Overcoming our fear of computer viruses may be the most important step we can take toward the future of information processing … All computers will link up into a chaotic digital soup in which everything is connected – indirectly or directly – to everything else. This coming Net … will be an ecology of computing machines, and managing it will require an ecological approach. Many of the most promising visions of how to coordinate the far-flung communication and computing cycles of this emerging platform converge on a controversial solution: the use of … free-ranging, self-replicating programs, autonomous Net agents, digital organisms – whatever they are called, there’s an old-fashioned word for them: computer viruses.
Predictor: Dibbell, Julian
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Julian Dibbell covers the concept that the study of computer viruses can lead to gains for networking and computing. Dibbell writes: ”Simply put, the only way to fully understand the phenomenon of autonomously reproducing computer programs is to take into account their one essential difference from organic life forms: they are products not of nature but of culture, brought forth not by the blind workings of a universe indifferent to our aims, but by the conscious effort of human beings like ourselves. Why then, after a decade of coexistence with computer viruses, does our default response to them remain a mix of bafflement and dread? Can it be that we somehow refuse to recognize in them the traces of our fellow earthlings’ shaping hands and minds? And if we could shake those hands and get acquainted with those minds, would their creations scare us any less? These are not idle questions. Overcoming our fear of computer viruses may be the most important step we can take toward the future of information processing. Someday the Net will be the summation of the world’s total computing resources. All computers will link up into a chaotic digital soup in which everything is connected – indirectly or directly – to everything else. This coming Net of distributed resources will be tremendously powerful, and tremendously hard to harness because of its decentralized nature. It will be an ecology of computing machines, and managing it will require an ecological approach. Many of the most promising visions of how to coordinate the far-flung communication and computing cycles of this emerging platform converge on a controversial solution: the use of self-replicators that roam the Net. Free-ranging, self-replicating programs, autonomous Net agents, digital organisms – whatever they are called, there’s an old-fashioned word for them: computer viruses.”
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