What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives
386
What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives
386eBook
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Overview
- all the music, film and text ever produced will be available on-demand in our own homes
- your "bodynet" will let you make phone calls, check email and pay bills as you walk down the street
- advances in telecommunication will radically alter the role of face-to-face contact in our lives
- global disparities in infrastructure will widen the gap between rich and poor
- surgical mini-robots and online care will change the practice of medicine as we know it.
Detailed, accessible and visionary, What Will Be is essential for Information Age revolutionaries and technological neophytes alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061873324 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 386 |
| Sales rank: | 200,033 |
| File size: | 851 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Home for the Web
The visitors in my office, acquaintances from my native Greece, were touring MIT with their son, who had applied for admission. It was February 1995 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the annual ritual of admission was once again under way. The trees outside my ground-floor windows at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science were dormant, but hopes for college careers were budding.
We were discussing MIT's 150-year tradition of not giving honorary doctorates to anyone, however famous, and many other characteristics of this great institution that made it so attractive to students and faculty alike. Suddenly, my assistant, Anne, appeared in my doorway. "Michael, they need you on the third floor. It's urgent!" I excused myself and rushed out.
I could sense trouble as soon as I got off the elevator. Four members of the team responsible for the World Wide Web—the computer network scheme that had taken the world by storm—were huddled in animated debate over newspapers and e-mail printouts. Two others were on their phones talking with so much artificial calm that it must have been to the press. They briefed me.
It had all started innocently enough the previous day, during a meeting on computer security organized by the Web Consortium,a group at that time of fifty organizations worldwide led by MIT and its European partner INRIA, which strives to push forward the Web standards. At the meeting, chaired by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and director of the consortium, a member had asked for a casual show of hands as to which of two proposed security standards the members preferred, based on what theyknew so far. Someone had leaked the straw-vote results, and this morning's headlines read: World Wide Web Consortium decides on Web security standard. The folks at Netscape, the leading provider of software for navigatingthe Web, had sent us e-mail threatening to walk out of the consortium because the "chosen" standard was not their favorite. Other consortium members were complaining that they hadn't been consulted. The team was now smoothing their feathers. Albert Vezza, associate director of our lab, was explaining to the reporter who wrote the story why it was wrong; a retraction would be issued the following day. Though I was director of the Laboratory for Computer Science and thus ultimately responsible for the Web Consortium and its activities, there was little for me to do. They were making all the right decisions. I told them so, and urged them to stay cool.
Back in the elevator, I mused that this way of pushing the technological frontier was not exactly what I had envisioned when four decades earlier, as a teenager in the United States Information Service Library of my hometown, Athens, I had come upon the design of a motorized mouse that could find its way through an arbitrary maze. My heart and mind were totally captured by this little machine. I knew that designing mechanical mice at MIT was what I would do for a living. I wasn't aware that the designer of that machine, who would become a colleague, was the celebrated Claude Shannon, who pioneered Information Theory and made the word bit something of a celebrity. Nor could I have known that the tiny robot was one of the many crucial advances in a long technical chain that would lead to computers and eventually the World Wide Web.
On this Tuesday almost halfway through the 1990s, we at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science were still inventing exciting hardware, like bodynets that can link small computerized devices on our eyeglasses and belts with others in our cars and homes, or software that can hold a conversation with a human. But technology had grown to affect the world so profoundly, to become so intertwined with human activity, that it was no longer an isolated pursuit. The rumble blaming technology for the world's ills had long been rising. So it was not surprising to me to have a crisis at the nerve center of the Web that was sociotechnical in nature. Already, in two short years the Web had shed its techie aura and become a major cultural movement involving millions of people. The tens of millions of Web users, from homeowners to CEOs, were growing in number at an alarming rate, adding daily to the cumulative web of information by posting their own "home pages" that described their interests and needs and included writings and other offerings. The (computer) mouse clicks of all these people, like twists on millions of door handles, were opening countless doors to information, fun, adventure, commerce, knowledge, and all kinds of surprises at millions of sites—down the street or a continent away.
