The fact that all the interpreters speak the same programming language regardless of the underlying operating system and hardware means that, as the base of interpreters approaches omnipresence on the world’s computer networks, the Net approaches the condition of a single, vast, and unmappable supercomputer, with each wandering digital organism a process in one worldwide parallel computation … With the advent of protocols like Telescript and Tierra, do we have the means to deploy such processes that treat the Net as one machine, safely and sensibly.
Predictor: Dibbell, Julian
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Julian Dibbell covers the concept that the study of computer viruses and worms can lead to gains for networking and computing, quoting Bill Atkinson, co-founder of General Magic, referring to the work of Tom Ray and telling of the work of Fred Cohen. Dibbell writes: ”General Magic manufactures a hand-held communication device that relies on a nifty new network-streamlining program language called Telescript … Its intelligent agents, General Magic co-founder Bill Atkinson promises, will soon be flitting about cyberspace on your behalf, visiting remote commercial sites to buy, sell, and trade information for you … Both wild viruses and Telescript agents routinely copy themselves from one computer to another. Both viruses and Telescript agents can run themselves on the computers they travel to, and, for those same reasons, raise differing degrees of concern about their security … More intriguing, though, are Telescript’s close similarities with Tom Ray’s digital diversity reserve and the experiments of Fred Cohen … [the] computer-security guru is experimenting with a distributed database in which self-reproducing query agents scurry throughout a network, much like the Telescript scheme. And like the sprawling biosphere of global Tierra, Telescript’s bustling marketplace depends on a broad base of local interpreter programs installed wherever its agents go to do their business. This has two significant implications. For one thing, the fact that the mobile organisms of both Telescript and Tierra interact only with their interpreters, incapable of functioning in their absence or of bypassing them to directly affect the host environment, obviates many of the security concerns surrounding their autonomy … And for another thing, the fact that all the interpreters speak the same programming language regardless of the underlying operating system and hardware means that, as the base of interpreters approaches omnipresence on the world’s computer networks, the Net approaches the condition of a single, vast, and unmappable supercomputer, with each wandering digital organism a process in one worldwide parallel computation. Taken together, these two features represent something of a watershed in the history of computing. It has long been observed, rather wistfully, that in principle the world’s computers sum up to one gigantic parallel processor, and that the crushing bulk of that metacomputer’s CPU cycles goes to waste, unused. Only now, however, with the advent of protocols like Telescript and Tierra, do we have the means to deploy such processes that treat the Net as one machine, safely and sensibly. This, then, is the real significance of these endeavors.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: Viruses/Worms
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Viruses Are Good For You: Spawn of the Devil, Computer Viruses May Help Us Realize the Full Potential of the Net
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.02/viruses_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney