That young man with the waxed mustache and gallic countenance is my son Cole, age seven. We’ve been studying division, going on long walks with Sadie the dog, and thinking about walking together all the way across the USA, which would require by our calculation 138 days of walking with no days off. This has made Cole very sad because he’s done a further calculation and concluded that he is unlikely to have 138 consecutive days available until he’s well into his 20’s and by that time he figures I’ll be dead.

Kids have a thousand ways of breaking your heart.

Sentiment aside, Cole might well be correct. He’s a busy kid and I’m an older father. When he is 25 I’ll be 76. And while I don’t expect to be dead at that age, Cole quite pragmatically looks at my father — Grandpa Ray, who died at 70 — as a pretty good predictor. Cole actually thinks about this stuff.

And it has made me do some thinking, too, like what advice I can give Cole and his two brothers should I be unable to guide and protect them as long as I have been planning to?

Our society, culture, and economy have turned to quagmires all at the same time. Nothing is as it was nor is anything even like it appears to be, so how does a seven year-old prepare for the future?  “What will you be when you grow up?” is a much harder question than it used to be.

There are near term and longer term implications to this question. In the near term how do we creatively respond to jobs going overseas? In the longer term what happens if Ray Kurzweil is correct and the Singularity rolls along in 2029 or so and humans suddenly become little more than parasites on a digital Earth?

The easy answer to this problem has been the same since the 1960s — become Paul McCartney. But how many Beatles can the world sustain?

My friend George Morton has a daughter (I know nothing about those — wrong datatype) facing the same quagmires as my sons, so here’s a synthesis of our thinking.

Remember the old Robin Williams joke about his son’s future:  “Hello Mr. President” or “Do you want fries with that?”  Career planning at this point probably requires a combination of serendipitous opportunity plus being curious. This in turn requires an educated mind that allows for serendipity to play a large role in discovering opportunities and staying just outside of your comfort zone.

We start with a Catch-22: You can’t get a job because no one will ever hire you. Now what are you going to do about it?  The answer is of course everyone works for themselves, there are no employees, and everyone is just a subcontractor.

There are two times this really sucks — when you don’t have a job and when you see your current job going away.  Many of us are in both situations nearly all the time.  I know I am.

How do you educate yourself to deal with the changes in your business knowing that whatever you do is going to be replaced by a computer sometime in the future?  First concentrate on the structural parts of any enterprise that are likely to never go away, computers or no: 1) finance; 2) marketing; 3) production or service.

The key change in any industry is the delivery method.  Change the method of distribution and you change the business model.  iTunes destroyed record stores, digital cameras destroyed Polaroid and Kodak; the list goes on.  The key change was distribution.

Look, for example, at what’s happening to Electronic Arts (EA).  It was pinball versus Pac Man, then PC’s with retail distribution, then Internet distribution, now smart phones.  Every time the distribution system changed so did the price point, which is now down to 99 cents.  EA still doesn’t know how to build Angry Birds.  iTunes changed the distribution system for users and developers so now it doesn’t look good for EA at 99 cents.

Note on my EA crack from an EA employee — “Battlefield 3, an ‘old school game’ retailing at $60 just broke records and sold 5 million copies DAY ONE. FIFA 12 did 3.2 million end of September. There is plenty of life in the old dogs yet.” I’d note, however, that they are old dogs. 

Change like this is rapidly coming to every industry.  Talk to book editors, as I sometimes do, and hear the terror in their voices. What if books simply go away?

Getting, keeping or making that future job starts with understanding the distribution system and your place in that process.  And to survive even mid-term the key is to position yourself as the linchpin.  Your knowledge has to be critical to the success or failure of the process.  That would seem to call for specialization but specialists often don’t see the ball even coming.  You need a broader view.

But not an MBA. Those will go away.  So will MD’s, CPA’s, and even CCIE’s, replaced with new acronyms for new certificates, so be ready to get a new label every few years.

Where you live counts as much as anything else, too, so position yourself in a city that has high serendipity.  Any kid living with his parents in Palo Alto can get a job today simply because he already has a place to live. No skills required.