Clearly, the new world of information was already affecting everyone's lives. Yet I knew that its present impact paled in comparison to what would be coming in the next several decades. While the media continued to flash old news about information highways, electronic mail, multimedia CD-ROMs, virtual reality, even the Web, newer and more fascinating technologies were already being prototyped in our lab and others around the globe. Meanwhile, the world's economies were getting ready to surrender a huge chunk of themselves to the activities that would stem from these technologies. And the envisioned activities, in turn, were already raising complex new social issues.
It was natural for the media to seize on exciting gadgetry it could already see and understand. But the press was missing much more startling research at labs it never bothered to explore—or that it found "boring" because the technology didn't have adrenal shock value or immediate impact on our lives. On the social and political fronts, too, it was more current to debate pornography on
the Internet than the future prospects for war and peace that the Information Age might bring. Mantras like "It's all about interactive TV" and "The medium is the message" were clouding the bigger picture. In a quiet but relentless way, information technology would soon change the world so profoundly that the movement would claim its place in history as a socioeconomic revolution equal in scale and impact to the two industrial revolutions.
Information technology would alter how we work and play, but more important, it would revise deeper aspects of our lives and of humanity: how we receive health care, how our children learn, how the elderly remain connected to society, how governments conduct their affairs, how ethnic groups preserve their heritage, whose voices are heard, even how nations are formed. It would also present serious challenges: poor people might get poorer and sicker; criminals and insurance companies and employers might invade our bank accounts, medical files, and personal correspondence. Ultimately, the Information Revolution would even bring closer together the polarized views of technologists who worship scientific reason and humanists who worship faith in humanity. Most people had no idea that there was a tidal wave rushing toward them.
I returned to my office and my old friend and his family. They thanked me for my time and left. I would find the son's name on the freshman class list that fall. Good for him; he had won a golden opportunity to see the tidal wave at close range, maybe even make some waves himself.
Our lab became the Web's home through a combination of chance and planning by many people. Three years after inventing the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, still at the CERN Physics Laboratory in Geneva, had begun looking for an institution that would help his brainchild grow. He had been offered opportunities to market the Web by starting or joining a company, thereby entering the club of Internet millionaires. But his idealism, his wish to make the Web a public resource, pushed him to search for a neutral institution. On this side of the Atlantic, as director of a lab that aspired to design the information infrastructures for tomorrow's society, I was looking for a way to bring the lab's celebrated researchers closer to the growing millions of Internet users. We heard of each other's interest and got together. After a dinner in Zurich and a couple of meetings in Boston, we realized we shared the same basic ideas. More important, the chemistry between us seemed right. We felt that we could trust each other.
On February 24, 1994, we clinched the deal. The Web Consor-tium was planned and formed by Albert Vezza. Tim, who joined MIT and our lab, became its director. Consortium members would pay an annual fee of either $5,000 or $50,000 based on their size. The fee would buy each company and university, large or small, an equal seat around the table where they would debate the future directions of the Web under Tim's leadership and would try to keep it from breaking up into different Web dialects. Within a year giants like AT&T, Microsoft, and Sony had joined, as had innovators like Netscape and Sun Microsystems. By mid-1996, the Web Consortium had 150 member organizations.
Interviews
On Wednesday, May 21st, the barnesandnoble.com Author Auditorium welcomed Professor Michael Dertouzos, director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, who joined us to discuss his new book, WHAT WILL BE.
Question: Can you recommend any good books, besides WHAT WILL BE, about the Internet, information technology, etc.?
Michael L Dertouzos: The other two major books are: Bill Gates's THE ROAD AHEAD and Nicholas Negroponte's BEING DIGITAL. There are at least a hundred other books in the computer aisles in any major bookstore.
Question: What are three positive and three negative effects you see the Internet/WWW having on our society?
Michael L Dertouzos: For positive, increased office productivity, greater prospects for collaboration, a shared set of values. For negatives, increased gap between rich and poor, more infojunk, and infocrimes.
Question: "Ubiquity" is often used when referring to the future of the Internet. When do you see this happening? What are the biggest obstacles now?
Michael L Dertouzos: Five hundred million interconnected computers by 2007. That's still only 7 percent of the world's population.
Question: Is the Internet a gold rush? Will only the Levi Strausses (for example, Cisco) get rich in the near future?
