The future of the Internet: Ray Kurzweil, Trey Perry, and the Pew report

A few weeks ago, I published my essay on the next 15 years of mass media evolution (see "Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution," on my Harvard and I, Lamont blogs). Since then, I have been actively seeking out other futurist writings, and have found a few that need to be discussed here.

The first is Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near, which I started to read on my way out to Intel HQ last week. Kurzweil puts forward an intriguing and convincing vision of a future dominated by massive computing resources, biomedical advances, nanotechnology, and virtual reality. In less than 40 years, he believes processing and storage power, growing at an exponential rate, will lead to artificial intelligence and the ability of human brains to interface directly with computers. Nanobots will be able to help solve some of our most pressing environmental crises, and will even be able to cruise the human bloodstream and, through networked connections, generate virtual representations of their hosts. Kurzweil's vision is fascinating, although I have to say his rigorous examination of the evolution of current biomedical and computing technologies is clouded by his own personal interest in living longer -- he says he takes something like 250 supplements per day to ensure that he lives to see the age in which he can take advantage of these marvelous technological advances. Is logic driving his views, or personal hope for an extended biological lifespan and digital immortality?

On a shorter timeline, Trey Perry and the Pew American Internet & Life project have published visions of the Internet in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Trey predicts the development of personal Internet technologies over the next ten years, while the Pew report ("The Future of the Internet II") has gathered the opinions of various experts regarding the big picture of the Internet's influence upon society at the start of the '20s. I will quote a few key findings of the Pew report here:

On the growth of the network:

A majority of respondents agreed with a scenario which posited that a global, low-cost network will be thriving in 2020 and will be available to most people around the world at low cost. And they agreed that a tech-abetted “flattening” of the world will open up opportunities for success for many people who will compete globally.

Still, a vocal and sizeable minority of respondents say they are unsure that the policy climate will be favorable for such internet expansion. The center of the resistance, they say, will be in the businesses anxious to preserve their current advantages and in policy circles where control over information and communication is a central value.

On autonomous technology:

Most respondents said they think humans will remain in charge of technology between now and 2020. However some fear that technological progress will eventually create machines and processes that move beyond human control. Others said they fear that the leaders who exercise control of the technology might use this power inappropriately.

On the new Luddites:

Future Most respondents agreed that there will people who will remain unconnected to the network because of their economic circumstances and others who think a class of technology refuseniks will emerge by 2020. They will form their own cultural group that lives apart from “modern” society and some will commit acts of violence in protest to technology.

On virtual reality:

Many respondents agreed with the notion that those who are connected online will devote more time to sophisticated, compelling, networked, synthetic worlds by 2020. While this will foster productivity and connectedness and be an advantage to many, it will lead to addiction problems for some.

There are many, many additional issues that are discussed in the Pew report, including the future of privacy, nation-states, legal issues, the Semantic Web, standards, interoperability, language and translation, computing costs, coding, and economic factors. I encourage everyone interested in the next 10-15 years of Internet development to read the Pew center's full report.

Second Life's 2D and X3D possibilities

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in a panel on Second Life out in Silicon Valley, at Intel HQ. It was fun to discuss virtual worlds and some of the challenges facing users and companies in Second Life. I wrote up some of the issues that were brought up at the panel, and expanded my own ideas, over on my Computerworld blog. Check out the post to read my takes on 2D views into 3D worlds, and the ongoing fragmentation of virtual communities. Also look at the comments -- Tony Parisi and a few others left some interesting tidbits to mull over, especially regarding the future role of standards like X3D and the H-Anim specification.

What keeps Hong Kong successful?

The American has an interesting analysis of Hong Kong, and what has kept it successful in the nearly ten years since the UK/PRC handover. The author, John Fund, identifies two main factors -- namely, bureaucracy-free capitalism, and rule of law. He also delves into the mid-1990s predictions of some Western naysayers, who predicted that China couldn't resist meddling once they took over in the summer of 1997.

Of course, such predictions were totally at odds with the history of the People's Republic of China's treatment of Hong Kong since 1949. Senior Communist/pseudo-Communist leaders in Beijing clearly recognized the importance of the British colony as a gateway to the rest of the world, a capitalist outpost that could benefit China, and a bargaining chip/point of leverage with the West. If they wanted to meddle, they would have done so in 1949-1950, when they were clearning out the last knots of Nationalist troops from China's southern coast and Hainan, or in the 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution and Vietnam War were raging. They didn't meddle then, and they sensibly didn't meddle in Hong Kong post-1997, with the exception of rejecting many of the democratic reforms that were implemented under British Governor of Hong Kong Christopher Patten in the mid-1990s (something that Fund did not address, incidentally).

Predicting Iraq's future: The grim truth

Gen. Tony McPeak (retired): The worst case? Iraq's Sunnis begin to be backed into a corner, then the Sunni governments -- Jordan, Saudi Arabia -- jump in. Israel sees that it's threatened by these developments. Once the Israelis get involved, then everybody piles on. And you've got nuclear events going off in the Middle East. That would be about as bad as it could get.