If you want to be in finance, going to Alabama is not going to help you develop the next big financial idea, but Boston, New York, London, Chicago will.  If you want to play with new business opportunities in IT, you get the picture.  So for an education; are you going to a school that helps you to develop serendipitous opportunities for your lifetime?

Go to a second or fourth grade teacher or even a high school guidance counselor with these ideas and they think you are crazy, but that’s part of the problem — the educational establishment is as reactive (and sometimes as reactionary) as any other government agency. They have no better ideas than we do what to do with our kids.

Jaron Lanier once told me that you can have enough money, enough power, but you can never have enough experience, so I plan to give my kids as much experience as they can handle, keeping in mind the fact that even post-Singularity it may still matter more who you know than what you know.

Live in the coolest place, I tell Cole and his brothers. Have the coolest friends. Do the coolest things. Learn from everything you do. Be open to new opportunities. And do something your father hasn’t yet figured how to do, which is every few years take off 138 days and just walk the Earth.

Walter Isaacson, in his new biography of Steve Jobs, reveals that Apple is planning to introduce its own televisions, attempting to revolutionize that space in the same way it did mobile phones with the iPhone. He quotes Jobs as having said that he had finally cracked the technical issues of controlling such a TV, though giving no details. This has led to a lot of speculation, but it seems obvious to me that Jobs was referring to IOS 5’s new Siri personal assistance capability. We’ll control our Apple TVs by telling them what to do.

Apple has tried to do TVs before. A few years ago, inspired by the TV success of Gateway and then Dell, Apple had an OEM line of TV’s queued-up and ready to go only to be cancelled when Steve Jobs decided they weren’t good enough. The issue was always controlling the TVs, especially if they were part of a multi-vendor home theater system. We all know the nightmare of multiple remotes, which Apple back then tried and failed to cure.

But Siri is different since it requires no remote.  That means in a house like ours filled with little boys no more losing remotes controls, too.

There are two key issues here that make Siri ideal for this control function. First is what I’m calling do what I mean, not what I say. As an intelligent process backed-up by a ton of knowledge on the net, Siri can learn all the devices attached to your system then easily tell them not just what to do, but what you mean. So instead of a big sequence of button pushes, Siri will respond to your command “Get me Dr. Phil” by finding you the latest (or any other) episode of the TV shrink.

The other advantage of Siri (at least for Apple) is what I’d call bait and switch, which is to say that Siri can offer you Dr. Phil from a variety of sources, but the first one will probably be from Apple.

Bait and switch will be Apple’s way of disintermediating TV networks, cable systems, and ISPs, grabbing their TV, movie, and advertising revenue for itself.

Not to mention Google. Apple is hardly going to give up search revenue, either, and Google TV will look pathetic compared to this.

Now that big data center in North Carolina is starting to make more sense.

A reader from Israel first suggested this idea to me. Neither of us know diddly whether it is true, of course, but it makes sense to me.

So Apple’s television would be an iPhone 4S minus the display and telephone parts velcro’d to a big 1080p screen. Figure an extra $100 or so for the Apple bits on a TV that will be marketed initially toward the top of the market but will eventually be aimed, like the iPod, at everyone. Between hardware, content, and advertising there’s another $100 billion market to be conquered there, just for the U.S.  Then add extensive language support to Siri and conquer the TV world.

He cracked it alright.

Note — A reader asked why Apple would make expensieve HDTVs rather than cheaper set top boxes like the Apple TV? That’s a good question. And answering it further illuminates Apple’s probable strategy.

Apple may do both, but they’ll want to make high margins for the bits they actually make so it is better to be selling $2000 TVs than $100 set-top-boxes. 

There is no joy in Round Rock.

Early this morning the database servers at Dell Computer went down hard. The company is unable to accept orders on its web site and almost 5000 Dell sales reps trying to meet their quotas in the last week of the quarter are unable to book sales. Today’s loss for the company is already over $50 million and rising.

The database system in question is Oracle running atop NonStop Unix on a Tandem NonStop (now stopped — what an irony) system made, of course, by Hewlett Packard. So Michael Dell is pulling his hair out at this moment while he waits to be saved by HP.

It could be a long wait.

I guess NonStop means never having to say you’re sorry.

If you watch the 60 Minutes segment this Sunday with Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’ biographer, on the eve of his book being published, you are likely to see up to three clips from my show Triumph of the Nerds. My 1995 interview with Steve for that series is famous for his trashing of Microsoft and has been played over and over on TV for the last 16 years. But that’s not the case with the interview from which that clip came… until now.

The interview we shot that day at NeXT headquarters in Redwood City ran about an hour but we used only 10 minutes in the TV series. It was our second try to meet with Steve, who had felt too ill (I thought too nervous) on our first visit. We were relieved to finally get him.

We planned to use more from the Jobs interview in my followup show Nerds 2.01: A Brief History of the Internet, but the master tapes for TOTN — all of them — were somehow lost while being shipped from London to Portland, Oregon for that second series. The Steve Jobs interview was gone forever.

Then two weeks ago TOTN director Paul Sen found a VHS copy of the Jobs interview stored in his UK garage. This is undoubtedly the only surviving copy of the best TV interview Steve Jobs ever gave yet nobody ever saw.

The tape is PAL-VHS, dubbed on professional equipment from a D1 master, but VHS is still VHS, which is to say crappy. Yet video technology has come a long way since 1995, so we’ve been throwing resolution enhancement voodoo at that tape, trying to get it ready for, well, something, we’re not sure what.

This coming week all the processing will be done, we’ll add a short opener and a few guiding voice annotations to what’s essentially an unedited interview — definitely not the sort of thing you’d normally see on TV.  It’s me coaxing Steve into a great performance.

This interview is a moment in time. NeXT was in trouble in 1995, though Steve would never admit it.  Apple, too, was at a low point. And none of us could know that NeXT would be sold to Apple within a year and Steve would be back minding the store in Cupertino shortly after that. No iMac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad were envisioned at that time, or if they were Steve wasn’t telling. But that younger Steve of 1995 was very much like the older Steve of 2005 or even 2011 — his devotion to design, to the user, and to bluntly speaking his mind shining through.

What we’ll do with the 64-minute video depends on how good it looks this week. Maybe we’ll put it up on the Net, maybe we’ll do something more. I’m open to your ideas.

It’s a piece of history, that’s for sure, and there couldn’t have been a better time to find it.

I’ve been catching some flak from readers for having not written a column on the recent passing of Dennis Ritchie, father of the C programming language and co-author (with Ken Thompson) of UNIX. Ritchie also wrote with Brian Kernighan The C programming Language, which we all have on our bookshelves and some of us have even read. Ritchie was easily a greater contributor to computer science (as opposed to the computer business) than Steve Jobs, yet I wrote about Jobs’s passing and not Ritchie’s.  What’s with that?

The simple fact is that I didn’t know Dennis Ritchie. I did know Steve Jobs for 34 years and felt I could write about him.  When I wrote about Claude Shannon it was because I knew him, too (we juggled together). If Doug Engelbart or John Warnock dies before I do I’ll write about them, too. But Dennis Ritchie was this guy from Bell labs, a place I have never even visited. While he was the father of C, I was a son of ALGOL 60, APL, Forth, and even PostScript — definitely a Left Coast guy, though Bill Joy was, too, so I guess I really have no excuse.

I’d love to hear Bill Joy’s take on the passing of Dennis Ritchie is among the reader comments, below.

It is clear from the outpouring of interest in Ritchie and the sadness at his passing that here was a guy I really should have known. Why I didn’t make the effort I’ll never know. It’s just another one of my mistakes, sorry.

So rather than attempt to eulogize a man I didn’t know, what I’d like to do here is ask you to do the heavy lifting for me. If you knew Dennis Ritchie, tell us about him. If you have a strong sense of his contribution to science, share it with us. And most of all give us some insight into the man. What was he like, what did he like, what were his motivators, and in what way did he touch you?

There’s a continuous revolution taking place in web development as platforms and tools evolved first to handle dynamic pages and now cloud services. But sometimes what goes around comes around so I’m predicting a resurgence of Java and Java-like languages as rotating storage goes into decline.  Here’s why.

In the beginning of the web we wrote web apps with Perl and C++ because that’s all we had.  This sucked.

