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SHOW 102 TRANSCRIPT
Will The Internet Change Humanity?

EXACTLY how many hours a week do you surf the Internet? Compare that number with what it was a year ago. Now project forward at the same growth rate, and within two years you'll never get off. If you're one of the millions who surf the Net, you've probably seen your on-line time increase dramatically. What happens when everybody is on-line? When access is immediate? When contact is constant? When individuals can usurp institutions? When gratification must be instant. On what's been called the information superhighway, distance disappears and destinations emerge within seconds. And it's fundamentally changing how we gather data, conduct business, exchange ideas. The original "internet"--known as the ARPAnet (the acronym refers to the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency)--was established to provide a secure and survivable communications network for organizations, mainly universities, engaged in defense-related research. The very first computer link-up transmission, in 1969, was from UCLA in Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute near San Francisco. In the next three decades, this small network grew into the Internet, which now comprises tens of millions of uses around the world and will eventually include just about everyone. This remarkable growth was energized by the advent of the World Wide Web, which made interlinked, hypertext, multimedia documents accessible and usable by common people. Hypertext radically transformed the way we think and work by freeing us from the traditional linear constraints of accessing information. Hypertext enabled highlighted words or phrases to be traced directly as we skip and jump from document to document, each of which has a unique address, all over the world. The Web was developed by Timothy Berners-Lee in 1988-1990 when he was at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) near Geneva and wrote a trio of protocols--HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), HTML (hypertext markup language), and what eventually became URL's (uniform resource locators), the domain name or internet address so recognizable to all Web users today. But is the Internet changing what we are, while altering what we do? Some say the Internet is as revolutionary as the harnessing of electricity or the advent of the internal combustion engine. Some believe its impact will be far greater. Depending on which of these camps you're in, our topic is a thrilling or a frightening look at the future. What's really happening here? We asked our participants, all of whom are plugged in, to assess the Internet's impact on society and particularly on the development of the human race. Though they come from different fields--computer science, space science, public policy, engineering, business--all see the same remarkable transformation.

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PARTICIPANTS

Dr. Francis Fukuyama, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, is the author of several important books including The End of History and the Last Man. Frank sees the Internet accelerating the development of liberal democracy around the world.

Dr. George Geis, an adjunct professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, specializes in business strategies for the digital economy. George considers psychological as well as economic issues on the Internet and focuses on separating the wheat from the chaff.

Dr. Bart Kosko, a professor of engineering at USC, is an expert on fuzzy logic and the author of The Fuzzy Future. Bart predicts that the Internet will help to erode professional monopolies end governments and as we know them.

Dr. Marvin Minsky, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, is a pioneer in artificial intelligence. He relishes the Internet and assesses its significance with several trenchant observations--watch out for Uncle Louie!

Dr. Bruce Murray, a professor of planetary science and geology at Caltech, was the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's center for planetary and deep space missions, from 1976 to 1982. Bruce believes that the Internet is a seminal--indeed, evolutionary--event in the history of humankind. 

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ROBERT: Marvin, you've explored the frontiers of machine intelligence and knowledge representation. You've seen the whole world of communications change. Give us a historical perspective for the Internet. Is it as significant as people think?

MARVIN: Certainly is. The Internet started in the late 1960s, when people began connecting terminals to computers remotely, and then, in the early 1970s, connecting them all around the country--that's when E-mail really got started. Then there were twenty years of rapid development--in the 1980s, something called USENET grew up, which was a precursor to the World Wide Web, where people could send messages to one another and they would be stored--and in the early 1990s the Web appeared, which has made it easier for everyone to use the Internet. 

ROBERT: Was the sudden broad-based use of the Web a surprise?

MARVIN: It was quite a surprise to people who weren't already using the Internet. But by that time, E-mail was very well developed. I have three children, and probably a hundred students, and I've been in constant contact with them since the early 1970s through E-mail. So I've grown up in a world where I assume that if I want to talk to someone, I can.

ROBERT: We're just catching up with you?

