82
It's been a lousy week for the Old Economy. My local paper summed it up on Wednesday with a one-word headline, printed in gigantic black letters. "Death," it said.
The death in question refers to the sudden shutdown of a GM truck plant in Ontario - just weeks after a breakthrough settlement with the union. The auto workers thought their jobs were safe. So did the government of Ontario, which has poured half a billion dollars' worth of bribes into the auto industry for a tacit promise of jobs.
Then oil went up to $130, and now those deals are worthless. No one wants what GM's selling. And what we are witnessing is the end of an era. Those high-paid union jobs - where a high-school graduate could make 60 bucks an hour, plus terrific benefits - are as dead as the demand for the giant gas-guzzlers they made. They aren't ever coming back, and trying to prop up GM will work about as well as trying to rescue the stagecoach industry in 1909.
Something else happened that day, too. Mike Lazaridis, co-inventor of the BlackBerry, pledged another $50-million of his own money for his brainchild, a tiny outfit called the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, just a few dozen miles down the 401 from the doomed GM plant. The news scarcely rated a mention. But why should it? A handful of big brains arguing about Big Bangs simply can't compete with a thousand angry auto workers who've lost their livelihoods.
Mr. Lazaridis is worried about the future, too, but not of union work. He's worried whether we'll have enough brains. "The number of PhDs the Chinese plan to graduate within the next 10 years is greater than the entire population of Canada," he says. He is a tall, soft-spoken man with a shock of snow-white hair. "We can't beat them on scale. We have to do it by smarts. The only way to get ahead of that tsunami is to invest in quality."
Mr. Lazaridis and his team are among the most successful wealth-creators in the world. The company he started, Research in Motion, is the most valuable enterprise in Canada. It's worth nearly $75-billion - around eight times more than all of General Motors. Its products are in demand worldwide, and its prospects look extremely bright. Over the next two years, RIM will hire as many people as GM is laying off just a few miles away.
One of Mr. Lazaridis's main concerns these days is not how many BlackBerrys he'll sell next year. It's how to harness brainpower in a way that will eventually benefit all mankind. That's what the Perimeter Institute is all about. It is a small collection of brilliant people who may just include the next Einstein or Heisenberg.
The Perimeter Institute occupies a light-filled building in a non-descript suburb of Waterloo, not far from the cornfields. In less than a decade, it has become a magnet for the brightest young talent in the world. It has no research labs, no fancy machines, nothing that looks the least futuristic or space-agey. Just sun-filled offices, comfy chairs, and floor-to-ceiling blackboards to scribble equations on. Even the restaurant (called The Black Hole) has a blackboard. It's about 50 feet long.
"Think of what basic physics has done for technology, wealth and health," he says. "Physicists figured out how atoms interact, and it led to the whole wireless industry." Twentieth-century physics has brought us transistors, semiconductors, lasers and circuits, and much more. It has brought us computing, the Internet, and MRIs. He has no idea what breakthroughs will come next. What he does know is that every time there's a fundamental breakthrough in our exploration of reality, "we have an industrial revolution in 50 years."
Such revolutions mean we can't predict the future. We'll always get it wrong. "Think of New York in 1900," he says. "It had thousands of horses. The streets were full of mud and it had a terrible pollution problem." If you'd asked New Yorkers to predict the future, they would have described ever-growing mountains of horse manure. To improve long-haul transportation, they would have asked for more steam locomotives and railway engineers. No one could have foreseen the transformation wrought in just a few short years by Henry Ford and the internal combustion engine - just as no one could have forecast that in 2008 we'd all be typing with our thumbs.
Mr. Lazaridis is a type not often featured in the mainstream media - a techno-optimist. He's so passionate about the next great transformation that he and his wife, Ophelia, have committed $200-million of their own money to the Perimeter Institute, as well as to an equally audacious venture called the Institute for Quantum Computing. His company has helped to shape the Kitchener-Waterloo region into the richest stretch of human capital in Canada. It's the template for our future - but only if we're smart enough to grasp it.
Despite all the lip service we pay to the Knowledge Economy, Mr. Lazaridis thinks we still don't get it. We don't invest enough in basic science and universities, and we don't understand why that matters. A lot of us are oblivious to the seminal importance of science and technology to our way of life, and some of us are downright hostile. Too many of our kids (and I'm saying these things, because Mr. Lazaridis is far too polite) drift into liberal arts and gender studies instead of engineering and math. The most revered scientist in Canada is David Suzuki, who thinks we need to turn back the clock or the Earth is doomed. Meantime, the most revered scientist in China is Bill Gates.
RIM's world is our future, and GM's world is our past. But we have a choice. And if we don't get it, we'll be doomed to eating other people's dust.