C++ is awesome for anything requiring intense performance but because it operates at a comparatively low level (closer to the silicon) C++ is very hard for dopes like me to use. And in a way it’s an insult to the language, which gets bored waiting for databases and network requests.

To avoid the complexities of C++ we turned to Perl which was fast to write in but wasn’t ready to be a web server. And Perl had no frameworks to help write web apps so we wrote a lot of boiler plate crap every time just to get started. Sure CPAN eventually brought libraries to help but it was still fragmented.

When Java arrived it wasn’t so interesting that we had Java, it was interesting that we had the Java Virtual Machine. JVM’s took care of cleaning up memory and automatically profiling and optimizing our programs — tasks that had to be done by hand back in C++.

Java also had threading really well integrated from the start so we could handle many requests at once which was starting to become a problem by 2005 or so. Multicore’s introduction hit just at the right time for Java, too. Compiled Java is a very high-level machine code but is a standard that JVM engineers have had more than a decade to tune so it works very well.

.NET was really just another Java for Windows. Nothing is fundamentally awesome about it over Java except that the engineers got to learn from Java’s mistakes.

Java’s performance was no C++ but it was way better than perl’s and again, we didn’t need all that much. What we needed was faster development and we got it.

Yet in the last few years since, say, 2007 we’ve been moving away from Java and .NET for web development and back to interpreted dynamic languages like Ruby. These are slow as molasses (though now our CPUs are much faster) but easy to program for a broader, younger, and maybe less experienced crowd of developers. Prototyping new websites and apps has become very easy, which is why there are so many bad ones out there.

The difference between the old days of Perl and today is that we’ve made the real web server in C++. So performance in Ruby is helped by a lot of work done in C++. Since every app needs to do that work, we can write it once and lay Ruby on top to make connections, talk HTTP, etc.

Under Ruby, we put C++. On top of Ruby we put the Rails web framework.  It’s not very common to actually code anything in Ruby.  You pretty much only see people coding Ruby while using the Rails framework which governs the whole thing.

You can replace Ruby here with Python, Django or Groovy and it is still correct.

Notice the transition? We started with Perl, went to Java, then came back to Perl!  The reason we didn’t literally do that (actually go back to writing in Perl) is because the kids who wrote Rails were too cool for Perl, which they saw as old school. But Ruby has nothing on Perl. What’s brilliant is the Rails web framework, which came about because of what people learned writing web apps in Java. There are lots of web frameworks in Java, but that was part of the problem — knowing which of the many Java web frameworks were any good.

Ruby is easier than Java. It runs something like seven times slower but who cares? We’re still waiting for the database. And if you are a new developer you can learn Rails and be one of the cool kids.

Java has all the fantastic data structures you learn about in school while Ruby has only hashtables and arrays. But if you don’t give a rat’s ass about performance you can shoehorn anything into hashtables and arrays. That’s why prototyping is so fast in Ruby.

Yeah, but there’s a problem looming for Ruby and Rails (Python, Groovy, etc.) and it is that web frameworks based on interpreted, dynamic languages only exist at all because disks are just so damned slow.  What happens to these frameworks when disks get faster or disappear entirely?

A modern disk seek is around five milliseconds. That means we can get only about 200 disk seeks per second.  Every non-cached database access will do several seeks (BTree datastructure, Mr. Smartypants) and every web page usually requires several database accesses to construct the page. In other words, its not uncommon to take half a second in just doing disk seeks for your local database!  And of course it gets worse, much worse, if seeks across the network are involved.

But if you replace spinning disks and moving read/write heads with Solid State Disks (SSDs) and no heads at all, local seek times drop to zero. That’s why Ruby and its surrogate languages will eventually disappear.

When SSDs gain enough capacity there will be a shift from the Ruby world back to the Java world. Not for prototyping, because, well, it’s prototyping. But simply because the statement “Ruby is incredibly slow but I don’t care because my database is slower” will no longer be true. At that point Ruby (Python, Groovy, you name it) becomes the bottleneck.

