Some years ago I had the tube running as a background - can't recall if it was on PBS or a Discovery-type channel - when part of a show on geological disasters caught my attention. The particular calamity that drew my notice is called a long-runout landslide, and it has since become a private metaphor for technology impacts, which I thought I'd share.
If you live here in California, you get used to landslides. Between an earthquake shattered geology, fire ecology, seasonal rains with periodic El Nino events, and lots of road and other cuts left by development, there's all the conditions you need to generate everything from a few cubic yard slip to a Devil's Slide extravaganza. Here's a massive creeping slide that hangs above Fremont in the East Bay, just for example.
When one of these cuts loose it's plenty destructive, with all the weight of sodden earth slamming onto whatever's unlucky enough to be downhill. The long-runout landslide or avalanche is something else again. While falling it entrains a large amount of air (in some theories) which it can ride as a cushion for a distance over ten times the height of the original fall, and sometimes much longer. These aren't common, but when they happen they can destroy places and things that appeared to be far away from danger.
It may be a bit of a jump from geological threats to technology, but the phrase 'long-runout' has stuck with me as way of describing technologies that have impacts that last for generations, and reach social and business domains that wouldn't initially seem to be implicated. Take powered atmospheric flight as an example. It has one of the hallmarks of a long-runout: large new impacts decades after introduction. Wide-body jet passenger aircraft appeared over sixty years after the Wright brothers. When you read an article about AIDS, or observe the diversity of faces in Silicon Valley, you are seeing part of their ongoing impact. Microelectronics (with silicon chips and Moore's Law as the current instance) is another obvious example, and the Internet will almost certainly become another.
VCs aren't necessarily looking for a long-runout in order to make money. Harvesting returns across decades and generations is a hard fit to our exit-driven business model. Many long-runouts start slow; there were many more fortunes lost than made in aircraft in their early years. You can also make decent money in a technology shift that's more of an 'ordinary landslide' in magnitude. Take compact discs as an example. Early in their cycle, they were impressive for the quality of sound produced or the amount of data stored. Neither looks as impressive now, and the technology is clearly seen as transitional, a harbinger of the digitization of everything, but being eclipsed by the Internet, the real long-runout. Yet, a lot of money was made along the way. For a more current example, consider OEO core networking circuits and systems. They drive our current backbone networks, and a lot of money has been and will be made (and lost) in their genesis. But would anyone seriously argue that they will last decades before giving way to integrated OOO systems? Riding the light is clearly the longer run.
There's one instructive way in which the geological and technological long-runouts differ. For the landslide, the energy to be expended is potential in the situation as it begins. For a technology, the long-runout must entrain more energy as it goes: more capital, more people, more markets, more complementary technologies. A technology which has pretensions to being a long-runout (under any name) - and here I will specifically mention nanotechnology - must be poised to continuously solve problems and recruit resources if it's to have a legitimate chance. A decades-down-the-road promise is not viable in the face of the voracious capital demands of a real runaway. I'll have more to say about this in future posts.