The Internet is Eating a Hole in the Global Economy
Introduction
When I was first introduced to the Internet in 1993, I knew right away that it was an important new technology but I really could not grasp the fact that no one (at least at that time) really owned it. Every time someone added a new server, hooked up their PC, created a website, put some wire in their offices, created a new part of the backbone by laying cable of any kind—fibre, twisted pair, co-axial, floated a new satellite in orbit to carry data traffic, the Internet just got bigger.
I remember having discussions with my friends and colleagues about what the killer application was going to be; the consensus then was that it was pornography. Some felt it was email. Others thought movies on demand would be the killer app. I thought the whole thing about THE killer app was bunk; if it was anything, it was the browser which allowed people to share and experience the Internet on a common platform.
If you think about computers and the PC, in particular, the promise of increased productivity never really arrived until these machines could communicate with each other. Yes, email was a part of that revolution but the browser is far more important—allowing bloggers, web masters, teachers, scientists, kids, to explore the world without leaving home and acquire and share massive amounts of data in exactly the same way every time.
The browser also allowed companies, for perhaps the first time ever, to create customized products and services using standard inputs. The ability for the Internet to reverse out a lot of the work to a company’s clients and customers and suppliers has created a unique opportunity to create scalable enterprises from what were before simply service industries or product companies where higher output required more inputs, in a more or less liner relationship. Scalable enterprises with custom outputs from standard inputs are fabulously promising entities as we will see later on.
The Internet is now just over a decade old and while a lot has changed since the Internet exploded onto the mass market in 1993, its adoption to do really great things is actually quite slow. To me, it seems more like electrification—the effects of electrification took many, many decades to change the global economy and to bring productivity benefits to every nook and cranny of our lives. Look around you and see how often electricity helps you in your day-to-day like: it opens your car windows and garage doors for you, it powers your alarm system, you write and communicate electronically because of it, conveyors move your food purchases through the check out counter at the local store, it circulates water in your pool for you, it is taking over more of the day to day work of moving you about (on electric trams, trains, in hybrid cars, …), it helps you cook, keeps you warm, gives you light at night, plays tunes for you on your iPod, and so on. And this is just electrification in personal use—far more important is what it does for industry.
I believe the Internet will be as important or perhaps more important than electrification; but I also believe that it will take at least a century to realize most of its benefits. It’s not that humans can’t see what the Internet might be able to do; it’s just that Homo Sapiens are reluctant and slow to change. It usually takes a great force to overturn this inertia—and that force almost always arrives in the form of competition in the marketplace.
Custom Results from Standard Inputs
Nothing has shaken
our world like the Internet revolution that has taken root in a massive way
since 1994. Despite the technology meltdown of the early part of the 2000s,
particularly severe in the telecommunications field, the Internet revolution is
continuing at a fantastic pace—the changes are still happening but they are
occurring with less hype and more substance-below the waterline, so to speak.
Jack Welch said
that in his 40 years at GE nothing matched the Internet in terms of its
technical or technological impact and Jack saw a lot during his career as a
CEO.
My colleague,
Professor John Callahan, at
What this means is
that we have transitioned from the days of an artisan or guild worker (now
called a 'consultant') who produced one off creations to order (made to measure
suits, for example) through to mass produced products (Henry Ford's automobile
assembly line) and now to made to order, custom products from standard
processes and inputs (like the way Dell's web site allows each client to
customize their PCs to their specifications using only standard Dell inputs and
processes). By reversing out the design work to the customer, Dell has created
a powerful position in the marketplace and become the largest and most
profitable PC maker on the planet.
The internet is all about automation and reversing out the work. Doesn't apply
to me and my business, you say? Well, it turns out that most of us have the
ability to move up the value chain by using some of the revolutionary aspects
of the Internet in our businesses.
Let me give you another example. We have a number of home builders who are
figuring out that they are soon going to be in the web site operating business
and not the home construction business at all.
