The Future Of Communications From a news story by January 1, 2000
We're in for the communications ride of our lives. The coming year will see cell phones small enough to hide in your pocket, really! And [small enough] to take anywhere in the world. The promise of videophones is coming true. [There will be] tiny hand size computers that know your favorite subjects, and Internet [will be] everywhere. Although Albert Brooks lampooned videophones in his movie "Mother," technologists believe 2000 will be the year of video messaging. [You will be able to] see whom you're talking to. AOL's new software pushes video mail. A plethora of video cameras jack into your PC. The technology is there to put you on camera all the time. Some folks live their lives on camera already. Web cameras already check the surf, check the traffic. It may be just five years before we can chat on giant screens like Star Trek's Captain Kirk. "Kirk Out." Want words only? Breakthroughs in palm devices make it easy to stay in touch. [There are] units you never plug in updated by radio waves. In the next five years, cell phones will sense their locations, and feed you information about where you are. Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future says, "You're walking down Sutter Street in San Francisco. Your phone chirps at you. A little message comes up on the screen and it's an electronic coupon from a Chinese restaurant a block and a half away in your direction of travel, and it says if you get here in the next 10 minutes we'll give you half off a dinner.'" The other coming breakthrough makes high-quality videophones possible, even easy. It uses broadband wireless, rooftop boxes to take in enormous gobs of video, data, games and conversations on one signal. The big winners here are rural areas or countries with little cable or telephone service. Greg Raleigh is the Director of Wireless Engineering at Cisco Systems, "Wireless offers a way, especially this type of wireless solution, for them to immediately jump into the new world in terms of the information economy, very quickly in a matter of months." You can't speak the language? In another year or two, [that will be] no problem. "You're under arrest...(Viet translation.) Oakland police officer Tam Dinh tests a new automatic translator that knows Spanish, Cantonese and Vietnamese. "Don't move" The machine repeats. "Go to jail." The translator also comes in handy in medical emergencies. Tam Dinh says, "Where people are injured it's always important to get as much information as quickly as possible." 2000 will be the year of email everywhere. No computer [will be] necessary. These devices from VTech and Cidco plug into any phone line. One button that says "get email." Easy. Or [you can] press this gizmo from Sharp up to any telephone. Constance Hale is the author of Sin and Syntax, "I believe that email has been an incredible boon to communication. People are writing today where they would have been telephoning yesterday. So people are engaging with words more than they have for the last couple generations." Hale says communication is getting better because people are writing more and reading more. E-books can soon be downloaded into anything, your palmtop or your Rocketbook. Constance Hale says, "And if e-books take off and as people read more, great. Because the only thing that's going to make us better writers is to read more and to write more." In another five years we won't even worry about wires at all. Right now the norm is every computer has a wire out the back. Paul Saffo says, "What the revolution is about in the short term is cutting that tether." Ten years out we probably won't even think about the Internet as the Internet. It will be as common as oxygen, and, for some, just as essential. The Internet becomes the infinite connection allowing you to connect and work anywhere. With a card developed by Sun Microsystems you plug in anywhere. The network knows it's you and puts up your work. Duane Northcutt is the Chief Technologist of Information Appliances Group, "It's really: create once, view anywhere, access anywhere." "You're going to have the information bankers, people who are willing to take on your information, store it there, and keep it safe and guarantee to you it's going to be there when you need it." 20 years out we won't even think about "connecting" to the Internet, if research now underway pans out. It will be with us always. "Think" about a topic and the brainwaves make the request, the Internet, maybe then called the omninet, responds. Brain-mail! The information stream gets faster and faster. More and more high speed tonnage is pouring into your brain. But is all this doing any good? Halton Adler Mann is a writer on these issues and he says, "We have all this information, but what are we doing with it and who is it reaching?" Halton Mann says communication's great promise of the twentieth century is yet unkept. "Can we put human communication to work for humanity? And even if we can do it, can we in any way do anything to reach the recesses of the human psyche that will prevent things like Rwanda..." Walter J. Freeman of the Univ. of Calif. Berkeley says, "Information is not a matter of sending so many bits across so many linkages out to satellites and back again, but rather it's the exchange of meaning. " Meaning that can produce a better understanding of one another. Right now information comes to us in a linear way one bit of information followed by another. In the future we and the world wide web will chat, decide, and ponder, all at the same time. The next generation will be better at this. A recent study showed that kids who play lots of video games get very good at receiving and digesting information from multiple sources, albeit in some cases multiple "bandits." The Internet of the future will be less about us talking to each other than about our machines talking to each other. The refrigerator reads the bar codes on the milk carton, determines when it's time to re-order, adds it to the Internet grocery list to automatically replenish. Or it might decide to wake you early for work. Bob Parks is an Associate Editor of Wired Magazine, "Bob's morning begins at about 6:45 a.m. and Bob is kind of mad, because Bob usually gets up at around 7:15 and likes to cut it close with his morning commute, but I look at my radio and it says that there's a traffic jam on 101 South and I'm gonna need an extra 1/2 hour. And so my radio has got a net connection, wireless net connection as well as a good old power cord to the wall and it has received notice that there's a traffic jam and it has calculated an extra 1/2 hour commute time." Scott McNealy is the CEO of Sun Microsystems, "Our belief is that anything with an electrical or digital heartbeat will be connected to the Internet. Your lightbulb will be connected back to General Electric and GE wll have a Sun server that will fax out a little map of where the next lightbulb that's gonna burn out in the next 20 minutes and GE will UPS out a new bulb that fits exactly into the right socket." Predicting the future may be so much fun because we're almost never around to see that it usually doesn't come out that way. Walter J. Freeman says, "I think when you look at the predictions that people were making about the nature of digital computers about 1950, saying that half would satisfy all of our needs for the next century. That's the nature of technological predictions that almost always falls short of the mark." Who could have predicted the Internet boom? Walter J. Freeman says, "It's the unexpected that we have to expect." We already use chips programmed to design better chips. In the next 20 years the internet will likely sniff out its own problems, test and repair them, seemingly growing and maturing on its own. Perhaps it decides who gets what information, and who doesn't. Can you say, 'Open the door, Hal.'"
Additional notes: New Technology
 © 2000 Cable News Network, Inc. Western/Pacific Literacy Network Western/Pacific LINCS All Rights Reserved |
