By separating revenue collection from acquisition of copies, hard drives and computers can disappear and become just part of the plumbing that conveys information-age goods between producers and consumers. Computers and telecommunications links become invisible, a transparent window through which individuals can communicate, cooperate, coordinate, and compete as members of an advanced socioeconomic community.
Making software … count how many times it has been invoked is easy, but making it count how many times it has been copied is much more difficult. So why not build an information-age market economy around this difference? If revenue collection were based on monitoring the use of software inside a computer, vendors could dispense with copy protection altogether. They could distribute electronic objects for free in expectation of a usage-based revenue stream.
The problem with data is that it’s dead. We should bring it to life … One proposal is to make every last hunk of computerized data its own intelligent software agent, storing information about itself and exchanging a stream of messages with all other relevant data. Having done that, we’d then have to redefine the other basic concepts of computing so that those millions of operations per second compute something meaningful – not just something that looks good. Sounds inefficient, doesn’t it? But basic processor speeds will keep on accelerating, and the computers of the world will keep on getting connected through networks. Let’s spend some of that exponential growth on the production of useful answers and the prevention of computerized hassles.
The future protection of your intellectual property will depend on your ability to control your relationship to the market – a relationship which will most likely live and grow over a period of time. The value of that relationship will reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its relevance to your market, and, underlying everything, the ability of that market to access your creative services swiftly, conveniently, and interactively.
Information economics, in the absence of objects, will be based more on relationship than possession. One existing model for the future conveyance of intellectual property is real-time performance, a medium currently used only in theater, music, lectures, stand-up comedy, and pedagogy. I believe the concept of performance will expand to include most of the information economy, from multicasted soap operas to stock analysis. In these instances, commercial exchange will be more like ticket sales to a continuous show than the purchase of discrete bundles of that which is being shown.
Neural networks are more flexible, adaptive, just like living systems, with the ability to evolve, to learn from making mistakes … We’re not going to take over the entire world in five years. Whenever you’re fighting uphill against an entrenched technology, you have to pick the right thing where you have a little bit of an edge.
There’s going to be more optimism – as people get linked up all over the world and feel they’re running their own lives. That will lead to more optimism.
The individual is the basic unit. This is a triumph and a new celebration of the individual. Some things will be universal, partly because everybody’s experiencing everybody else. And some things will differentiate this tribe from that tribe. The riddle of the 1990s is, what’s going to become universal, and what’s going to remain tribal?
Telecommunications is creating one single global economy, but at the same time empowering individuals and small groups by providing them opportunities that only big companies had before … Many small players are global forces.
The next big jump in computing, potentially as important as the jump that created the programmable electronic computer, must be inspired by biology … It may be that the successor to that type of machine is gestating far from the hotbeds of computerdom, in an obscure corner of the chemical business: a field called process control … Such computers will not be much like human-programmed digital computers … They will be less like the idiots that digital boxes are now, utterly dependent on flawless programming, and more like dogs: trainable, but with an inherent set of instincts and abilities, herding our processes and reactions and systems like a border collie runs a flock of sheep.