“We live in a complicated world. All the time, it gets more complicated. Everywhere you look, where people are dealing in long-term plans—in business, in industry, in technology, in politics—more money is having to be put down up-front, the lead times are stretching farther into the future, and what happens at the end of it is anybody’s guess. Bigger stakes; less certain outcomes. In other words, it’s all getting to be more of a gamble.” He paused, looked from side to side, and showed his empty palms, as if inviting anyone who could to dispute that.
“Guess wrong, and you can be wiped out even though nothing was your fault: the bottom drops out of a market that everyone said couldn’t fail; a trend turns around; the public loses interest in some fad that was going to be the rage for the rest of time . . . and nobody knows why.” Borth held up a fan of stubby fingers and began ticking off examples. “How many of you remember the savings-and-loan mess years back, when they poured billions into stacking up downtowns with high-rise office space that nobody wanted? Before that there was the synthetic-fuel thing. Eight billion they blew on it—because the world was about to run out of oil. Then we’re drowning in oil, and the whole thing’s a fiasco. Screenpad Corporation spent eleven years making plans and tooling up, saying they were going to make paper obsolete. There’s still plenty of paper around today, but they’re not.”
He raised an emphatic finger. “But . . . if you call the shots right, you can be made for life. Not that many years ago, all the pros laughed when a couple of guys in a garage said everyone could have a computer. Amspace in Texas came up with a cheap, clunky, surface-to-orbit pickup, instead of the Ferraris and mobile homes that the Air Force and NASA had been making, and they created a global space-trucking industry.
“Now look at the things that some people are telling us will be next.” Borth looked around again, appealingly this time. “Nanomachines? Adaptive fiction? Bioregenerative materials? Talking houses? Where do I put my money for the big paybacks ten years down the line?” His gaze came back to rest on the three people from CLC. “You can see the problem—and believe me, it is a problem. That’s where we make our business: helping people out there to make those decisions. And naturally there are other outfits who do the same thing. Sometimes we’re right more often than they are. Sometimes they get the edge on us. Frankly, there isn’t a lot of difference: we all hit at around the same percentage. But I can tell you this: there’s lots of money out there, big money, just waiting for the first outfit that can come up with a way of doing it better. We happen to think that smarter computers is the way to go. That’s why we’re interested in anything new that CLC has got coming down the pike.”
Borth sat down finally, indicating that he was through. He continued looking expectantly at Corrigan. Corrigan, however, having had his orders, left it to someone else to respond. Hamils launched off into a fairly standard line about Virtual Reality technologies offering new ways for users to interact with data: Through suitable presentation to the user’s senses, information normally handled as abstract symbols could be transformed into the furnishings of a directly perceivable “world.” Processing would then take the form of manipulating those objects via intuitively meaningful actions as used in the everyday world. Glinberg gave the commonly cited example of a bicycle. “To compute the correct angle to lean at for taking a corner at a particular speed requires solving a complicated equation of physics. But the five-year-old kid just feels the right thing to do, and does it. Well, the way you do forecasting at present is tackling the problem as numbers; what Joe’s people are working on will give you a bike.”
“So it’s not one of these systems that thinks it knows my job better than I do,” Borth said, assuming the position of one of his clients. “I’m still the best judge of my own business. It simply gives me a better way of seeing the angles.”