MARVIN: You're just catching up.

ROBERT: Frank, your book The End of History and the Last Man is one of the most original and important works on international political economy. What is the end of history? Give us a short overview. 

FRANK: First of all, it's history with a capital H, the progressive evolution of political and economic institutions. And in my view, progressive intellectuals used to believe that this evolution would culminate in some form of socialism. But I think it's quite evident that that's not going to happen, and that modern liberal democracy and market-oriented economic systems are basically it. In a way, it's the end of the line of development of modern postindustrial societies. 

ROBERT: Why did your thesis cause such a firestorm?

FRANK: Well, people thought it cut off hope for progress in the future. And people are, I think justifiably, a little uncomfortable with liberal democracy and markets. If this is the end of the line, people want to know whether there's a Utopia beyond that.

ROBERT: How do you see the Internet, in this move toward liberal democracy and markets?

FRANK: It's very intimately connected to that. The newer information technologies are profoundly democratizing, because they don't reward economies of scale. They work best in decentralized, non-controlled societies. They're anti-authoritarian, because authoritarians control societies by their ability to control access to information. So if people can get information on their own simply by dialing up a computer, then we have ways of getting around hierarchies. The Internet helps to spread power out rather than concentrating it.

ROBERT: Bruce, you think a great deal about the future. What are the implications of the Internet for the future of humankind?

BRUCE: Oh, I can answer that by noting that you pose the question of how the Internet will change humanity. Two years ago I gave a talk to science fiction writers--the most avant-garde audience you can have. And I tentatively threw out the idea that the Internet might change humanity. Two years later, we take for granted that it will and now we want to know the details of how. The Internet is more than an end-of-the-century phenomenon. This is one of those transitions in human social structure [i.e., cultural evolution] that happens only once every few thousand years.

ROBERT: Bart, what's the impact of the Internet on the professions? 

BART: I think it means the end of the professional monopolies, in law, medicine, education. It means that people all around the world, in the poor countries as well as the wealthy ones, will have access to information that they didn't have before. So, in a very real sense, lawyers and doctors and professors will be given a run for their money. 
ROBERT: That sounds like good fun. George, how does the Internet differ from other media in the business world?

GEORGE: Other media, traditionally, have been one-dimensional, along a content-interaction grid. For example, newspapers are content-rich but interaction-poor. You can write a letter to the editor, but that's about it for interaction. The telephone is communications-rich but relatively content poor--just the human voice. With the Internet, you have rich growth along both content and interaction dimensions. Given the growth of digital video and other types of multimedia broadband communications, what we're going to see is a closer and closer approximation to human experience.

ROBERT: Let's talk about key characteristics of the Internet. 

MARVIN: Well, I haven't been in a library in thirty years. When I want to know something, I go on the Net. The other day I was lecturing on child development, and I raised the question of how children get attached to their mothers, and I said that it doesn't really happen until late in the first year of life--a child can't even recognize its mother until it's three months old or maybe more. And one of the students who'd been working with children said, "No, that's not true--children recognize their mothers just after birth." So, there was an argument, and I went home and I typed four keywords into a search engine: infant, face, recognition, brain. I got a list of people, and I sent them E-mails. One of the more interesting responses came from a woman in France, a graduate student doing research on this subject, and she said, "Yes, infants seem to recognize the mother right away, but if you put a scarf over the mother's head and hide the hairline, then they don't." So the infant is not seeing facial features but something about the shape. That's the Internet.

ROBERT: How long did it take you to get that answer?

MARVIN: About an hour, because she was away. 

ROBERT: Before the Internet, you probably wouldn't have gotten any of those answers at all, or at least it would have taken weeks. 

MARVIN: Oh, the woman in France was doing a PhD thesis, and it wouldn't have been published for a long time.

ROBERT: Bart, what do people mean when they say that the Internet is self-organizing? 

