Movies, shopping, libraries, e-mail, education will sooner rather than later find their digital way down the wires. We don’t have to choose this – it will happen.
Industrialism, the ethos encapsulating the values and technologies of Western civilization, is seriously endangering stable social and environmental existence on this planet, to which must be opposed the values and techniques of an organic ethos that seeks to preserve the integrity, stability, and harmony of the biotic communities, and the human community within it.
Users will begin to demand better privacy measures and user-authentication. The Internet will increasingly be used to sell information … That will first take solving intellectual property issues such as how to keep someone from making an unlimited number of copies of a copyrighted document.
There’s a revolution in global telephony coming that will have such brutal, industry-crushing speed and power that it will make even the computer industry blanch. Analog is dying everywhere. Everyone with wire and antenna is going into the business of moving bits.
Cyberspace isn’t a technological problem. It’s the solution that will enable government to continue to economically deliver vital services like education, social services, and adequate health care while making the interface between government and citizens easier and more rapid no matter where those citizens happen to live.
All information is not of equal value and this lies at the heart of much of the problem with cyberspace as represented by the Internet in its current state. There is a vast volume of data flooding through the network that one must wade through to find information.
During the peak hours on CompuServe the chat system is full and will reject you when you try to get on. AOL has so many people chatting that it’s almost impossible to count them … This is a sociological trend that needs closer study. Is there some secret need for this lurking in our collective unconscious? I think it’s time some sociologists take a close look and tell us what it all means.
The day-to-day mass audience will splinter further into niches, not just because hundreds of channels are offering programs where once there were just three, but also because people will want to create their own customized flows of information.
A more effective software development paradigm and technology base will be developed. This will be founded on the principles of composition rather than construction, solid architectures rather than ad hoc styles, and more direct user involvement in all stages of the software life cycle. The entire technology base developed in this program, including services and software, will be leveraged across the National Challenges, leading to significant economies of scale in the development costs.
With the incorporation of IITA activities, the HPCC Program will advance intelligent system interfaces, real environments augmented with virtual environments, image understanding, language and speech understanding, intelligent agents aiding humans “in the loop,” and next-generation data and object bases for electronic libraries and commerce.