Developing an Open Data Network Architecture

The international nature of infrastructure will have to be addressed in whatever technical, market, and legal measures are taken to assure smooth communication and interaction between most countries. International connectivity must be maintained and expanded as foreign networks develop and proliferate. Beyond physical access, one or more bodies may be needed to develop and monitor bilateral and multilateral agreements on standards, transborder data flow problems, and transborder legalities generally. In addition, both to assure the maximum usefulness of international connections and to support U.S. vendors, export control restrictions on the sale and deployment of U.S. infrastructure technology should continue to be reviewed and, as appropriate, revised.

What’s Arriving on the Information Highway? Growth

To be sure, the telecom boom of the 1990s is not a done deal. Lawmakers and regulators could dampen the spending explosion by maintaining traditional barriers to competition among the various telecom players or by slowing spending on the Information Superhighway. But the lure of a new profit frontier and the fear of being left out are driving telecom companies to consider investment programs unthinkable a few months ago. That’s the best news the demand-starved U.S. economy has had in many a moon.

What’s Arriving on the Information Highway? Growth

The raw investment numbers understate the dynamism that will be unleashed by building the Information Superhighway. Much like the construction of the railroads in the 19th century, electricity networks in the 20th century and the interstate highway system after World War II, the Information Superhighway will change the way we live at home and work. It will also open up opportunities for new goods and services dreamed up by the nation’s innovators and entrepreneurs – cutting-edge ideas that spur economic growth.

What’s Arriving on the Information Highway? Growth

Spending on the Information Superhighway isn’t likely to slow … even if current interest rates rise or the economy temporarily flags … The impact of their investments will have a powerful multiplier effect on the economy in coming years … Much of the gain from telecommunications investments will stay in the domestic economy, too, because U.S. producers account for a major chunk of the world telecom industry.

Eisner On the Info Highway: Slow Down – Michael Eisner Speaks on the 500-Channel Television Proposal

In [one vision of the future,] viewers are blessed with the great gift of interactivity … They have become couch potatoes of the tenth power. Equipped with special glasses and a headset, people use their TV links to experience all sorts of events and sights and trips without ever stirring from their ergonomically designed lounge chairs. Virtual reality has now become primary reality … Cocooning becomes a form of self-burial and a relative to paranoia. [In another, television is] a “catalyst” for people to share common experiences … interactive television could not replace the “shared experience” of watching … the World Series … “Digitally compressed interactive high-definition television is not going to be the center of the universe. Why? Because there is no substitute for being out there, meeting, working, traveling, mingling and learning.”

Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior

You should be able to link microcapital to microtrade to micromarkets to microtechnologies, and get a global economic system which is much more finely granulated than the coarse system that we now have … what I’m saying is, computers are going to drive down the cost of the money system. Computers are going to make possible microtrade, they’re going to make possible microinvestments, and microcultures. The dangerous and difficult part of this is that it also makes possible micro-weaponry. Changes cannot happen without intense conflicts as power shifts in the world.

Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior

If we begin to put very powerful, small, cheap technologies into regions and cities to make them economically viable in a way they never were, it might increase conflict. The cultural, ethnic and regional differences, which are now the source of argument, but which are opposed by many on the grounds that they make no economic sense, could very well make economic sense at some time in the future. This is why you might see conflict in, say, Europe.

Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior

[We are] rapidly developing a chain of info-intensive countries whose economics depend not on the hoe or the assembly-line but on brainpower … All the social institutions designed for the second wave – for a mass production, mass media, mass society – are in crisis. The health system, the family system, the education system, the transportation system, various ecological systems – along with our value and epistemological systems. All of them … The emerging third-wave civilization is going to collide head-on with the old first and second civilizations … The master conflict of the 21st century will not be between cultures but between the three supercivilizations – between agrarianism and industrialism and post-industrialism.

Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior

For 300 years we have had a scientific ethos that says “information is good” – and the more we know the better. I believe we’re heading into an era when there’s going to be enormous pressure to block out, to prevent further development of certain kinds of knowledge.

Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior

Our existing political and moral structures are going to explode. There’s nothing that remotely prepares us to cope with say, armies equipped with genetically engineered, race-specific weapons or, for that matter, governments capable of practical eugenics. It’s going to be a strange world.