Just because we have become interconnected, we have not earned the automatic right to bother anyone we want with our e-mails or phone calls. Nor have we acquired the automatic obligation to respond to messages from others. Just because you are interconnected, you shouldn’t mindlessly respond to every push button. Disconnect if you don’t want to be bothered. If the sunset is taking place, turn the damn thing off.


How does this advice reconcile with the growing trend in the business world for 24/7 access to everyone?
I could see that in some corporate situations people will say, "I’ve got to be able to reach you anytime I want to." And then, of course, you’ve got to decide if that’s the kind of life you want to lead. Is it time to leave the company? Or do you want to have your union fight it? If we take wireless technology and use it as an oppressive tool to keep tabs on human beings, to rein them tighter to the corporate center, I think we’ll fail. If we use wireless technology to empower the individual freedoms of human beings, we will win. It’s the difference between the Henry Ford era, where workers were treated as interchangeable parts, and the post-Ford modern era, in which workers count and have to be treated with tremendous respect and given the ability to improve the whole corporation by their own sort of individualism. The companies with that understanding are the best companies in the world today.


As the number of users continues to explode, how will wireless networking technology evolve to keep pace? After all, we already have a lot of wireless dropout--even in metropolitan areas.
We think of wireless as things that move. But the ultimate place we’re going with all this is to build a huge, fixed antenna system. To gain more and more high-speed communication--something we all want--you can either pump more power into your device, which costs a lot, or you can make the cell size [the geographic area served by a cellular tower signal], the antenna and the surrounding things that can hear the antenna, smaller. Today a cell size is [maybe] 30 miles. When one antenna handles all the cars and mobile users in a 30-mile radius, it cannot give you much speed; it’s got to proportion what it has. But suppose that instead of one antenna handling a 30-mile radius, several antennas spoke to one city block worth of people and cars? They’re sitting up on telephone poles or electric company poles within a few blocks of each other. Now you can have huge bandwidth and accommodate lots of people using little baby wirelesses with small batteries. You could have a conversation that lasts an hour as you move through several cells, but this is in urban and quasiurban centers. As you go to the deep countryside or to the oceans of the world, you’re not going to have that. You will always rely on other media, such as a satellite, which is also wireless, although slower, but at least with that you can reach the remotest parts of the world.