BART: It has no central authority or commands, which I think many people find scary. And--related to Frank [Fukuyama]'s thesis about the rise of liberal democracies and the end of history--the Internet erodes and fuzzifies the jurisdictions of governments. Governments can pretty well define their boundaries in terms of land, but it's not at all clear who's in charge on the Internet. If you live in California and visit a Web site is in, say, Tennessee or Germany, are you subject to laws that apply in that state or country? In some countries, like Burma, it's a crime to have an unlisted account on the Internet. But attempts to regulate the Internet--in China and elsewhere--have not been effective. Another example is Internet gambling. There have been many efforts to stamp it out, but that's simply had the effect of increasing encryption technology and spurring innovations. No one's in control, and that scares people. 

ROBERT: What traits differentiate the Internet from other forms of communication?

BRUCE: I want to take issue with Frank's statement, because I don't think it goes far enough.

ROBERT: He's rarely accused of that.

BRUCE: In his view, these previous centralizing structures, such as Marxism, or religions before that, are collapsing or at least modifying, and the default is capitalism--which is avarice at the local and national level--and liberal democracy, which is in the eye of the beholder but generally means that people can try doing whatever they want, to some extent. But I think that that system, too, is transitional--and the reason is linked to the Internet and the Web. If you look at the history of evolving technology--printing press, broadcast radio, broadcast TV--each one of these enormously affected culture. With the Internet as the emergent technology, other cultural structures will evolve--political, economic, religious--that will dominate the next century. And so we're in transition.

FRANK: In a sense, liberal democracy doesn't tell you what to think, and so all that is compatible within its framework. But I think it's correct to say that the one big technological change in communications is that broadcasting--that is, TV and radio--went only in one direction, from one source out to many recipients. But the self-organization features begin to appear when people can communicate in both directions.

BART: I hope we're not going to see the end of freedom.

BRUCE: You don't know. We haven't been there yet. We don't know what will happen, that's the point. There's never been a time in human existence, ever, like the present. There's never been a time when you could do what we have just described--that is, sit down and communicate with people all over the world in a very information-rich way. It's never happened.

BART: Will freedom increase or decrease in time?

BRUCE: Did freedom increase or decrease when previous [political-economic] structures changed? Sometimes it got worse; sometimes it got better. It depended. That's probably going to be true in the future. 

BART: Right now, governments haven't figured out the Internet jurisdiction issue, but when they do, you'd expect a loss of freedom, not an increase. 

ROBERT: Information currently on the Web amounts to roughly the total amount in the Library of Congress--twenty terabytes, which is twenty trillion bytes. George, what does this mean?

GEORGE: It goes to what Marvin [Minsky] was saying: there's so much content out there that it becomes extraordinarily important to assess the value of that content. Marvin may be able to judge whether or not the expertise he has access to in Europe makes a valuable contribution to his child development class, but others may not be quite so adept at assessing what they pick up. So the question of separating the wheat from the chaff, whether it be in commerce or science or health, becomes vital, as people try to evaluate what they see out on the Web.

ROBERT: There are new metrics for describing Internet communications, new ways of looking at how people collect information--the so-called laws of surfing: how many visits, or hits, per hour, how many pages per visit, time per visit, and so forth. If a Web site doesn't download in ten seconds, for instance, you go someplace else. 

BRUCE: When you use the word "information" I think you have to be very careful. Information implies some processing. What people see on a Web site is basically data, and turning data into information depends, among other things, on what happens in their minds. Therein lies the big challenge. There's a lot of data out there--how do you convert it to information that's useful to you? 

ROBERT: Let's move beyond accessibility. Marvin, how has the Internet amplified individual choice and the power of the person?

MARVIN: There are rather trivial things, like marketing. If you want to buy something, search engines can find the lowest price for a product. I don't know quite what this will do to normal business practices, but I use it, and things cost twenty to forty percent less.

ROBERT: But I bet you're buying more, though. I do--it gets me all the time. 

MARVIN: Well, I don't have to pay for these things, because--

ROBERT: That's cheating. Come on.