Today, with all due respect, the home building business is still largely a
craft based endeavour which, if it were compared to the computer industry,
would still produce five function calculators that look like primitive World
War II vintage Turing machines (used for breaking Japanese and German codes)-
big, clunky and expensive.
Ultimately, a home builder's web site will allow consumers to 'goggle' in to
the site in three dimensions, to choose the model that they want, the lot that
they want and then to load up their shopping carts with the features they
desire. As they make changes to their design and add and subtract amenities,
the calculator will tally and show them their costs.
Visa and MasterCard are moving upstream- their credit cards will be used for
everything including buying a new car or buying a home. There is a small but
fast growing market for power cards that carry credit limits in the hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
But this home buying e-commerce transaction using a credit card is only the tip
of the iceberg. In all probability, it is the e-business applications that will
have the most dramatic impacts on home building. Pre-authorized suppliers and
sub-trades will log on to the builder's web site to estimate the volume of work
required and to bid on it. Scheduling, based on just-in-time delivery, will be
net based. Payments will flow business to business via e-payments. Municipal
inspectors will log on to see when they are required for inspections.
Municipalities will recognize that home builders are their clients. The number
of separate subcontractors and trades will fall from 25 or 30 today to perhaps
just 8 or 9.
If former Russian President, Boris Yeltsin in his early days as a construction
boss in Sverdlovsk (1,000 miles east of Moscow) could
build five storey, wood frame apartment buildings in five days (albeit with a
huge crew), surely we can learn to build houses in 45 days or less at higher
levels of quality, with fewer defects, higher margins for the industry and
lower prices for consumers.
The home builder will become a web site operator. Legal closings, land registry
documentation, mortgage financings … all will be web enabled. And what does
this do to profitability? There is no doubt that efficiency will climb,
productivity will increase and in every instance where this has occurred, more
wealth is created for all to share.
Americans are early adopters of technology and none is more earth shattering
than their embrace of the internet. As a result, the Internet is eating an
enormous hole in the world's economy. After all, it does not matter how little
someone is paid in the third world, the Internet can do it faster and cheaper.
Old-line industries are going through incredible re-engineering.
A national advertiser who wanted to launch a national billboard advertising campaign
just five years ago went through a six to twelve month process. They drew up a
campaign theme, got the creative done by an agency, had the agency contract
billboard locations with up to 25 regional billboard companies, sent the
artwork out to all of them by courier, received back the proofs from all 25 for
approval, made the necessary changes to get consistency in the artwork, sent
them back, checked them again, signed off finally. The images were then often
hand painted on huge strips and, at last, a crew went on site and glued them to
the board.
Today, billboard companies put their inventory of available billboard locations
on their web sites and agencies can book and pay for that inventory on line.
Agencies then can download their artwork over high speed lines and, as
billboard companies merge and become national and as they move towards
replacing conventional billboards with high definition video boards, an agency
can place a national campaign in a matter of hours or days. It does not matter
how little a third world labourer is paid; the web
can do it faster and cheaper.
That means that the entire global economy has to move up the food chain—and the
only way to do this is to invest in education, medical care and social order,
which happen to have been
Scalability
When I give my first
lecture to my students in Entrepreneurialist Culture, I take them through the
simplest of all business models—the barber shop. A business model is (usually)
a one page flow chart which shows the relationships between customers,
suppliers and the business. Information flows from the business (say, for my
Barber Shop example, information on hair styles and prices) to the customer and
money flows back from the client to the Barber for his services. Information is
also flowing from suppliers to the business (say, types and prices of shampoos
or disinfectants) and money is flowing from the business to the suppliers for
their products or services. Now there is one more dimension to a business
model—it is orthogonal to the flow chart. It is how the business markets and
sells its products and services to its client base.
If the cost of
acquiring a new customer is too high, the business will fail, ALWAYS. So
without an effective way to market your business, you are dead (or, at least,
your business is dead). In the case of a barber shop, their marketing might
consist of nothing more than a rotating barber pole on a busy street. It seemed
to work for about 80 years anyway.
