Tech philosopher George Gilder is feeling pretty pumped about the upcoming COSM meet, October 31 to November 1, 2024 — and with good reason. He’s got a pretty strong lineup of speakers.

They’re strong in a special way: They aren’t the people who are always in the news. But if you ask insiders, they are some of the people who matter most. For example,

• Computer pioneer Carver Mead, who named Moore’s Law on the growth of computing power was practically alone in thinking that the integrated computer circuits we rely on today could possibly work.
• Renowned chemist James Tour will discuss his work with the new “sci-fi” material graphene, whose astounding qualities — despite the fact that it originates in pencil lead — could turn Silicon Valley into Graphene Valley.
• Bob Metcalfe won the Turing Award (2022), the “Nobel Prize of computing.” He won it for the invention of the Ethernet, one of the earliest and most extensively utilized networking technologies, according to MIT.

Reflecting on the lineup, Gilder looks back on his 45 years of study of the way technology can help us develop our potential — beginning with his book Wealth and Poverty (1981). Back then, we were only beginning to realize the potential of the silicon chip — which is, after all, just processed sand:

That was the first silicon revolution, which I dubbed the “microcosm.” It was followed twenty years later by a second silicon revolution, the “telecosm,” which I celebrated in a book by that name in 2000. The telecosm transformed the same essential sand—silica—into “worldwide webs of glass and light,” fiber optic lines opening the way to a realm “after bandwidth abundance,” realized in the creation of the Internet and what I predicted in a speech to a conference at Microsoft in the early 1990s as the “teleputer”, ushering in a “wireless new world…as portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet…more powerful than your PC…”

That all happened except for one thing. We don’t call it the “teleputer”; we call it the smartphone.

COSM 2024: Looking beyond the microchip

Gilder is hoping to learn more about the graphene technologies that will likely succeed the “impossible” microchip:

Wafer-scale ultimately will enable the eclipse of chip technology and its cumbersome packaging, the worldwide supply chains chips entail, and the labyrinthine datacenters they empower. It will make possible the creation of data-centers on eight to 12 inch sheets of graphene that you can fold into invisible films that open fabulous new opportunities for every industry…

As a single atomic layer of graphite, familiar as pencil lead, graphene was known long before the British researchers peeled it off a graphite lump with scotch tape. The new discovery by the Nobel winners was its miraculous properties: 200 times stronger than steel, a thousand times more conductive than copper, switching in the terahertz (a trillion times a second, or a thousand times faster than silicon) all while being as flexible as rubber and more invisible than glass. As I like to say, you could bounce on it like a trampoline and appear to be dancing on air.

It sounds remarkable but what’s even more remarkable — at least as a concept — is that graphene (above) is the closest that a three-dimensional universe can come to a two-dimensional entity because it is a single layer of elementary particles.

Yes but … the money?

Gilder has thought about that: “If you’re still on the fence, I need to point out that Discovery Institute has generously agreed to extend the $1,150 price ($300 off the current price) to subscribers if you register by September 30. Simply register here and the discount code GG-DIFRIEND-300 will be automatically applied.”

If you are old enough, think back to the 1990s…

Are you the type who would have wanted to know back then that the smartphone would dominate today? Could you have used that information?

But here’s a bigger question: Could you have even found that information? Most media were running front-page hype about a projected worldwide computer collapse in 2000 instead (which, of course, never happened).

To find out what is really likely to happen, we can start by hearing directly from some of the people who have helped design the systems.

At COSM next month, you can do that. Find out about the technologies that these inventors and futurists have good reason to think will dominate in the next few decades. Register today, save money, and get ahead of that curve.