MARVIN: I get these grants, and-- 

ROBERT: What about us normal people? I go on a Web site and I save a few dollars, but then I buy three times as much as I had planned. 

MARVIN: Another way the Internet empowers people is in enabling them to keep in contact. This is going to be a very strange thing. Right now, we have a mobile society: we go to grade school and then we move on, somewhere else, and we learn to make new friends. Here I have Motorola's little gadget that enables me to send E-mail anywhere. What will happen in the future, when children have this access? So when you're seven years old, you make a dozen friends, and now even when they move away, you still have them. You can spend your whole life with your first friends. We may get a society of people who don't bother to form new friendships. 

GEORGE: Even if we continue to make new friends, we may have a better connection to our past--which is especially important for personal integrity as people get older. 

BART: The Internet also lowers transaction costs. If you have a brain tumor, in theory the surgeon could be in France operating a robotic device that cuts your brain while you stay in New York. Your access to skills and services will change dramatically. 

ROBERT: Frank, how does the Internet break barriers between cultures, or between organizations, or within cultures and organizations?

FRANK: Well, it certainly accelerates the decline of sovereignty. As Bart said, communications don't respect international jurisdictions, and so governments can't regulate it. On the other hand, I have to take a little bit of exception and talk about the disadvantages. One of the problems of the Internet is that it encourages a kind of superficiality of human social interaction. A good example of this is your typical USENET group or chat room. You get these so-called flame wars, where people are simply uncivil to one another, and part of the reason is the impermanence of the association. It's not like the bricks-and-mortar kinds of human communities. The people of the Jamestown settlement and the pilgrims landing at Plymouth were stuck with each other; they couldn't get away. But anyone can get in and out of an Internet community whenever he or she wants, so it doesn't lend itself to the development of shared norms and values, the sorts of things that really bind the more traditional kind of human community together.

MARVIN: I disagree with that. I don't like civility. The trouble with insulting people in their presence is that they might hit you. And you can't express yourself very well. I've made many friends on USENET newsgroups whom I've never met--and in many cases I don't hope to meet. These flame wars are wonderful: people tell you what they really think. Or maybe they lie--it doesn't matter. But I think you learn more per hour this way, by getting right to the heart of the matter. The polite people are a waste of time; they write all these words, and I usually turn to another screen when that happens. 

ROBERT: What about Frank's shared norms and values of traditional human communities?
MARVIN: You're talking about people getting into their own culture, and I don't like cultures. I think cultures are a waste of the human mind. A person becomes a kind of robot because he's a Serb or he's a whatever-he-is. Everybody says we should respect these cultures, but why should we? I belong to some scientific cultures on the Net; these are my cultures, and we're very close, because we share ideas much more intimately than we could if we were meeting in person.

ROBERT: But your scientific cultures on the Net aren't any more legitimate than national cultures. 

MARVIN: I don't know. When you meet people, you look at them, and their face or their posture or something may remind you of your Uncle Louie, or some person you don't like. So you're dominated by that stereotype. Face-to-face contact is almost impossible to penetrate. When you talk to people on the Net, though, what you're dominated by is their ideas. 

BRUCE: I have some experience. For the last four or five years, I've been working on how to use the Web for the deliberative discourse on complex issues that affect a lot of people. And we've done a series of experiments. The approach is called HyperForum, which is the copyrighted brand name for it. The idea is to counterbalance the consequences of radio and TV talk shows, which tend to exploit the short term, and Internet chat rooms, which I think are terrible because they're based on instant interaction and posturing--

ROBERT: How does HyperForum work?

BRUCE: It's all non-real-time. There's lots of information, a structure, moderators. You type out what your position is, in a form that other people can read, and then they can comment. Everybody plays under his or her real name; there are no avatars, no pseudonyms, the bios are known. Participation is often restricted to a certain group of people from a certain community, because people will not open up on a difficult subject if they think journalists or outsiders may be listening. Our demonstration topic is sustainability. So there is a way to use the Web for truly thoughtful discourse. But it's extremely difficult to have that kind of discourse in our real-time, shoot-from-the-hip society. 

ROBERT: Are you saying that an unformed discourse is bad?

BRUCE: No, but in this series of experiments we've learned something very important--it's best done if you have a face-to-face meeting at the beginning. Then you go through these extended Internet-based interactions, maybe for three months, following which you have a face-to-face outcome session. One of the conclusions I'm drawing from this empirical research is that it's the hybrid--the human interaction with the technology--that is so powerful. Technology does not and cannot replace human interaction.

ROBERT: Marvin disagrees.

BRUCE: I know. And I differ. I differ very much. I'm concerned that we're at risk when people have completely impersonal communication--especially when they don't even have to be themselves.

GEORGE: One of the challenges we face in the next decade is to figure out the form of the virtual identity versus real identity. For different personalities, different groups, the combination will come together in different ways. We know very little about how the virtual world and the real world will blend in creative combinations. The one thing we do know is that both worlds will remain very important. What I'm hearing now, for example, is people saying, "Wait a minute, let's drive commerce back to the real world. Let's not use the Internet to do all our shopping; let's use it to build a mirror of a community--a local community--so we can send the business back to local shops." So we're seeing mixes and creative blends of the virtual and the physical worlds.

BART: There's a downside that has to do with the issue of civility. You can really hurt people badly by defaming them on the Internet--and you can do it easily, in ways you couldn't otherwise. The accusation that Mr. X beats his wife can become very widespread, given the links you have. And if Marvin has a new book coming out and a graduate student sneaks a copy of the files and dumps them on the Internet, what happens to the proprietorship of Marvin's bits of information? These questions have not been settled. 

MARVIN: But that's not a new problem. Stealing has always been a problem.

BART: Now it's amplified. 

MARVIN: I'd like to challenge the idea of real identity versus network identity, because I think when you're in the same room with a person there's no real identity. You're talking to that person in his role as a salesman, as a member of a religion, as a member of a culture, as a member of a profession, and--

ROBERT: Aren't those real attributes?

MARVIN: Well, I don't know what "real" means. The same applies when you talk to somebody via E-mail; you're communicating with a certain aspect of that person's personality. You could just as well say that the E-mail personality is the real personality and the [face-to-face] personality is just a tradition.

GEORGE: We have to use the words "virtual" and "real" with appropriate definitions, because "virtual" does convey certain real information and "real" does convey certain virtual information-- 

MARVIN: --and lacks others; the "real" personality is very incomplete.

ROBERT: How about privacy? Is it enhanced or compromised by the Internet?

GEORGE: There's great concern over that. In fact, many corporations now state that they won't deal with Web sites that don't have privacy statements [i.e., written policies protecting the confidentiality of customer or visitor data]. So we're seeing this continual tug of war between individual privacy and access to information.

MARVIN: The problem of privacy is always with us, because if you want to prevent crimes, you can just watch everyone all the time--and that annoys people. There's a beautiful book by [award-winning science-fiction writer] David Brin, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, in which he proposes that we now have to choose between two worlds: one where nothing is secret, the police know everything, and we have all sorts of protections, and one where privacy is maintained but there are more dangers. [Brin offers the controversial proposition that the best way to preserve freedom will be to give up privacy; that privacy, far from being a right, thwarts accountability, which is the true foundation of a civil society.]

BRUCE: But the main issue--which is important, because it involves more than just the Internet--is accountability versus privacy. That pertains to the mail, to all other kinds of communication, too. It's just escalated on an enormous scale with the Internet. 

BART: This raises the issue of taxation. How will governments be able to tax people's incomes, if all they see is that there has been a transfer of money from account A to account B?

ROBERT: They should hire you as a consultant.

BART: That won't do the job. I would predict a shift away from income taxes and toward consumption taxes.

MARVIN: We're going to have that anyway. Consider the cost of collection. What fraction of the tax collected is the cost of the tax collection? Not to mention accountants and tax lawyers and the weeks of people's time every year.

