Philadelphia's Own Ralph Roberts

Say what you will about Comcast, with the passing of its founder, Philadelphia has lost a legend. At 95, Ralph Roberts was Philadelphia's Steve Jobs. Raised in Germantown, educated at Wharton, and stationed at the Navy Yard during World War II, Roberts' presence in Philadelphia wasn't incidental.

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Philadelphia was Roberts' home, and throughout the decades a major source of his philanthropy. But between all of his contributions to his city, none amount to his decision to keep Comcast headquartered in Center City. Comcast Center didn't just redefine our skyline, it redefined our city. Prior to its dominant presence, Center City Philadelphia wasn't a national name. Despite our humble collection of skyscrapers, few outside the tristate area really knew what Philadelphia was "about." Center City - our downtown - was a collection of office buildings promptly closing their doors at five on Friday. To those who worked in Old City or King of Prussia or Cherry Hill, Center City was essentially a vertically elevated, nondescript office park. 

Comcast Center changed that. With an arm reaching coast to coast and everywhere in between, 17th and JFK is full of the hustle and bustle synonymous with Midtown Manhattan. Harried consultants from Dallas and Chicago and Portland rush from full hotels, wheeled suitcases in hand, to play their part in the Philadelphia rat-race while New Yorkers flood Acela trains south to do the same. Many of them are relocating here, growing our population and changing our city.

Ralph Roberts' investment in Center City irreversibly changed our city, and for so much of the good press we've received in the past years, we have Comcast to thank. 

But does Roberts' passing signal a new era for the cable giant, one that has grown into a multimedia conglomerate with the transparent aspiration of being a power player in the information technologies game? With Ralph Roberts, Jr. still at the helm, Comcast remains a family owned company. 

This new era has seemingly been in the works for years. Ever since acquiring NBC-Universal and donning the Comcast logo with NBC's rainbow peacock, Comcast has been more than just a cable company. While the conglomerate has yet to fully integrate its parts, its ambition is evident. 

The Comcast Innovation and Technology Center promises to inject Comcast into the technologies arena. But to date, its mission is unclear. Will Comcast be bridging the gap between Philadelphia and the Silicone Valley? Will the Innovation and Technology Center be a vertical lab for software and hardware geeks to toil away on endlessly funded R&D? Will the driverless car come from 18th and Arch? Or will Comcast stick to its rigid profit-first analytical stance that resists the urge to invest in anything that can't be bundled into a sale? Will the Innovation and Technology Center simply innovate improvements and copies of the real tech coming off the west coast? 

As a geek, I hope for the former. But the latter will still be a boon for an already booming Center City. Still, to imagine Comcast bringing innovation back to the east coast, back to the Workshop of the World where American innovation began, fills me with binary-coded glee. And why shouldn't they take the risk? Unlike thriving startups throughout the Bay Area and the Cascade Valley, Comcast has more money than they know what to do with. They have the cash to do more than reinvent Netflix or offer us home security. 

They could be investing in truly effective mobile cable or wireless power. As effective and powerful as Comcast currently is, they successfully follow while they could be boldly leading us into the unknown. The Silicone Valley may be known for laptops, smartphones, and software, but their research has grown far beyond our screens and into artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and is redefining the once un-redefinable: the American auto industry. 

In Comcast's new era, the company that wants to fancy itself on par with Google should be looking at what Google is doing behind the scenes, and it should be grabbing a piece of that and taking it a step further. Comcast has plenty of well groomed suits to bring in heaps of profits, but that means nothing to a future that won't need cable internet. It's time to start spending money on the hoodie wearing nerds who are building our future from suburban San Francisco and Seattle, and bringing them to Center City.

Technology: Friend or Foe? (Ironically from a Google blog)

If you've been watching HBO's Silicone Valley, or even Veep, you've seen just how far software giants' heads are planted up their own ass holes. To put it more diplomatically, for all the useful interfaces and gadgets they provide us with, countless R&D is invested in technologies that prove just how out of touch the Silicone Valley is with the rest of the planet. So out of touch, in fact, that a Stanford lecturer on the subject, Balaji Srinivasan suggested secession from the United States.

Don't let their hip campuses, nap rooms, and socially liberal ideologies fool you. Companies like Google and Apple are every bit as Red as the Reddest, steak chomping oil company.

While advances in technology look good on paper (or in the Cloud), many of which make daily life simpler, information technology is not an altruistic industry. Try to imagine a world before the internet, before cell phones, a world not long ago. Impossible, right? We need these technologies. Silicone Valley has convinced the world that the era before the internet - let's call it "B.I." - was an archaic one akin to a time before automobiles and vaccinations. And in a way it is, because the sycophants lining up for the next iPhone can't imagine life without 4G tethered to their wrist.

I'll tell you what it was like: We made plans. Relationships didn't end via text message. And we knew how to drive with three pedals. And that's where this rant is leading me.

Google's driverless car.

There was a time when no one dared enter the American car industry without a fear of being hostilely taken over, indicted, or dead. Tesla Motors, and the Big Three's engineered incompetence, changed the face of that industry. 

Let's get the superficial out of the way first. Google's driverless car looks like a castrated Disney cartoon, which shouldn't be possible. I don't know what it is with tech-savvy car buyers and their affinity for vehicular eunuchs, but I'd be more inclined to get behind the wheel of a hybrid if every model didn't make it look like my testicles had retreated up inside my body. Don't get me wrong, I'm a tree-hugging liberal, but when it comes to my cars, I'm red meat and scotch. 

