The United States could benefit greatly - in research, in education, in economic development, and in scores of other areas - by efficiently processing and dealing with information that is available but unused. What we need is a nationwide network of information superhighways," linking scientists, business people, educators, and students by fiber-optic cable. This network would encourage a second information revolution.

In 1979, I proposed a network of information superhighways, and the only person I could find who was really enthusiastic about it was a gentleman from Coming Glass. Executives in the communications industry were at first reluctant to endorse this idea. Indeed, hostile would actually be a more accurate description.

Today, the idea has really taken hold in all of the industries related to communications, computing, and information. The president's science adviser, Allan Bromley, recently said that such a network is the single most cost-effective step America could take to become more competitive in the world economy. It is also the single most important step the United States could take to improve its proficiency in science and technology and research.

We're now drowning in information.

We have not successfully mastered the task of organizing and distilling the information for our productive use. Years ago, I created a new word called "ex-formation,' information that exists outside the conscious awareness of any living being but that exists in such enormous quantities that it sloshes around and changes the context and the weight of any problem one addresses. The problem is to convert "ex-formation' into information and then to convert the information into knowledge and eventually to distill the knowledge into wisdom, the hardest process of all.

For example, the Mission to Planet Earth satellite program will soon send down to the Earth's surface from orbit every day a quantity of information equal to all the bits of data in the entire Library of Congress. We can't even handle the information we now have about Planet Earth.

Some have argued we already have all the information we need to decipher the operations of the climate system and the changes we're making to that system. NASA is proposing to send up a new generation of data-collecting satellites and spend 17 years compiling a lot more information. And yet, just one satellite system, Landsat, in orbit for the past 18 years, can photograph the entire Earth's surface every two weeks. More than 95% of Landsat's pictures are stored in digital form and have never fired a single neuron in a single human brain. Teams of researchers, using the most complicated models now available, cannot communicate with each other and work together productively to solve problems, because in order to communicate they have to find a way to download their models and their results onto magnetic tapes, take the tapes to another lab, and read the tapes so other researchers can review and talk about them.

As we face this critical problem, there is really no excuse for not enabling teams of researchers to link up with each other in real time with information flows appropriate to the tasks we have assigned them. A National Research and Education Network would make that possible. Excess of Data, Hunger

For Knowledge

Current U.S. information policy offers disturbing parallels to U.S. agricultural policy. Vast silos of grain are rotting in storage while millions starve to death. Worldwide, some 40,000 children under the age of 5 die of starvation and related maladies such as diarrhea every single day, and the nation allows these vast bins of food to rot. Likewise, storage bins of data coexist with ignorance and a hunger for the information needed to solve the problems this world confronts.

Global climate change is only one such problem. Major U.S. corporations spend minions of dollars seeking answers to questions about how to plan for the future and how to gain a competitive edge. In almost every case, all of the information they need to answer those questions is already available. But they have no idea how to find the needle in the haystack, how to sift through the "ex-formation" to get the information, to distill it, to get the knowledge and make the judgments required to guide those corporations.

Some argue we're now on the seventh generation of advanced computers while barely out of the first generation of computer network technology. What's going to happen when an advanced computer that costs $20 million today sells for $250,000? And what will happen when the competitors of American companies in a unified Europe and in the Pacific Rim have these computers readily available, communicating with their parts suppliers, with their marketers, with every important function in the corporation? U.S. companies will have them, too, but their value to the nation and to our global civilization will never be fully tapped until they can be linked together to allow the synergy, the mutually reinforcing advantage, to work for our benefit.

Of course, today scientists and engineers and a few minion computer hobbyists know the power of computer networking, and they take the convenience of networking for granted. But imagine that the network could transmit not just text but video and voice. It is easy to imagine uses for such a system because prototypes are already available. But the prototypes are limited because they link only a few computers. Imagine what it would be like if everyone could log on. Already there's electronic mail, electronic banking, electronic shopping, electronic tax returns, electronic newspapers, but these applications are limited severely by the speed and size of our networks.

The really exciting services are yet to come. Researchers are already developing and demonstrating them. Today they are using supercomputers to build virtual realities that let users explore artificial worlds existing only in the computer's electronic circuitry. In a few years, that same technology could be used to develop interactive digital television programs brought into every home by optic fiber. The interactive features made possible in a network will revolutionize the nature of television yet again. The education potential and the entertainment potential, of course, are unlimited.

Similarly, the software being developed to allow massively parallel supercomputers to sort through these silos of data will be used to provide network users with access to digital libraries containing au the information in the Library of Congress and much more. Children could come home from school, sit down with a device no more complicated than a Nintendo machine, and with that device gain access to digital libraries and information that can expand their knowledge and awareness of the world around them and help them gain more control over their own lives.

But the most exciting uses are not even on the drawing boards yet because they are beyond our imaginations. Remember that electronic mail didn't exist until ARPANET (the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency network) 20 years ago, and today electronic mail is a billion-dollar-ayear business and growing very rapidly. ARPANET wasn't built to carry e-mail. Nobody had even conceived of such a thing, but, as the potential expanded, our imagination expanded and new uses appeared.

The Fiber-Optics Revolution

Right now, fiber optics is starting an unpredictable and dramatic technological revolution in both computing and communications. The National Academy of Engineering lists fiber-optic communication as one of the most important scientific engineering achievements of the last 25 years. Clearly, it is every bit as revolutionary as was the transistor. A single cable can carry hundreds of thousands of times the number of channels carried by the largest copper television cable. That simple fact means that fiber win provide opportunities unimagipable with copper and make possible the digitization of America, including digital television, which will make HDTV as outdated as 78 rpm records. It will make it easy to shift billions of bits of data from one coast to the other in seconds. In many fundamental ways, fiber optics will change the way we view our world, just as the Copernican Revolution did.

How the revolution proceeds depends a lot upon the Bush administration, the courts, and Congress. The federal government funds half of the $140 billion of research and development done in the United States every year. Federal communications policies can block or promote the use of new technologies. Unfortunately, the U. S. government is not particularly good at dealing with technological revolutions.

Congress has been described as 535 raging incrementalists. Each year the president sends up his budget, and we trim 1% here and we add 1% there. That's not good enough anymore. The world is brand new. In 1945, on the eve of the Marshall Plan and NATO and free trade, General Omar Bradley said, "It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of each passing ship. " This again is such a time. In the closing days of the 101st congressional session, the National High-Performance Computing Act of 1990, which would accelerate the appearance of the National Research and Education Network, was passed by the Senate, but not by the House of Representatives. The bill will be reintroduced in early 1991.

When one is in the middle of a technological revolution, one has two choices: to follow yesterday's map or quickly chart a new course and grab the opportunities that we find. As a great philosopher once said, "What we have here is an insurmountable opportunity.- A nationwide network of information superhighways has been an insurmountable opportunity, but we are now nearing the crest of the hill. We can see the vistas opening up on the other side. It is once again time to steer by the stars.