COSM is an exclusive national summit on the converging technologies remaking the world as we know it. For decades, George Gilder has written presciently about the technological revolutions shaping our world, from the microchip in Microcosm, broadband in Telecosm, and the cryptocosm in Life After Google. COSM 2024 will hail the New American Century: exploring a technological transformation and revival of our country and economy as redemptive and cosmic as its renewal of technology.
Cosm — the root of the English words cosmos, microcosm, and cosmopolitan — comes from the Greek word kósmos and means order, government, world, universe.
Science popularizer Carl Sagan used to proclaim the insignificance of humans in a universe with as many stars as there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. Topological theorist Jennifer Cano responds that there are as many electrons in a single grain of sand as stars in the universe. These electrons comprise a nanocosm, a quantum universe with plenty of room at the bottom for intelligence at the top.
On the way are a new planar and waferscale electronics beyond silicon and even beyond chips. Coming is a new age of 2D simplicities beyond baroque 3D tangles of overheated wires and switches in plastic packages. In our pockets will rest cool personal supercomputers that empower us rather than reduce us to appendages of giant centralized data centers. American influence can spread through the world in a new spatial web rooted in proof of knowledge of a new epoch rather than in mindless power propping up the past in the name of progress.
Emancipated from a blinding mirage of mandates and manacles, we will discover a real intelligence (RI) distributed as widely as human minds, rather than an AI concentrated in huge data mines. A new science of “topology” with five Nobel Prizes can even transform our political world, with cool new 2D materials led by the miracle of graphene redeemed from garbage, and with redemptive new monies at once as scarce and potentially infinite as time.
A New American Century can launch a new American economics. It will be gauged and expressed in the eternal verities of time-prices rather than the price controls, industrial policies, spurious statistics, and emergency socialist palliatives of decline.
Opening up to a raveled world is an economics of superabundance beyond planetary games of scarcity. A positive-sum economics that enables all to win rather than all to wither in a net-zero maze of regulations and conflicts. At the heart of the new American economy is the new horizon of nanocosmic space and time. Like the original American saga, it opens a new frontier and tames an old wilderness. We live in an age of superabundance rather than scarcity, creativity rather than chaos, and global topology rather than a local lather of illusions. Topology defines the difference between heat and light, between random energy and ordered luminosity, between ambient noise and the music of the spheres.
Our new American Century will transform randomness into the creative surprises of enterprise, redeeming at once our political crisis, our technological impasse, and our cultural unravelling.
On to the New American Century in Bellevue, October 31 and November 1.
