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Show Snoozin': U.S. could lag behind Japan as Information Age dawns Weekly Special Washington-;- As the Information Age dawns, the United States is still sleeping while Japan and some of the nations of Western Europe are already i' ind hard at work. They are making the long-range plans and doing the groundwork that will allow them to take advantage oi the high-technology breakthroughs that are occurnng- with( dizzgjgg speed.'they are a1r our once formidab' lead. Can our compet; ion overtake us? Yes. Can we stop them? Not at the rate we're going. Does it matter? Very definitely yes. The Informalio Revolution is every bit as signif ic, it as the earlier Industrial and Agricultural Revolutionsbut Revolu-tionsbut this time the "old order'! is being toppled many times faster. The new generations of computers will completely transform the way we work and live by the year 2000. Microprocessor chips no bigger than a baby's fingernail will be able to compress all the infjjffjlation contained con-tained in the Library of Congress in- to the space taken up by your dining room table. A single optical disk the s ,.e of a long-playing record will be able to store as much information as there is now in all the world's telephone directories. ' The Information Revolution began in the United States, but our country is now in danger of being trampled underfoot. Our schools graduate lawyers while Japan's are graduating engineers; half our students take no math after the 10th grade and 80 percent don't complete science courses. Our associate, Michael Binstein, consulted a number of experts, and here are some of their forecasts: Before 1990, information technology will be the world's biggest big-gest manufacturing industry. By 1994, the information industry's yearly revenues in the United States will be $300 billion 6 percent of the gross national product, more than double what it is today. By 1995, computers will be at least 100 times more productive,' but at costs roughly comparable to the present pre-sent computers a thousand times more'efficient are possible by the . year. 2000. . ,. , .. computers in this country; by 1990, one-half of all households will probably pro-bably have some sort of computer-based computer-based system. Even with the growth in computer-related computer-related manufacturing, there will be only 22 million Americans employed in manufacturing by 1995, compared to more than 28 million in service industries. in-dustries. And employment in the basic smokestack industries will shrink from its current 20 percent of the labor force to a mere 8 percent. Neither the government nor America's corporate titans' are doing do-ing much to prepare for the consequences conse-quences of the Information Revolution, Revolu-tion, let alone take advantage of it. The best brains in the business world ' waste their ' talents and energies bleeding their own and other corporations cor-porations in extravagant and unproductive un-productive takeover attempts. Instead, In-stead, they should be mapping strategies to win foreign markets for American products, a necessity if ' the U.S. economy is to grow at the pace necessary to support our population. Meanwhile, the Japanese are not sitting idly by, waiting for us to come to our senses. They are busily planning moves that would make them No. 1 in technology within the next 10 years. They have already embarked on an ambitious, government-sponsored plan to build artificial intelligence computers and supercomputers that will be literally thousands of times faster and more versatile than today's machines. If they can grab the lead in this field, the reverberations will be felt throughout their economy and ours. KEEPING SCORE. The Coast Guard has borrowed a morale- ,. "boosting technique from the nybbys.'"' who used to paint skull-and- each enemy aircraft shot down. To keep score in their war against drug smugglers. Coast Guard cutter crews paint a marijuana leaf on the bridge for every bust they make on the high seas. The cutter Ingham, which operates out of Portsmouth, N.H., and saw duty in World War II, had nine pot leaves with red slashes on its bridge at last count. QUIET ENVOY; The U.S. ambassador am-bassador to the United Nations, Gen. Vernon Walters, is more a diplomat than an ideologue, and he evidently hasn't provided enough rhetorical . red meat to satisfy the voracious appetites ap-petites of the arch-conservatives '. wjjo .usedto howl in glee at former Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's belligerent denunciations of the Soviet Union. Walters prefers to operate quietly and effectively behind the scenes. But even his renowned linguistic skills are cause for griping by some. "He is inarticulate inar-ticulate in seven languages," groused grous-ed one critic who pines for the glory days of Mrs. Kirkpatrick's tough talk. GOLD DISCOVERY: Federal officials of-ficials are trying to decide what to do with 47 pounds of gold that have been gathering dust for 20 years or more at the National Institutes of Health. Shaped into cones for use in brain scanner tests, the gold was apparently ap-parently stashed away and forgotten after the experiments ended in the early 1960s. In 1980, an employee discovered the gold in a cabinet where research equipment was stored. At today's prices, the gold cones are worth upwards of $180,000. They are being kept in a safe at the NIH credit union. |
