Tech Isn't All Brogrammers, It's Still Nerds Building New Things
And that's a good thing.
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R. Stanley Williams works at HP Labs, and he has for a long time. In the video of him that I am watching, his pony tail flows out over his blue-collared shirt, and onto his lumpy sweater. He wants to tell us about Leon Chua, the Einstein of circuit theory, and the mathematics of voltage, charge, current, and flux.
He thinks—though there is some controversy—that he has discovered the memristor, a fundamental piece of circuit theory that Chua's equations predicted. Regardless, he is working on devices that are down on the bedrock of computing. It's all CMOS logic and bits and math. This guy believes that he is changing the fundamental possibilities of computation and information storage.
And Silicon Valley is filled with people like this. They design chips at Intel. They come up with new machine-learning techniques at Google. They redefine data centers at Facebook. They design programming flows for GPUs at Microsoft. They refine antennas at Apple. And it's not just the big places. It's all these small semiconductor shops down in Sunnyvale. It's people working on photonics and optimizing memory manufacturing and building lasers.
But that's not really what's happening in most of Silicon Valley or the technology world at large. And that so many people have come to think that it is drives me a little crazy.
Are there some young guys who say stupid things and build silly companies, more than 200 of which end in ly? Sure. For every funny startup, there are nerds (and I use the term as one of endearment) like Williams, who loves engineering and math. These aren't bros. They say things like, "At least theoretically, with one simple layer of CMOS, we can address as many as a thousand layers of memristors and each memristor layer could have as much as a terabit of memory associated with it. We're all of a sudden looking at petabits of information in a square centimeter device." The pitch of Williams' voice bends upward as if he's just corrected you on the square volume available in the Star Trek Enterprise. "OK?" he says. "What can you do with that?"
Think about that: that's one million gigabits in a one square centimeter device. What can you do with that?
I am watching this video because HP announced the creation of an initiative to build The Machine, not just a next-generation computer, but a next-generation way of thinking about building computers. A big component of this system are the memristors that Williams began to work with in the mid-2000s. Is this going to work? Will they be able to manufacture devices like memristors?
This stuff is difficult to cover. If journalists knew enough about circuit theory to adjudicate between competing experts whether Williams had discovered Chua's predicted memristor, we would probably be designing circuits ourselves.
That's a major reason why you don't often hear about the people doing the technical work. But they are the heart and soul of what we call Silicon Valley, not the business guys hanging around SOMA or that weird
The tech industry is not perfect. It needs to become more diverse and think more deeply about how the industry's products open up new possibilities for increased inequality and surveillance. But the idea that the brogrammer (a total caricature in itself) is somehow the avatar of tech is just absurd.
Live long and prosper, ponytails.
Alexis C. Madrigal
Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology Channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
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