Silicon Valley, from chip to AI: half a century of idealists changing the world

One of the many relics that justify a visit to the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View is the first server that Google used for its algorithm that revolutionized the world. Nothing to do with the mammoth super machines that were used at the dawn of computing, a set of devices that fit perfectly in a room, too large for the idea we have of personal computing, too small to think that the embryo was there. from the Alexandria Digital Library. There are also the Apple 1 and Lisa models, the first bites of the apple firm in the technological world, or the Xerox PARC files, which inspired an entire generation of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

Located a stone’s throw from the Google Plex, the headquarters of the large multinational created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, and close to Cupertino and Apple’s hollowed-out UFO-shaped headquarters, from Microsoft’s secondary campus in Silicon Valley, or Stanford University in Palo Alto, the museum is presented as a visual tour of the inventions that have shaped how we communicate, inform ourselves, entertain ourselves, and work. An invitation to discover in situ what Francesc Bracero, responsible for consumer technology information for the last fifteen years at La Vanguardia, exhaustively summarizes in the book Bicycles for the Mind (Peninsula).

Francesc Bracero borrows the title of the book from the prodigious mind of Steve Jobs. The founder of Apple used to say that what differentiated humans from primates was their ability to build tools and recalled studies on efficiency in locomotion: the condor was the most energetically efficient animal and human beings were very poorly located in that ranking… unless they used a bicycle, then they surpassed the condor. And Jobs concluded his simile by assuring that computers were bicycles for the mind.

The shadow of Jobs hangs over Bracero’s book as one of the guiding threads of this history of technology from the last two decades of the 20th century to the present day. Certainly, the genius who changed the way we relate to computers and store and play music died more than a decade ago, in 2011, but his influence still endures and even more so since he turned mobile phones, thanks to the iPhone, into a mountain bike. , an all-terrain bicycle, capable of unifying almost all technological devices, including the PC, that had been created until then.

Bracero defines him as one of the key figures in the world of technology and has never hidden his admiration for Steve Jobs. As the communicator Pedro Aznar said at the presentation of the book, “Francesc Bracero is like me, one of those journalists who divided time into whether Jobs was alive or no longer alive.”

But the book by the La Vanguardia expert, one of the few Spanish journalists who has visited the Apple Park in Cupertino and who has tested the Apple Vision Pro, the brand’s latest revolutionary and risky bet, is not simply an exercise in fascination with Jobs. He exudes enthusiasm for all those names that have made it possible for us to move from the first PC to artificial intelligence. Some famous people like Larry Page, Sergey Brin or Bill Gates, others known but whose decisive contributions the general public is unaware of, such as Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, others recently claimed as Alan Turing or Gordon Moore, and others forgotten like Frederick himself Terman, who is known today as the father of Silicon Valley, Grace Murray Hopper, the mathematician who created the first compiler, or Alan Kay, a researcher at Xerox PARC who had a great influence on Steve Jobs.

Those Californian lands on which the Silicon Valley has been settled are the same ones that the literary laureate John Steinbeck portrayed without complacency in The Grapes of Wrath, that of the crop fields with day laborers who, despite working from dawn to dusk, lived in misery and in conditions bordering on slavery. A part of that territory transformed the appearance of the San Francisco Bay thanks to silicon, a chemical element that, instead of creating a steel industry around it, ended up forming the pole with the highest concentration of technology companies in the world and giving shape to virtualities. and potentialities with which the nearest future will be written.

Silicon Valley spawned punch cards and chips, but also hardware, software and social media. Except for Bill Gates, who brought Microsoft to the outskirts of his hometown, rainy Seattle, virtually every consumer technology innovation was conceived or inspired in Silicon Valley. And even Gates, despite distancing himself from California, soaked up the new organization of work and the garage culture that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard gave birth to, in a private parking lot that today has become a space of worship for techies from all over the world.

The mixture of ‘hippie’ sensibility, another movement that developed in California – before the appearance of the PC – with capitalism is one of the hallmarks of Silicon Valley. Informalism, the liberation of business rigidity and to a certain extent idealism, or at least the initial intention to change the world through technology, were the driving forces that Francesc Bracero explains in an entertaining, intelligible and rigorous way in Bicicletas para la mind’

The author defends that technology is a passion and transmits it in each chapter of his documented book, but his journey through the ingenuities of the digital age becomes more critical as the kindness of the pioneers gives way to the greed of the new executives, the interests of shareholders above users or the emergence of new businesses that simply erase ethical commitments and circumvent regulations that restrict their ability to act. They are the changes in attitude of Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders of social networks or virtual platforms, or the inventors of cryptocurrencies – which the author directly considers a pyramid scheme – and the drivers of uncontrolled artificial intelligence.

Francesc Bracero’s half-century journey is not limited only to California and Seattle. He also tours Finland, where a former wood pulp company, Nokia, was able to be the world leader in mobile phones before Jobs changed the game with the iPhone. Or stop by Korea, where Samsung, which processed dried fish and brewed beer, has become a consumer electronics giant. Or Antigua and Barbuda, a tax haven that was a cryptocurrency paradise until the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX.

Based in San Francisco, Open AI, the company that has shaken the world with Chat GTP, the most accessible artificial intelligence with more possibilities for users, represents a new generation of Silicon Valley initiatives. The times and spirit of the pioneers are long gone. That is why it makes sense that the story of great advances that Francesc Bracero tells ends with the advent of AI and the questions it raises. Because Bicycles for the Mind is the chronicle of an era of prodigies and free minds who dreamed of improving the world.

This is how it is explained and reflected, within the reach of technology enthusiasts or those who want to learn who is who in our computer and digital world. Because San Francisco and the Computer History Museum, let’s not forget, are a ten-hour flight from Europe and such a profuse and complete story was needed without having to get on the plane.