Your home is not a terribly convenient place for storing data. By and large you want your data to be where you use it: You want it in your office, you want it when you’re on the airplane. Having your own home computer is kind of like having your own home electric generator.
The broader and perhaps more dramatic social impact of the hyperlearning revolution will be the large-scale displacement of traditional “employment” by a new form of human capitalism in which ownership of intellectual capital progressively replaces labor.
Almost every market you can conceive of will work far more efficiently because it will be mediated electronically. You are talking about something that is very fundamental.
Many homes are already attached to two dedicated communications infrastructures: telephone lines and television cables. When these specialized communication systems have been generalized into a single digital-information utility, the information highway will have arrived.
A variety of PC-like appliances will allow each of us to stay in touch over the highway with other people as well as with information. These will include digital replacements for many of the analog devices, including televisions and telephones, that surround us today.
The highway will come about because of a confluence of technological advances in both communications and computers. No single advance would be able to produce the necessary killer applications. But together these will. The highway will be indispensable because it will offer a combination of information, education services, entertainment, shopping, and person-to-person communication.
The information highway will make it feel as though all the intermediary machinery between you and the object of your interest has been removed. You indicate what you want and, and presto! you get it.
At some point not far in the future, a single wire running into each home will be able to deliver all of a household’s digital data. The wire will either be fiber, which is what long distance telephone calls are carried on now, or coaxial cable … That single wire bringing the network will certainly carry much more than phone calls, movies, news. But we can no more imagine what the information highway will carry in 25 years than a Stone Age man using a crude knife could have envision Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors in Florence.
You will be able to stay in touch with anyone, anywhere, who wants to stay in touch with you; to browse through any of thousands of libraries, day or night. Your misplaced or stolen camera will send you a message telling you exactly where it is, even if it’s in a different city. You’ll be able to answer your apartment intercom from your office, or answer any mail from your home. Information that today is difficult to retrieve will be easy to find.
The telephone was a major advance in two-way communication. But at first, even it was denounced as nothing more than a nuisance … As I write, a newer form of communication Ð electronic mail, e-mail, is undergoing the same sort of process: establishing its own rules and habits É The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg’s press did the Middle Ages.