There’s a steady, inevitable overcoming of human provincialism. We’re becoming schooled to larger perspectives. Though it’s not always easy to believe, we’re going to be more tolerant of diversity and difference. We will grasp a sense of global living in a way we never could before.
Today’s Next Big Something is so wrapped in hype it’s tough to see what’s really going on … Anyone can recite the narrative. It goes like this: … By exchanging information, we grow closer as a community. By exchanging information, we become free. Blah, blah, blah. But what if … the crystal-ball narrative doesn’t turn out as planned? What if, a decade or so from now, we wake up to find that the digisphere has been overrun by swarms of inane mass marketeers… ? It has happened before … Perhaps radio wasn’t the right technology. But the Web and the Net may well be. Our job is to make sure that glorious potential doesn’t get stuffed into yet another tired, old media box.
The Net makes it impossible to exercise scientific isolationism, even if governments want such a policy. We have no choice but to exercise the free trade of ideas … For example, newly industrialized nations can no longer pretend they are too poor to reciprocate with basic, bold, and new ideas … Now that ideas are shared almost instantly on the Net, it is even more important that Third World nations not be idea debtors – they should contribute to the scientific pool of human knowledge … To think you have nothing to offer is to reject the coming idea economy. In the new balance of trade of ideas, very small players can contribute very big ideas.
In the world of bits, you can be small and global at the same time … Everyone can play in the multimedia and human-interface arena. This means individuals or researchers from developing nations can now contribute directly to the world’s pool of ideas. Being big does not matter. For these reasons, more than ever before, we must trade ideas, not embargo them.
Never has there been an opportunity for technology to have such an impact around the world. If innovation is being able to get invention to the marketplace, then the golden age is still ahead of us.
[Developments for the future include a] project investigating the neural nets of small animals to see if they are applicable to future chip design that more nearly approximates living intelligence … the optical amplifiers and wavelength multiplexing technology that will broaden bandwidth to unimaginable degrees; the revolutionary digital-audio compression algorithms; the optical trapping technology that allows levitation and precise manipulation of matter down to the molecular level; the new type of semiconductor laser, the quantum cascade, able to emit light at fantastically specific wavelengths; and even the newly created lead-free brass alloy … We’re demonstrating that the investment in knowledge pays off in the long run.
Countries that have offshore money laundries are gonna have offshore data laundries. Countries that now have lousy oppressive governments and smart, determined terrorist revolutionaries are gonna have lousy oppressive governments and smart determined terrorist revolutionaries with computers. Not too long after that, they’re going to have tyrannical revolutionary governments run by zealots with computers; then we’re likely to see just how close to Big Brother a government can really get. Dealing with these people is going to be a big problem for us.
Computers will probably help people manage better in those countries where people can manage. In countries that are falling apart, overcrowded countries with degraded environments and deep social problems, computers might well make things fall apart even faster.
Any culture or nation that does not come to grips with the technologies changing our lives is, quite literally, living in the past. While the French argue over the culture of communications, they inevitably discourage investment. Who is going to invest in building an “information superhighway” if they do not know what traffic it will be allowed to carry? … If Europe falls even further behind on that highway, it will no longer have to worry about its cultures, for it will have effectively put them all in a museum. As Molire once said: “Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses.”
Will the French take defense of their language to the point of jamming German-language stations broadcast from shared satellites? … The enforcement of cultural quotas on the explosive growth of new technologies could succeed only through authoritarian supervisors – “thought police” – tuned to every satellite dish, monitoring every signal plucked from the air or whizzed down an optic fiber.