Michael L Dertouzos: No. The information marketplace is owned by and used by everyone. No single organization or small group can own it, because for the first time, each of us can sell our skills as well as buy products and services.
Question: How can managers best prepare themselves to work in the information age? How can we be more efficient and not be drowned by too much of everything?
Michael L Dertouzos: Stay vigilant by reading constantly. The terrain is changing daily.
Question: Can you please explain "bodynets"? This is something completely foreign to me. Thank you.
Michael L Dertouzos: Bodynets were inspired by the redundancy of having displays and push buttons on cellular phones, LCD diaries, video and audio Walkmen, pagers, etc., that a person carries. The bodynet is a network that connects all theses devices to a shared display, speakers, and mikes, on wearable glasses.
Question: Do you feel that Hollywood has a good grasp on technology that will affect the future? It always seems that the movies present a new idea in futuristic technology, the public sees it as fantastical, and then boom, the new technology appears soon after.
Michael L Dertouzos: Yes. It was the same with Jules Verne.
Question: I saw you on CNET the other night! It prompted me to buy the book. Let me ask you this: Where do you think Microsoft will be in five years?
Michael L Dertouzos: Thanks! If Microsoft continues to make the right moves, as it is doing now, it will continue to be a major factor, perhaps even a bigger factor, than it is today.
Question: David Shenk was on here last night, and he talked about the overload of information that comes across in the Information Age to the average person. Do you think that this in unhealthy?
Michael L Dertouzos: Any excess of this kind is unhealthy, like eating ten chocolates a day. I have faith that the self-preservation instincts we have carried for thousands of years will make us throw away the infojunk before suffering too much.
Question: What is the main audience you are trying to reach with this book?
Michael L Dertouzos: All people with a great interest in where we are headed with the new world of information.
Question: Michael -- Hey there -- I saw you on CNET the other night, and at the end you said that the future lies in speech-understanding programs -- can you elaborate and also project when will this hit the mainstream (like how the Windows interface replaced the DOS C:> prompt?)
Michael L Dertouzos: I expect speech interfaces to be available for a few hundred dollars within five to seven years. They will be dominant because we are born with mouths and ears, not keyboards and mouse sockets. But they will not be the only human interfaces.
Question: Who do you think the main players of the technology future will be? Telephone companies? Cable companies? Media companies? Hardware/software companies? Will Microsoft own them all?
Michael L Dertouzos: All of the above will win, because each serves different purposes. No single company can dominate, any more than a single company could have manufactured all the products in the Industrial Age. The real winners and players will be all of us.
Question: You mean that Gates had something new to say in his book?
Michael L Dertouzos: Each one of the three books I have mentioned has new things to say. Reading all three, and more, contributes to the debate concerning an unknown but exciting future.
Question: I read that you were one of the cohosts at the recently concluded Davos summit. Can you share your thoughts as to whether this gathering of the world's elite had any novel ideas on where information technology is heading and how to best take advantage of it?
Michael L Dertouzos: This get-together of 1,300 CEOs, 300 ministers and prime ministers, and 300 intellectuals, was the most exciting get-together I have ever attended. To have all these people discuss where they feel we are headed, there is tremendous value in our learning from each other.
Question: I have heard the term "ExtraNet." Do you know what it means ??
Michael L Dertouzos: No.
Question: Is the Clinton/Gore administration forward thinking in terms of technology ? What are some of the key initiatives ?
Michael L Dertouzos: They are among the most forward-thinking administrations in the world. The top current initiative is the wiring of America's schools.
Question: As director of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT, you must see a lot of exciting and futuristic technologies. Where do you think the biggest breakthroughs will come from?
Michael L Dertouzos: The biggest breakthrough ahead is not a gadget, or a piece of software. It is the huge effect of multiple technologies coming into the lives of us ancient humans, and helping us live and work, laugh, and play, with a modern set of tools. It will be a movement as big as, or bigger than, the Industrial Revolution. I am privileged to be part of it, as I know you feel also. And I thank you, and everyone else, for a great set of questions.
Moderator: Michael Dertouzos has left the auditorium, to deliver a speech on many of the same topics raised in tonight's chat. Thank you for participating!