in the last few years. They can’t invent well, it seems. They can copy and understand theory, but that’s not enough anymore. Labs in other countries around the world are collaborating, sending huge chunks of data back and forth, petabytes, on fiber-optic cables under the sea. Just look at the Globegrid Project. How, Susan, can you merge the three biggest civilian supercomputer farms in the U.S., with ones in France, Russia, and Japan to create into one virtual machine, as was planned, if there is now no big pipe to connect them? Note, please, that we left China out of the project because of U.S. paranoia.”
    â€œWait, Globegrid. Was the U.S. end of that network going to be in CAIN, the building over at MIT that burned down Friday night?” Susan asked, looking at the soot on her shoes.
    â€œThe penny drops? Globegrid was to go online this month. Think what could have been done with all of those huge parallel processors working as one. Then Friday night, CAIN catches fire, and Sunday morning truck bombs take out the fiber-optic beachheads. Had you all really not put that together yet?” Myers asked incredulously. “The other two U.S.