Digital technology is ushering in a marriage between television, computers and telephones that many believe will revolutionize the business, political and cultural landscape of the entire globe.
The development we now generally refer to as cyberspace may be a hot topic of discussion these days, but it is unlikely that it will be much talked about 25 years from now … Over the next few decades, cyberspace will become increasingly ubiquitous and unobtrusive – which is another way of suggesting that its social impact may be so profound that we won’t even be able to trace all the ramifications.
Interactive mixed media would have limitless instructional, educational and cultural uses … The world’s great architects, doctors, musical performers, car designers and poets could use this technology to deliver and explain their own unique forms of knowledge. Students would gain the advantage of being tutored and would derive much more wisdom from the masters than they could by studying passive manuscripts, drawings and musical scores
We see opportunities to break through barriers previously facing those living in rural settings and those with physical disabilities. Democratic values can be served by making more information and services available.
If electronic, biological, and molecular technologies continue to be developed and used at approximately the same, or greater, rate as they are now, the world of the 21st Century will be even more different from the 20th than the 20th was from the 17th or 18th. It is very difficult to overstate the extent and magnitude of technologically induced social and environmental change over the next decades.
Advances in, and the marriage of, television, computers, telephones, visualization, dematerialization, and related technologies are rapidly leading to the emergence of what is being called “virtual reality,” making it possible for individuals and groups, perhaps widely separated in time and space, to create and experience together realities beyond anything Mother Nature ever invented.
As the electronic revolution merges with the biological evolution, we will have – if we don’t have it already – artificial intelligence, and artificial life, and will be struggling even more than now with issues such as the legal rights of robots, and whether you should allow your son to marry one, and who has custody of the offspring of such a union. Thus during the 21st century all historically experienced human processes – agriculture, industry, commerce, education, you name it – will come to an end … What is actually happening … is the merger of four information societies into one: the 4-billion-year-old genetic information society; the 10,000-year-old cultural information society; the 3,000-year-old civilizational society; and the 250-year-old industrial information society, all merging in the 21st century into one new “coming information society.”
The “new” technologies of the present and immediate future … clearly imply, in my view, that the challenges and possibilities of the immediate future are in this respect as well, completely without precedent, or adequate analogy, in the immediate, much less more distant, past. … There will be no return to “The Way it Used to Be” for future generations. And I deeply regret that so much time and effort is being spent on trying to make it so.
Huge sums of money are about to be spent …There is no one overriding vision … There is a potential for enormous disasters … It’s going to pervade our lives.
The entertainment, telephone, cable-TV and computer companies will “stumble all over themselves to stake a claim in the Internet, a marketplace they do not really understand.”