ROBERT: Bart, what about the economics of the Internet? Is it really all free?

BART: There's no digital free lunch. There's a price for every bit of exchange on the Net. Every time you send or receive a bit of information, there's a cost associated with it. Historically, the American taxpayer has subsidized the Internet, and we continue to do so to some degree. That will change, and it's a good thing. Otherwise the Internet would be overwhelmed. For example, let's say you, as a user, have a so-called intelligent agent--that is, software that collects information off the Web for you--and that agent creates two agents, and each of those creates two more, and very soon the
Internet is saturated. There has to be a cost. Imagine a newspaper of the future tailored for you, where your agent searches all around the planet for the kinds of information you like--arts, entertainment, sports, the news. That agent should probably have to pay microcurrencies--fractions of a penny--for each piece of information. It won't be a free lunch.

ROBERT: George, your company, TriVergence, tracks the strategic moves of Intel and Microsoft. How much of their business is Internet related? 

GEORGE: A lot. Intel and Microsoft realized that a transition needed to be made from personal computing to the Internet. So both companies are using their balance-sheet cash, billions of dollars, as well as the currency of their stock, to stimulate all the economic drivers of the Internet--bandwidth, content, and so forth. 

ROBERT: How is the Internet affecting international commerce?

FRANK: It will break down commercial barriers, but it also serves as a challenge to governments, because any political system--liberal democracy, particularly--needs to be based on shared values and perspectives. The Internet has the potential for fragmenting society--not just nation states but local areas--into multiple microscopic communities. It puts you in touch with all three hundred people who are interested in growing gladioli on the upper peninsula in Michigan, but you may have nothing to say to people who like growing roses in southern Florida. 

ROBERT: So as groups get more cohesive and don't bother communicating with people in other groups, all these groups grow farther and farther apart.

FRANK: And that has sinister implications. The militias get to talk to one another, and they create a parallel reality that isn't anyone else's reality. 

ROBERT: Marvin, doesn't this worry you?

MARVIN: Oh, sure. But the formation of cultures in general worries me. A culture is a number of people all thinking the same way, and most of our troubles come from small cultures. The quandary is that given modern technology, small cultures have more leverage, but I think we're just jumping from one frying pan into another. 

ROBERT: This brings up freedom of expression--a major issue, obviously, involving everything from pornography and hate groups to controversial theories in science, politics, and religion. All non-mainstream ideas are subject to criticism. 

MARVIN: Right now, pornography is a terrible problem, because we can't face it. But I don't think it's a particularly terrible problem inherently--not if we address it as a society--but I don't know how you deal with these things. 

BRUCE: You're saying that pornography is inherently not a terrible problem, that it wouldn't be a problem if we didn't have all the attributes of human society--our language, our mores, and everything else. But then our world would be completely different. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about that; it's called Brave New World. But this mix of diversity and tension is what it means to be human. 

BART: Think what would happen if Hitler had had the Internet. Or Napoleon. Their reach over humanity would have been greatly extended.

BRUCE: Exactly the opposite. Then all the groups that Hitler and Napoleon suppressed would have been able to use communication against them. The Internet would have leavened the lump.

ROBERT: This is a real dichotomy: on the one hand, dictators can control public opinion with rapid, ubiquitous downloads; on the other hand, subversive information--samizdat--can't be suppressed. 

BART: The Internet amplifies. It amplifies evil and good. 

MARVIN: Yes, there's a serious problem in that people don't understand the difference between popular democracy and representative democracy. The idea of taking a poll five minutes after something has been publicized is very dangerous. So the most important thing that we can do might be educating people not to make decisions based on the latest news, but I don't know who the "we" is.

ROBERT: We are we. This is it. Bruce, what do you see as the evolution of the Internet itself?

