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Taiwan at the Crossroads
Many students who wanted to build this thing were all very amazed that I could draw very complicated three-dimensional equipment in two-dimensional and upside down.  They always said, "I haven't seen anybody who could do this except you, Mr. Lee."  That was some 30 years ago.  But at the present time, even a not very smart student can come to the laboratory and use the computer, and with computer-aided design, he can do all the things that only I could do 30 years ago.

  It means that 90% of the people can do what at that time only a few percent of people had managed to do. Well, that is the reason why I said that we would certainly go beyond the limit of brainpower.

     It is interesting to observe that in spite of many important changes which have taken place in the world, rules of the game among competing nations and localities seems to be substantially unchanged. Although the competition based on military might has been replaced by the high-tech-based economic competition. The latter is no less fierce than the former. Those countries, which catch up with this second industrial revolution, will again become rich and powerful and those countries, which fall behind, will again be poor and miserable. Actually, history of human society in recent years has been and continued to be developing with fierce competition among nations. There is no doubt, some of the Third World countries will catch up this time, and I hope Taiwan is one of them, but most of them might not be so fortunate. As we approach the end of the 20th century and look back on various changes that have taken place in it, we find nothing more striking than the rapid advancement of science and technology and its profound influence on the social life of mankind. It is very likely that we will also witness the fast developing biotechnology, especially when it is successfully applied to agricultural and medicine, profoundly influencing human society in the next century. However, we have to be mindful, this time we are tinkering with natural lives as well as evolution of biological systems, rather than inventing tools to enhance our abilities.

     So we are really moving into a very different phase.  I remember about 15 years ago, one of my colleagues at Berkeley, he was very healthy and he was living till 102 years old.  When we celebrated his 100th birthday, everyone was so curious and asked him, "Joe, how did you do it?  How come you look like a young man at the age of 100?"  He said, "It's easy.  It's very easy.  Before you were born, you had to choose your parents very carefully.  Once you had done that, it's quite easy."  He said, "My father was from Denmark.  He was a farmer in Denmark."  He described that he had successfully chosen his parents.  But now, even if you are not smart enough to choose your parents 'ccorrectly', there is a way to fix it up.

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