This is one of nearly a thousand foresight statements shared by people from around the world. To return to the Voices of the People home page or to refine your search, click here.
Name: Robert Harrison
From: Ohio
Bio: Information Technology Architect
Area of Expertise: Technology Developer/Administrator
Topic: Community/Culture
Headline: Paradise Lost and Found
Nutshell: With freedom, the Internet will shortly allow all sentient life on Earth to experience wealth, power, knowledge, pleasure, joy and ease unimaginable today; without freedom, the Internet will promote tyranny, repression and slavery, leading to the end of humanity and probably all life on Earth.
Vision:The Internet and related computing and communications technology will, within the next one hundred years, permit persons all over the globe to share ideas and interact with each other singly or in rapidly and dynamically changing groups. Everyone will have access to the sum total of accumulated knowledge essentially for free and be able to share and transform this knowledge in perfect clarity to others. Communication to unlimited numbers will occur at thousands to millions of times the current speed we can speak to one person today. The problems of language and geographic or temporal or cultural distance will no longer exist. Consequently the level of advance in knowledge, science and technology will be millions to billions of times or greater than it is today. From the perspective of our understanding of the universe today, our future selves will appear to be able to violate the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology at will. The amount of knowledge and wealth generated through and by the Internet and follow on technologies will greatly exceed 99.999% of our economy. We will have solved all of today’s problems and in the process will have created entirely new classes of problems that we cannot envision today which will be insoluble even given our future technology. Solutions to these problems will need to wait until even more inexplicable feats of wonder occur two hundred years from now.
This of course envisions the best of possible futures. However, other futures are possible. There is a profound and growing hatred of science, knowledge, expertise and rational thought in fundamentalist cultures, particularly the United States. Fearful of change in any form no matter how beneficial, these modern day Luddites would rather slink back into the darkness of the cave rather than flip on the light switch of progress. If these patterns of church and state sponsored repression of science and promotion of ignorance as an ideal continue it is likely that Internet technology will be turned towards control of society’s thoughts and actions. The Internet with microscopic cameras and voice-recognition technology in every room enables a fascist police state Stalin and Hitler could never have dreamed of.
In the end, the Future is ours. We can reach out for the promise of tomorrow or we can sink back into the slime, just another failed experiment of evolution (sorry, Creation.)
Date Submitted: November 10, 2004
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