With more than 200 reader comments submitted already it is clear that my column from earlier this week about America’s next frontier is a hot topic. I asked readers to tell me what they thought would be (should be) our next area of national expansion and the responses ranged from single words to essays and I learned a lot from all of them. But this is such a fertile and complex topic that no one reader (or even one columnist — me) can be expected to encompass it all in a single session, but we can try and will, right here, right now.

What our next frontier clearly isn’t is any single industry. Nanotechnology and biotechnology and alternative energy technologies are all important, true, but none of them constitute a frontier any more than saddles or buffalo or Winchester repeating rifles constituted the American west of the 19th century. These industries may be tools, components or enablers of future frontiers, but they don’t constitute the frontier, itself. Nor does the Internet, where you are reading this.

Industries or technologies or media can’t define a new frontier because they haven’t in a long time fostered migration, which is a key component of any frontier. A frontier is, after all, a place, a line of demarcation, the interface between here and there. And while it’s true that there is some implied line of demarcation, I guess, between people who use the Internet and those who don’t, they typically live on the same streets and few people move specifically to get better Internet service.  If they did we’d all live in Korea.

There are technology waves that one might be tempted to identify as frontiers, but even these are not. The best one that comes to mind is NASA’s Apollo Program of the 1960s. Just look at the advances in electronics, materials, structures, and information technology that sprang from landing a dozen men on the Moon!  Those advances led directly to many of the technologies we have today and they can be linked back to specific NASA requirements, which confirms government’s role as a funder of research, but doesn’t in itself make the Apollo program anything like a frontier.

It’s an odd connection to make, perhaps, but I think frontiers have a lot in common with movie scripts or novels. If you take a scriptwriting class you’ll learn that at the heart of every movie, whether it is comedy, tragedy, or even documentary, is someone with an unfulfilled need. My child has been kidnapped and must be found; we must destroy this enemy military installation; I need money and only know how to steal cars; I want revenge; I want love; I want redemption; I want the survival of my people: the meerkats are in danger!  Same with frontiers, which are breached and expanded by people who like what’s out there more than they like what’s in here.

One thing about frontiers is they are optimistic. There is risk in braving a frontier or we wouldn’t so easily use the verb “braving.”  Yet we do brave frontiers and for good reasons: 1) the potential rewards are huge, and; 2) we feel up to the task.

Where one reader said the next frontier is hope, they weren’t far off.

Let’s take this a step further.  Why are frontier’s optimistic?  In large part it is because to even be called a frontier in the sense we’ve been using the word a lot of people have to be successful there.  Taming the Wild West wasn’t the lore of thousands of books and movies and TV shows because we failed at it but because we succeeded. The California Gold Rush was a rush because people found gold, not because they didn’t. And when there is an expectation of success, it gets a lot easier to say “yes.”

We see this from time to time, too, in speculative bubbles. Remember Alan Greenspan’s mention of “irrational exuberance” describing the last decade’s housing bubble. Remember the dot-com IPOs of the 1990s which were based, in retrospect, on nothing but an unlikely potential for success seemingly built of Super Bowl commercials. Those times were crazy yet we didn’t feel crazy, we felt excited. But those weren’t frontiers any more than was landing on the Moon.

Optimism is not in great abundance these days so irrational exuberance isn’t either. In fact it is a lack of hope that may well keep us from even attempting the next frontiers at all. Pessimism, it turns out, is a powerful force. Remember when the term liberal used to mean something good and conservative meant stodgy? Today pessimism has corporations hoarding cash in case they need it, stunting growth in the process and guaranteeing they’ll need it.  See, we were right!

Sure you were.

From a structural standpoint, here’s my view of what is getting between us as a people and the next frontier. Humans are a species divided along social fault lines into four groups:

1) The players — people who are tasked to solve the problems of society in order to keep the system alive — scouts, guides, buffalo hunters, scientists, and startup founders.

2) The observers — people who for one reason or another have the time and willingness to make it a habit to know as much as they can about what is going on but have no direct connection to the players. Most of my readers are in this category.

3) The entrops — people who are actually bringing the whole system down either through greedy parasitic removal of necessary resources or because they feel society cannot be repaired and the only hope is to crash the system so it can all begin again. Only in their minds we’ll rebuild the system “the right way” this time.  They use terms like “starve the beast.”

