The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete (Enterprise) - Hardcover

George Gilder, the best-selling author of several books—including Telecosm, Microcosm, and The Spirit of Enterprise—is the publisher of the influential Gilder Technology Report. He lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts.

Known for weaving engrossing stories from material knotted with numbing complexity, Gilder (Telecosm; Microcosm) delves once again into the world of high-tech business, this time focusing on the company Foveon and its efforts to develop a device that will allow digital machines to see as the human eye does. "Computers can perform instantaneous calculus... and search the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a disk-drive database," he writes. "But they cannot see. Even today, recognizing a face glimpsed in a crowd across an airport lobby, two human eyes can do more image processing than all the supercomputers in the world put together." The book traces a circuitous path in its investigation of Foveon's "silicon eye"-leading through discussions of the magnetic codes on paper checks and of notebook computer touchpads-but Gilder is a competent, eloquent guide. Moreover, the journey is populated with richly limned characters like Dick Merrill, who, with "wire-rim glasses, long white coat, electromagnetic blond hair, a bright feral glint in his skyblue eyes," resembles Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films, and Michelle Mahowald, who decorates her lab walls with "artsy-dispsy posters" and releases "random analog beasts of prey from their safe digital cages." While some readers will find Foveon's saga half-fulfilled, Gilder sees its fulfillment as inevitable. "Foveon," he writes, "can do for the camera what Intel did for the computer: Reduce it to a chip and make it ubiquitous." Whether or not readers are believers by the end of this narrative, the ride is electric.
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