But the Google-mobile isn't just ugly, it's disconnected with its market, and even its purpose. It's one thing to relax behind the dashboard of a virtual chauffeur on Interstate 5 or the wide lanes of suburban San Francisco, but try to imagine Google maps navigating the small streets of Philadelphia, New Orleans, or London. Sure, the technology is still being perfected, and in all likelihood, will be. The bigger question is, why?

Is driving such a chore? Maybe to some, but to others it's a privilege and a thrill. When Porsche perfected the automatic transmission and did away with its manual gearbox, they learned that the world's most sought after performance machine was no longer so sought after, and quickly introduced an optional seven-speed. Automotive purists want to be engaged, and there are a lot of us. And nothing is less engaging than a car that drives itself. 

In some capacity, Google's driverless car is going to happen, that's a fact. What remains to be seen is its impact on our ability, even our right, to drive ourselves. Like the automatic transmission, will satellite GPS and remote driving become so perfected that it renders human error a liability. Technology is already encroaching on the manual driving experience through rearview cameras, alerts, and even Progressive's interface that tracks your every move to offer discounts for safe driving. I drove a car last weekend with the technology installed, and Flo screamed at me every time I hit the breaks or made a sharp Ponono turn. A noble endeavor on paper, but when will in-cabin driver surveillance be mandatory? And when will insurance companies not use that data to offer discounts, but to increase rates?

At the end of the day, the automobile is only 140 years old, and a practical one is less than 100. A shift was inevitable, and the inevitability would inevitably come from the Silicone Valley.  But the key point remains: this new technology is not about improving the quality of life, our personal enjoyment, or basic need, but rather fabricating a need that doesn't exist to make us ever more reliant on the technology coming off the Digital Coast. 

Technology - whether it's the telegraph or the internet - is intrinsically fascinating to the human mind, which puts its heads in an extremely opportunistic position. Today it's a modest, driverless car, but tomorrow it will be a visual search engine that can find every awful photograph of you that's ever ended up on the internet. Technology is our friend until it isn't. The car rendered the train useless by the 1960s and smartphones killed conversation in the early 21st Century. What fallout awaits the next great leap in technology?

Simpsons Did It

The self important technocrats of the Silicone Valley have found a new way to opt out of reality, and I'm not talking about a new MMORPG. Stanford lecturer Balaji Srinivasan has made the ultimate proposition, secession from the United States.

With anxiety over Affordable Health Care and same sex marriage growing in the nation's redder states, you might expect the treasonous s-word be uttered in Texas or Arizona, and not from the state home to The Museum of Tolerance.

But that's what happened.

Frustrated with financial failings, unions, and today's government in general, Srinivasan claims that technology has not been allowed to grow under America's pejorative "Paper Belt." An obvious dig at bureaucratic paper pushers, the Paper Belt essentially encompasses everyone who isn't willing to don a pair of Google Glass for the betterment of iMankind.

It's interesting, a little crazy, and dare I say, Nazi-esque.

After all, idealism is an interesting topic in the sophomore student union, or apparently in the intellectual island of the Silicone Valley. But in practice, idealism can be very ugly. The demons that Srinivasan claims plague technological advancement are the same notions that make our nation one of the freest in the world. Our bureaucracy, however frustrating, is the byproduct of divergent opinions and beliefs.

Under the iron fist of ideological societies, it's assimilate-or-get-out. It works on a college campus, or even Google's campus, but it doesn't work in a nation however staunchly enforced. We've seen what happens when tried.

After being asked to remove his Google Glass, Nick Starr too to Facebook to call for the underpaid waitress's termination. Welcome to a nation run by the Silicone Valley: No Freedom, No Privacy, and don't you dare question your Dictator, the Internet.

Of course it's fun to point to the Simpsons, where an idealized society was parodied when Springfield's intellectual elite attempted to run the town, “Not only are the trains now running on time, they’re running on metric time. Remember this moment, people, eighty past two on April 47th, it’s the dawn of an enlightened Springfield.”

The truth behind a proposed intellectual utopia is much darker.

Democracy can't exist in single interest societies. Not because Liberals are smarter than Conservatives, but because Conservatives are just as smart as Liberals. The enlightened points in the history of humankind thrived due to divergent options, those without were referred to as the Dark Ages with good reason.

Whether or not Srinivasan believes his nation should exist off the shores of the United States or in a virtual environment, the products produced by the Silicone Valley won't leave the nation without a fight, one members of his exodus couldn't rival.

You can't beat the U.S. military by clicking Shift-Ctrl-Up.

For all the intellect within the campus communities in the Silicone Valley, around Seattle, or the Dulles Corridor, virtual dreamers can't sustain themselves with 3D printing and biomedicine. Never mind the fact that computers simply can't replace tech support hotlines and clogged toilets, but there's a very real third dimension to this world that includes angry North Koreans and coked up teenage soldiers in the Congo.

Srinivasan claims his conceptual utopia is an opt-in nation for the technologically adventurous, but  in reality, it's a opt-out society for the culturally intolerant.

Then again, if I never have to read about ass holes like Nick Starr and Robert Scoble again, I might be okay with all of this.