4) Everybody else, which is to say the consumers who actually pay the freight.

The only one of these groups capable of doing real harm to the system — to society –  is the entrops. As entrops infiltrate the other divisions the system begins to falter. At some entrop infiltration level the system will collapse. Look at the paralysis in Washington.

The final frontier is the domain of human soul, discovering a way to inspire the human race with hope of a better tomorrow and to even transform entrops into hopefuls.  Hope defeats entropy.

Bob Dylan wrote, “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”

My corollary is, “When you ain’t got hope, you got nothin’ at all.”

The irony here is that the simple application of hope would almost overnight reverse the structural economic problems of most nations. It’s not that we don’t have enough money but that the money is being controlled by entrops who see no good reason to use it and every reason not to use it. The only thing that will beguile them from hopeless to hopeful is the attraction of a clear and unambiguous new frontier.

What should that new frontier be? It almost doesn’t matter as long as it is big enough to capture the fancy of hundreds of millions of people. Your ideas are just as good or better than mine. But since I have a couple favorites I’ll throw them on the table. I think our next frontier should be a combination of additive manufacturing and autonomous flight.

Huh?

Additive manufacturing is currently exemplified in 3D printing, where prototype devices emerge from plastic baths, sintered by lasers, only at my little company we make things of titanium. Additive manufacturing is in the middle of a revolution that within a decade will have usable devices appearing in volume and at competitive prices from backyard sheds and sold into local commerce.

We’re talking car factories in every city serving just that city — factories that could make you a 2020 BMW or a 1936 Auburn Speedster, you pick. We’re talking local manufacturing of everything from gutters to semiconductors. Additive manufacturing will change the way things are built and the people who build them.

Now if only everybody had an airplane!

For all but the last century man has functioned strictly in two dimensions, traveling the earth and seas but only marveling at the air. Invention of the airplane changed that a little, yet today less than a quarter of a percent of Americans know how to fly. What if we all could fly? A decade from now we just might.

Technology exists today for people to fly by themselves, quickly, quietly, with little or no pollution, from anywhere to anywhere in any weather, asleep or awake, because the real pilot is a computer. A decade from now, thanks to Mooreʼs Law, this technology will be the price of a car.

What would the world be like if you did not need a road or even a driveway? How would demographics change? Would our crumbling infrastructure still need repair?

Meet George Jetson. He has an electric aerial vehicle that takes him where he needs to go. But he does not fly it; the vehicle flies itself, knowing to the centimeter where it is anywhere on earth, lighting like a dandelion fluff with thirty thousand other such fluffs over a major city, each going its own way yet aware of all the others. This is where transportation is headed.

All of these components exist today — electric aircraft, GPS navigation, autopilots from aerial drones that can do all the work including takeoffs and landings in the dead of night while Mama nurses a sick child in the back seat. Aircraft that come when you whistle for them just like Trigger.

What qualifies autonomous flight as a good frontier is that it fits beautifully in the traditional frontier paradigms of population expansion and steadily increasing property values. American frontiers, as I wrote earlier this week, have long been paid for with free or inexpensive land. 40 acres and a mule, land rushes, railway rights-of-way and all the way back to royal land grants were responsible for populating much of America, taking the value of Manhattan from $40 worth of Dutch trinkets to $1 trillion worth of concrete and steel today. Yet today our property values are out of whack and often decreasing as we urbanize, de-industrialize, turn more and more to corporate agriculture, great swaths of our land going back to the state they were in Revolutionary times.

Reforestation in the American northeast, for example is happening faster than deforestation is happening in the Amazon. Yet we have no reforestation policy (we should — we could probably get carbon credits from it), we’re just neglecting the land.

Here’s a picture taken out my living room window in Santa Rosa.

See that ridge across the valley from me, framed by trees?  There’s a rocky peak and to the right of that a shoulder of grass dotted with oak trees. I would like to build a house right there, among the oaks, looking west toward the sunset. Though only about three miles from where I live that spot of land could just as well be on the Moon. There is no road to it, no power, no water (yet) and as such that little patch of land, less than 50 miles from San Francisco, is almost worthless. But if I could build a house up there the view would be amazing, looking all the way south to San Francisco and all the way west to the Pacific. On foggy mornings I’d be above the clouds.

All I’d really need to live and work up there are water, power, and transportation. I could dig a well or maybe harvest water from the coastal fog, I could generate power from solar or wind. These are easily within reach today. But to reach Safeway or Google I’d need to fly. That part is almost here, too.

A large part of the promise of the Internet, circa 1999, was that businesses could operate anywhere. IBM even did a TV commercial about that. Yet businesses for the most part don’t operate just anywhere. They are tied to infrastructure and transportation links. But they might if we replaced 100+ million cars with the same number of aerial bots.

Combined with superior communications we could live and work almost anywhere, our impact on the land would be more dispersed and therefore less. Our infrastructure needs would be dramatically reduced. And we’d have a whole new industry to drive the 21st century just the way automobiles drove the 20th. Now that’s a frontier!

A lot has been said about Steve Jobs in the 24 hours since his death and some of that has come from me. It has been 24 hours of round-the-world media interviews, most of them live but you can see an edited version of me this Friday on ABC’s 20/20, which is doing a Jobs tribute of some sort. Remember ABC’s parent is Disney and Jobs was Disney’s largest shareholder.  With all that has been said and written, however, I’m hard put to know what there is I can add here. I can tell you though the two Jobs questions I still want answers for, and where I hope to find those answers.

Question #1 — Was there a grand plan for Apple?  Did Steve and his little circle set out in 1997 to do an iMac followed by an iPod with iTunes followed by an iPhone followed by an iPad?  And if they did have such a plan, what was next on their list after the iPad?

Some technical and product transitions are no-brainers. Computers get smaller, faster, and cheaper over time. After a certain point smaller, faster, and cheaper begets mobility.  After mobility gets smaller, faster, and cheaper we want all our stuff to be available anywhere anytime. After we have all our stuff with us anywhere anytime the platform itself begins to disappear.  All of these steps except the last happened in Steve Jobs’s lifetime, and it is easy to see that last step coming, too. But while these steps were no-brainers in retrospect, were they obvious beyond Apple, were they part of a plan?

I like to think that there was a plan, which might explain why Apple never made televisions in Steve’s life, though I know they came very close. If there was a plan I’d love to know the value set and algorithms at its heart.

But my sense is actually that there was no plan or maybe that the plan changed, perhaps many times, explaining the exodus of top Apple talent over the years. I’d like to hear what Avie Tevanian has to say, for example.

Question #2 — What happens to Steve’s money?  This may seem crass to some, but no more crass than a billionaire with no outward signs of philanthropy. It was Steve’s money of course and he could do with it whatever he liked, but what was his reason for outwardly appearing to have little interest in others?  Maybe he was a closet philanthropist. Certainly in recent years the considerable amounts he spent on cancer research aimed at his own cure will benefit thousands of others.  I’d still like to know, though, Steve’s plan for his fortune.

I hope to learn the answers to both questions from Walter Isaacson when his authorized biography of Steve Jobs is released on October 24th. I haven’t read the book yet and know nobody who has, but I hope Walter got around to my silly questions and that Steve answered them.

He was a busy guy, Steve Jobs — so busy living for the moment that maybe he didn’t have to live so far (or indeed at all) into the future. Maybe none of this matters, but I’d still like to know.

What unanswered questions would you have for Steve Jobs?

Tomorrow I’ll respond to the 200+ comments on my Final Frontier column, hopefully setting off another burst of discussion and discovery — just the sort of discourse Steve Jobs would have liked, especially if it riled people up.

And now the frenzy begins. Running this story in reverse it’s suddenly clear why Apple didn’t introduce the iPhone 5 this week. It would have been lost in the news of Jobs’s death, killing the marketing value he would have loved. I’m sure the phone will appear in a week or two with that appearance in part to encourage the recovery of Apple shares from what is sure to be a short-term decline.

I first met Steve Jobs in the spring of 1977 when I helped the two Steves take a prototype computer out of Woz’s Fiat at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting. In the 34 years that followed I was hired and fired by Steve more than once, our relationship conducted in large part through screaming. “Sometimes I can be an asshole,” he said to me many times, and it was true, but I miss him already.