Rolling Stone has put together a panel of experts to talk about Iraq, how we (the United States) have lost the war, and what will probably happen over the next five to ten years.

The resulting report is not an analysis by a Rolling Stone journalist. It's a cobbled-together collection of verbatim opinions and predictions by experts from the military, foreign policy, and academic worlds, including:

Zbigniew Brzezinski
National security adviser to President Carter

Richard Clarke
Counterterrorism czar from 1992 to 2003

Nir Rosen
Author of In the Belly of the Green Bird, about Iraq?s spiral into civil war, speaking from Cairo, where he has been interviewing Iraqi refugees

Gen. Tony McPeak (retired)
Member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War

Bob Graham
Former chair, Senate Intelligence Committee

Chas Freeman
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War; president of the Middle East Policy Council

Paul Pillar
Former lead counterterrorism analyst for the CIA

Michael Scheuer
Former chief of the CIA?s Osama bin Laden unit; author of Imperial Hubris

Juan Cole
Professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan

What they have to say is honest, and alarming. But we have to accept what these folks are saying: We've lost the war, we've exacerbated social tensions in that part of the world, and the best we can hope for is, frankly, quite depressing.

The Rolling Stone report is called Leaving Iraq: The Grim Truth and is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about what's going on in Iraq.

That is, everyone.


Related Harvard Extended content:

Vietnam and Iraq: promoting democracy, and forgetting about it

"A mission based on lies is, by definition, a flawed mission, no matter how dedicated our soldiers are or noble our ambitions."

Thesis update: Almost finished

I can't believe it. I am almost done with my thesis. Or at least substantially done. I finished the second draft two nights ago, and managed to incorporate practically every suggestion that my thesis director had made after reading the first draft. They included:

• Working on the transitions between chapters, which often meant summarizing what I was doing overall or intended to do in the next chapter


• Being more forceful about the advantages of quantitative techniques


• Greatly reducing the data dump which plagued my first draft. I basically combined chapters three (results) and four (analysis), and eliminated a lot of the descriptions of the results -- now there are only 12 figures, compared to nearly 30 in the first draft.


• Adding seven appendices to the end of the document


• Creating a TOC, biography, acknowledgements, and other front matter

I also completed a lot of the formatting requirements dictated by the ALM Thesis Guide. These rules are very specific ("The left-hand margin should be 1 1/2 inches, to accomodate the binding. The top, bottom, and right-hand margins shold be one inch (except on pages with new chapter headings or other major headings, requiring a 1 1/2 inch top margin"). The formatting rules are sometimes quite frustrating, as they entail using advanced functions of Microsoft Word that are neither intuitive nor precise. An example is the table of contents; you can try to do it on your own and then be stymied by changing the layout and watching all of your chapters shift over a few pages, requiring going through every item on the TOC and updating the numbers. Or you can do it Microsoft's way, and apply heading styles (heading 1, heading 2, etc.). Adjusting styles in Word is a nightmare, but at least the TOC can be automagically generated.

The second draft of the thesis took about three weeks to rewrite and reformat, working 2-3 hours nearly every night, and a few more hours every weekend afternoon. I haven't been keeping track, but surely I've spent more than 1,000 hours on the research and writing phases of the thesis. The second draft I sent my thesis director is 22,301 words long, and comes in at 105 pages. It's not a done deal, because he still may ask for more changes, and it has to go back to the Extension School for final proofreading, but I am almost there -- I can feel it!

Second Life's infrastructure issues and the end of Utopia

On my Computerworld blog this week, I wrote a lengthy post on Second Life's continuing struggle to expand, entitled "Second Life's population problems." The gist of the post is SL is not nearly as popular as is regularly suggested, and is built on a creaky infrastructure that cannot scale.

Interestingly, the reaction to this post was far more muted than the reaction I received to my last Computerworld salvo against Second Life, in which I criticized the PR-driven forced march into the virtual world, and the UI. This time, I actually received a supportive comment, and the negativity was limited to a few pleas to give Second Life a chance. I think many SLers are starting to realize Second Life is far from a Utopia. They don't have to read about the problems somewhere else; many people who visit the world can see some bizarre activity taking place, dissent, and bandwidth/processing-related rendering problems.

That's not to say Second Life is a lost cause. I am a firm believer in the potential of virtual worlds -- including Second Life, as well as newer endeavors such as Sony Home -- to improve certain types of communication needs, such as education, product demonstrations, and of course, gaming. Additionally, research conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project last year found that five million people were taking "virtual tours" online on a typical day -- this news bodes well for the future of virtual reality and 3D technologies to connect people.

Also, in related news, I have been invited to participate in a panel on Second Life later this month. It looks very interesting -- there seems to be a range of opinions represented in the group. I'll post more after the panel takes place.