BRUCE: Everywhere you turn, there's conflict--privacy versus accountability, centralization versus fragmentation. It's all going on at once. But I think there's a way out of these conundrums. If you were a sociologist on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, looking at this funny just-discovered planet called Earth, you would see that this period of time, this hundred or two hundred years of human history, is unprecedented. There's nothing like it, nor will there ever again be anything like it--because the trends can't be sustained. For one thing, the world's population can't continue to grow at the same rate. So we're in this remarkable transition--I call it the crunch. And this perspective makes you realize that outcomes are not a simple linear progression of what we see now. There are new alignments emerging--and eventually new belief systems. My prediction, for what it's worth, is that the next major religion will develop over the Web. 

ROBERT: Let's get a prediction from everyone. Fast forward a hundred years. How many hours a day will the average person be on-line? 

MARVIN: I don't want to answer that, because I suspect that within a hundred years there will be artificial intelligence systems on the Net, and you won't have to search it yourself, because they will have read all the stuff and answered all your questions. So maybe you won't have to spend any time at all on-line. But seriously--it's impossible, as Arthur Clarke said, to predict more than fifty years ahead in technology, because all the things we don't think can be done will seem like magic. Ten years ahead--that's a different story. 

BRUCE: The limiting factor will be us. I'm not only a futurist, I'm a geologist, so I've been schooled in the idea that we're an evolved species. Now we're in a very stressful period, because our environment is changing rapidly. In fact, we're at the limit. We could go crazy both individually and collectively, because of this rate of change. So there's a limit to how completely we'll be consumed by a cybersociety, because we're biologically primitive. 

GEORGE: We'll maintain a rich blend of the physical world and the Internet world, but I can't go forward a hundred years either. I simply see things moving too quickly and I can't possibly forecast that far.

ROBERT: Bart, you can go a hundred years.

BART: Well, I don't know about that, but as Marvin said, we'll have intelligent software agents doing our work for us, they will always be on-line, and we'll be in wireless, real-time connection with them. So the answer, relatively soon, will be "twenty-four hours a day." Some part of you will always be in communication with some part of the Internet. 

ROBERT: Frank, how do you see communications affecting the political structure of the world?

FRANK: Well, since I've said we were at the end of history, I don't need to see [any further]. But it's probably true that technology will be embedded in everything, exacerbating some social problems--loss of privacy for example. If you want to establish trust with other people, if you want to deal with them on a long-term basis, that's a social problem that isn't solved by technology. In fact, trust gets in the way of privacy, because if you want someone to trust you, you have to reveal something of who you are and establish your credibility. And that's not a problem that can be solved through technology. 

ROBERT: What will be the most significant fact, looking back, about the Internet?

MARVIN: People will say, "Well, the Internet was really important until the development of artificial intelligence in 2073." The second event will be the big one. 

BRUCE: I think the most significant fact is the point that Frank [Fukuyama] made--that radical change in the political and economic relations of people all over the world is happening because of this unprogrammed advent of the Internet and the Web.

GEORGE: Diverse communities. The ability to have a very wide range of communities come together around special interests--commercial, recreational, educational. 

BART: I think, unfortunately, the most significant change will be a form of world government, and the first big step in that direction will happen when the United Nations begins taxing the Internet. 

ROBERT: Will everyone have to wear black [as Bart does]?

BART: They may.

FRANK: Actually, there are two parallel revolutions going on--one in information technology and the other in biotechnology. Whatever is going to happen in a hundred years will come out of a fusion of these two. 

ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

The Internet, like most new technologies, brings us a set of conflicts. The benefits are obvious: there's personal choice and empowerment, unlimited information at the speed of light, and the breaking of boundaries of every kind. But the Internet also threatens to fragment society, isolate communities, depersonalize relationships, distort intimacy, erode privacy, and sacrifice reflection to an addiction to speed. Yet such change is only the beginning. The Internet is not a something, it is virtually an everything; and therein lies a deeper, more fundamental issue. The Internet entails such a profound change for human beings that we who embrace it may be setting in motion a new kind of evolution, literally transforming humanity into a new kind of species. Maybe that's science fiction. Or maybe that's closer to truth. 

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