As a Net user, you start to view yourself as an individual cell in this growing global brain. Online users form connections to learn and grow, as brain cells do. Eventually we’ll develop a global memory, a global ethic.
Predictor: Gentry, Tom
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for The Modesto Bee, Rusty Coats, interviews Tom Gentry, a professor at Stanislaus State University. Coats writes: ”The future will find us more attached to our information engines. One place studying this convergence is Stanislaus State University, where Dr. Tom Gentry has introduced a major called ‘Cognitive Studies.’ The major explores the merging domains of real and artificial intelligence. Gentry doesn’t see ‘this evolving thing we call the Internet’ as an acceleration or next step for earlier technologies, but as a new animal – an offspring of man and machine. ‘As a Net user, you start to view yourself as an individual cell in this growing global brain. Online users form connections to learn and grow, as brain cells do. Eventually we’ll develop a global memory, a global ethic.’ Gentry’s background in neuroscience – his doctorate was in how the brain interprets what the eyes see – plays heavy here, but the theory is a popular one in computer and sociological journals. The virtual community of computer users on the Internet, they say, will create a new empathy among people, uniting them under a single tent, creating a truly global village. For good and ill.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Human-Machine Interaction
Name of publication: Modesto Bee
Title, headline, chapter name: Info-Culture Technology: Savior or Destroyer of Society?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=9242440c133a8b4f8b92228020e63450...
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney