Intel chief Craig Barrett offers high-wired view of future in lecture

Charles Lee, right, the H.J. Louis Professor of Management and director of the Parker Center for Investment Research at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, speaks with Craig Barrett, president and CEO of Intel Corp. in the Parker Center April 26. Barrett had just spoken to a Johnson School class before taking a tour of the Parker Center with Lee and giving his afternoon Durland lecture. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Linda Myers

Our booming knowledge-based economy has been good to the United States so far, observed Intel's Craig Barrett, but unless we do something soon to strengthen our weak K-through-12 education system, he warned, we'll be in last place, not first, among the developed nations.

Barrett, who is president and CEO of Intel Corp., one of the largest makers of computer chips in the world, delivered that sobering message as part of his Lewis H. Durland Memorial Lecture to a packed house in Kennedy Hall's David L. Call Alumni Auditorium April 26. His talk, which was titled "Education and Technology in the New Economy," was sponsored by Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.

But before offering details or solutions to what he saw as an imminent crisis, Barrett discussed the positive kinds of changes we're likely to see in the next few decades, a topic of great interest to the wannabe dot-commerce millionaires among the audience. His scenario for the future included "a billion connected somethings" -- some form of networked computers -- "and trillions of dollars of commerce conducted over this network." While business-to-consumer dealings over the Internet seem to be getting most of the media attention today, said Barrett, the real growth will be in business-to-business commerce, about $7 trillion of it by the year 2004.

Rarely pausing to collect his thoughts, Barrett delivered his message with an unnerving confidence and seemingly total command of his subject. Recounting the past three decades, which have brought us networked computers, e-mail and the Internet, he predicted that computer chips would continue to become both more powerful and much cheaper, and bandwidth would keep increasing exponentially. But he advised his audience to look beyond the United States, "at the big picture," to see what the next, biggest development was likely to be.

While the personal computer currently is "the implement of choice" for Americans who want to access the Internet, it's an entirely different story overseas, and is likely to change here soon, too. "Visit Japan, which has run out of cellular bandwidth for hand-held cell phones and is now producing Internet-capable cell phones. "Six million have been introduced already," Barrett said, and predicted the number would climb to half a billion in two to three years, followed by other alternate access devices.

Barrett called such growth and swift change "both wonderful and scary" and said they are already altering the way people view the world and each other. "Different countries have different privacy rules," he noted, some of which may be breached when the Internet crosses borders. "We're going to need a common language to communicate with each other" and common standards to do business with each other.

And in the United States, "[while] there's lots of excitement and venture capital dollars, at least a billion a week, flowing into new technology enterprises," Barrett said, "institutions like Cornell aren't producing enough engineers to staff the high-tech industry driving the economy" -- which brought him back to his original cautionary message.

While "the cream of the cream," the top students who attend research focused universities like Cornell, are still there, "the average 12th grader in the United States is at the bottom of the pile in math and science comprehension," compared with 18-year-olds in other industrialized nations. "If enemies of the United States had tried to design a weapon to lead to our downfall, they couldn't have done a better job than our K-through-12 system," declared Barrett.

He called for companies and prestigious academic institutions to become concerned about what's happening. "Everyone has someone to blame, but the system won't correct itself from the inside. It won't improve until we collectively get involved, go in, help," by doing such things as setting up after-school computer clubhouses in underprivileged neighborhoods, he said.

As a start, he related, Intel and Microsoft had a program to train about 400,000 secondary-school teachers in how to integrate technology into the curriculum, but lamented that, "we're not going to make a dent" because of the high turnover rate among our nation's teachers -- who work, on average, about four years in the school system.

"Our success in the new economy depends on our ability to start companies, create wealth and create a better standard of living," Barrett concluded. We can only do that, he said, with a well-educated, employable populace.

The Durland Memorial Lecture series, which brings distinguished executives from the fields of business, finance and investment management to Cornell annually, was initiated in 1983 by Roy H. Park , the late chairman of Park Communications Inc., and a small group of donors to honor former Cornell Treasurer Lewis H. Durland.