This kind of intelligence can live in two different places. It can live at the transmitter and behave as if you have your own staff writers – as if The New York Times were publishing a single newspaper tailored to your interests. In this first example, a small subset of bits have been selected especially for you. The bits are filtered, prepared, and delivered to you, perhaps to be printed in the home, perhaps to be viewed more interactively with an electronic display. The second example is one in which your news-editing system lives in the receiver and The New York Times broadcasts a very large number of bits, perhaps five thousand different stories, from which you appliance grabs a select few, depending on your interests, habits, or plans for that day. In this instance, the intelligence is in the receiver, and the dumb transmitter is indiscriminately sending all the bits to everyone. The future will not be one or the other, but both.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In his 1995 book “Being Digital,” Nicholas Negroponte writes:”One way to look at the future of being digital is to ask if the quality of one medium can be transposed to another. Can the television experience be more like the newspaper experience? Many people think of newspapers as having more depth than television news. Must that be so? Similarly, television is considered a richer sensory experience than what newspapers can deliver. Must that be so? The answer lies in creating computers to filter, sort, prioritize, and manage multimedia on our behalf – computers that read newspaper and look at television for us, and act as editors when we ask them to do so. This kind of intelligence can live in two different places. It can live at the transmitter and behave as if you have your own staff writers – as if The New York Times were publishing a single newspaper tailored to your interests. In this first example, a small subset of bits have been selected especially for you. The bits are filtered, prepared, and delivered to you, perhaps to be printed in the home, perhaps to be viewed more interactively with an electronic display. The second example is one in which your news-editing system lives in the receiver and The New York Times broadcasts a very large number of bits, perhaps five thousand different stories, from which you appliance grabs a select few, depending on your interests, habits, or plans for that day. In this instance, the intelligence is in the receiver, and the dumb transmitter is indiscriminately sending all the bits to everyone. The future will not be one or the other, but both.”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: February 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Being Digital (book)
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 1: The DNA of Information
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Page 20
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne