All rights to this published paper reside with the author. Text and slides are a reduction of the speaker's full presentation. The function of this talk is to suggest that it would be useful to think of the business we're in as planning for a 10,000-year library, which is an exciting thought. Civilization's story so far is roughly 10,000 years, if you start from when the ice retreats in the Northern Hemisphere and you begin to get agriculture and settlements, then move toward cities.
Civilization is what happens in cities, and that is the story so far.
So assuming that we're in the middle of civilization's story, not at the end, we've got 10,000 years of amazing events coming. A Gordon Moore diagram from 1965 indicated that the power of chips was going to double every 18 months. I refer to this as Moore's Wall, because it prevents us from looking at the future with any great confidence and therefore often not looking at all. Dealing with that rate of change is a very difficult thing to do. I'm suggesting that, in a period of severe change, part of what this civilization will want to do is bear down on severe continuity.