Tomorrow’s network is not going to be 100 percent wireless. Everybody is going to win. You’re going to have wired networks up the wazoo. You’re going to have glass fibers going to stationary antennas. You’re going to have coaxial cables. You’re going to have wiring like crazy in the urban and quasiurban areas because that gives you speed. It’s cheap, and it communicates nicely from one wired location to another. Then you’re going to have a lot of wireless with local range. And you’re going to have satellites for the remote parts of the world.


There’s already a lot of controversy about the impact of cellular towers and wireless transmissions on people’s health. Do you really think communities will allow the technology to be as ubiquitous as you propose?
I’m not advocating that we should adopt that model, I’m simply observing that this is where we’re headed. I don’t see the community protests being higher than the greed for self-gratification and having toys to play with. Do we know that these things are dangerous? If we do, that’s why we elect governments and put regulatory agencies together to protect us from such things. But after 50 years in the electronic business, we don’t have a solid piece of information as to whether this wireless activity is dangerous to our health.


Currently less than 5 percent of the world uses the Internet. How will wireless technology reach the disenfranchised?
The fascinating thing about wireless is that it can carry speech. Speech can bridge the gap between the illiterates and the literates and the [technological] gap between the Chinese and the English. Think about trendy handheld PDAs that demand that you learn entire new sets of commands when you write on their little screens so that their programs can understand you. Compare that to the H21 [a handheld device developed in Dertouzos’ lab] that has no keypad of any kind. You communicate with the H21 through spoken dialogue and by viewing what it shows you. Although keyboards for typing Chinese ideograms are far more complex than those for typing English [100,000 ideograms versus our 26-letter alphabet], designing experimental speech understanding systems for Mandarin Chinese is no more complex than designing those that understand English.

In addition, we can use the low Earth orbit satellites whipping around the world to provide a backbone of wireless communications to underdeveloped countries. These satellites fly over Africa and India as often as they fly over New York. Right now, when they’re over Africa and Asia, they’re not busy and the marginal cost to leave them on is very low. There is so much more we could do with tax credits from the rich countries to the poor, with private donations, with training, with companies donating equipment. There is a hell of a lot we can do if we have the will.


What kind of changes do you foresee in the way we work and live?
Wireless is just a medium. All it will do is give people on the go the same capabilities that they now have when they’re sitting in their offices. But in 10 or 20 years’ time, it should make the work environment more seamless. Microphones, for instance, will pick up your voice wherever you are: in the office, at home, in the car. Again, though, we have to make sure we develop this technology to empower people, not machines. Let me give you an example: When you enter a friendly building in the middle of the 21st century, your computer should be able to know what computer resources are around so that it can use them. You’ve been dictating and have documents, perhaps 30 pages of important stuff, plus some voice and video fragments. You’d like to say, "Let’s print this on the nearest computer." Now, there are several ways of doing this. One is that as soon as you enter the building, you broadcast to your computer and everybody knows you’re there, but you may not want others to know you’ve arrived. Yet the minute you broadcast your presence in the building, you’re vulnerable. In our laboratory, we did it the other way. All the resources are broadcasting their existence. No human is broadcasting his existence. So when I enter a building, every resource, every printer, every fax machine, every computer in the building is broadcasting, "Here I am! Here I am!" every 20 seconds. As I walk into the building, my computer can measure the difference between signals and know how far a resource is. After I walk around, I have a complete map in my computer of all the resources in the building without anybody knowing that I’m in the building. This is a humancentric position.