Is Silicon Valley Automating Our Obsolescence?
Silicon Valley has created mind-boggling amounts of wealth. Entire industries have been invented here. Smartphones, search engines, cloud computing and cars that drive themselves are designed here.
Billionaires are minted annually, but inequality is rising rapidly.
This week we will be looking more closely at the tech-driven economy of the San Francisco Bay Area. Many economists across the political spectrum argue this place provides a glimpse of our nation's collective future.
History In Fast-Forward
Before Silicon Valley was called Silicon Valley it was known as the Valley of Heart's Delight. In the mid-'50s, this place was an agricultural paradise. I can still pick Meyer lemons in my backyard or persimmons from a neighbor's tree — even in mid-December.
Leslie Berlin is a historian at Stanford who specializes in the history of this place. I met Berlin last week in a doughnut shop in Mountain View.
"One of the reasons I love studying the history of Silicon Valley is that it's like someone took the history of the United States and pressed fast-forward," she said. "When you are at the end of the 1950s you are still dealing largely with [an] agricultural economy out here."
In the 1960s and '70s manufacturing exploded. In the 1980s, just as suddenly, the manufacturing economy here began to collapse.
It was replaced almost immediately by the knowledge economy, Berlin said.
"In Silicon Valley, you see it happen over ... 40 years — four decades and you have gone from a period of agriculture to [an] information economy and it makes your head spin," Berlin said.
Putting Silicon In Silicon Valley
Berlin and I met here at this specific doughnut shop in Mountain View because this is where Silicon Valley really began. We are right across the street from Intel's first silicon chip factory — or fab.
"This is where they started building their chips — this is where Intel first started getting inside all machines," Berlin said.
From 1968 when Intel launched this fab until the mid-'80s more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs were created near here. These were good jobs — really good jobs.
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