Steve Jobs was an iconic figure. Everybody knows his name. He was perceived as being personally responsible for the growth of the most valuable U.S. corporation. Steve Jobs changed the way people live by making popular everything from desktop publishing to digital music, to revolutionary smart phones and computer-animated films. He changed forever the computer, music, and film industries, doing so through the simple expedient of better design. He redefined the notion of taste in an industry dominated by engineers and a general lack of style. Steve Jobs had a billion dollar eye. No, make that a $300 billion eye.

Jobs was a 21st century combination of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton. As an aesthete, a corporate leader, a salesman and a wrangler of geeks there was no person in American business — maybe in the world — who compared to this adopted child of Syrian extraction. Yet who actually knew him? Almost nobody.

I’ll be writing more about Jobs in the coming days, but for now here is the best public moment of insight into this man, the commencement address he gave at Stanford University in 2005.

When I was in school we had the occasional class discussion in history or social studies about the role of the frontier in U.S. economic development. Back then (this was the 1960s) if the teacher was sharp this would sometimes segue into a discussion about the implications for America of being without an obvious frontier — a condition that was widely known even then. Those conversations have stilled for some reason with the rise of what seems to me to be societal stupidity, but it is my growing sense that this is at the heart of our current economic malaise. We need a new frontier.

America has had several important frontiers in its 235 years. First there was the wilderness, then industrialization, then consumerization. These are my classifications and you may well disagree, especially with the last one, but I’m painting here in broad strokes. The wilderness frontier was conquered through the simple act of occupation — growing a population to fill the space. Industrialization turned that occupied land to fruitful endeavor, giving us jobs and industries and leveraging the value of that space we had occupied with such great effort. And consumerization (again this might be controversial) took that economic value and spread it to where there weren’t mines or factories or wheat fields by bringing the goods to us in our towns and cities whether it was Post cereals, Ivory soap, Howdy Doodie, or McDonalds.

Each frontier was conquered at great expense but little cost. The cost of taming the wilderness was free land with the expense being racial intolerance (my grandmother was a Cherokee — don’t get me started on this). The cost of industrialization was more free land (railway rights-of-way) with the expense being pollution and eventual urban blight. The cost of consumerization has been separating us from our traditional means of production, that is the previous industrial phase. Add to this an aging population and inefficient government dominated by the very folks who used to run for student council and you have where we are today — drifting.

Looking more closely at this latter phase, In the 1980′s and 1990′s we wiped out R&D in companies and that led to the loss of tens of thousands of engineering jobs, but this went often unnoticed because it took a decade or more to be strongly felt.

In the 1990′s we started shipping manufacturing jobs and equipment offshore.  One statistic tells it all — the United Auto Workers’ membership is down by 500,000 in the last 15 years. There are a lot of fervent opinions thrown out about whether unions are good or bad (to be fair, I like unions — my father ran one) but we’d be hard put to argue that the existence of the UAW hurt Detroit in most of the 20th century. Our manufacturing job losses have to be in the millions. In the last decade we started shipping IT jobs offshore, too.  Those numbers probably match the auto workers.

Economies embody an evolutionary process.  As old businesses and industries phase out, others emerge.  One of the big problems today is we have no real emerging industries, certainly nothing that can employ millions.  Jobs are being lost and nothing is there to replace them. Government can’t fund enough jobs to cover this magnitude of loss.  Here’s where we make a mistake by spending too much time these days talking about how we can best get back to where we used to be, but that isn’t going to happen. You can’t go home again.

We need a new frontier to get us truly back to work. But what’s that going to be?  As much as I love the picture with this column the next frontier is unlikely to be space flight. Fun as it is that’s a rich man’s lark and will remain so for decades to come until teenagers start building space hotrods.

Alternative energy offers some possibilities but it is too fraught with conflicting interest groups to get enough traction. Remember new frontiers beget new fortunes and in energy the old fortunes aren’t yet ready to let go. Energy independence would be wonderful but I don’t think it will be allowed to happen unless it is a side effect of some even greater economic force.

So what should be our next frontier and what makes your idea better than another?  I have my own thoughts, but I’d like to hear yours first.