Now if a barber
wanted to expand his business, he needed to hire other barbers, add more chairs
and maybe add more space too to his premises. This is not what I would call a
highly scalable business. It is more like the barber has created a paying JOB
for himself but not much more than that. After he retires, the shop probably
will close or be sold for a de minimus amount. The challenge we put to our students is
to create a business that does more than just give you a JOB. It must create
wealth and it must be able to outlive you.
If generating a JOB
for yourself is all you can do, then you are really better off working for
someone else. Why go through all the struggle and agony and worry of being an
entrepreneur when you can just get a JOB that will pay you about the same
amount and take weekends off without a care in the world?
So now I turn to my
students and ask them: How would you make this business scalable so the Barber
can create wealth for himself and a business that would outlive him? They
generally just stare at me at this point. But today, it can be done.
What if the barber
added spa services to his business model? Now he has higher margin services to
sell (massage therapy, hair coloring (worth about $1,000 per year for every
client he adds in this category), pedicures, manicures, etc.) His average sale
per customer is going to shoot way up (spa enthusiasts think nothing of
dropping $250 on a few hours at the spa compared with maybe 20 bucks for a haircut
for a guy). At this point, the barber has added more revenues and more margin
for each square foot of floor space he is using but his enterprise still isn’t
truly scalable.
What our barber
needs to do next, is to view himself as essentially a matchmaker between
customers on the one hand and his suppliers on the other. His suppliers now are
the manicurists, hair stylists, masseurs, etc. His real business is operating a
call centre or website (usually both) where customers can log on (or call in)
and select the services they want and the providers they want. The providers
can choose which of these appointments they will take on and specify what
products they need to complete their jobs. Now the former suppliers (of
shampoos, hair colours, massage oils, etc.) are suppliers to the Barber’s
suppliers and not to him.
Now he has a new set
of upscale clients to cater to, higher margins and a call centre/website that
is working for him. But there is more. The Spa (no longer a barber shop and the
rotating barber pole is long gone) might see some of those information flows
and money flows start to reverse themselves. For example, if he is selling
enough product, suppliers might give him larger discounts for volume buying,
they might offer him free trips to fashion centres like New York and London
which he can use to give away to special clients or to outstanding service
providers or even take advantage of them himself. Now information is flowing
from the Spa to suppliers about volumes and about the type of celebrity clients
he is now serving and money is flowing backwards from suppliers to him (for
trips and in the form of larger volume discounts or in the form of free product
samples or money for better product placement, e.g., at the end of shelves
where more customers will see them and presumably buy them).
He might even pay celebrities to come to his Spa, to
endorse his products and services. So again information flows and money flows
are reversing themselves here.
Now when he views
himself as something apart from the business, he is starting to create a
business model that is scalable, that can work for him even if he is not in the
Spa. He might, for example, discover that he could add the sale of gift
certificates to his website. No one buys gift certificates from a barber shop
but they sure do for a Spa. (And note that about 30% of those gift certificates
are never redeemed so that money falls right to the bottom line). His business
model is now the type where the harder you work the more money you make; it is
scalable (he can add any number of new services or products to his website
because it does not create more work for him—it is more work for his service
providers and clients and suppliers to his service providers) and it reverses
out some of the work to clients and suppliers. The ultimate goal is to create a
business where you can make money ‘even when you are lying on a beach’. That is
the road to wealth. If we can do this for a barber shop, imagine what a
properly designed business model can do for you?
Biz Models Count, a
Lot
Rob Hall, an Ottawa-based Internet pioneer (Internic.ca, Zip.ca, etc.), has hit another home run with Pool.com. He launched it in the summer of 2003 and it is a runaway hit. Here's why Pool.com is a "heads Rob wins, tails Rob wins", revolutionary business model:
1. SnapNames.com was the recognized leader in backordering deleted domain names. Say you owned the domain name MyGreatCompany.ca or .de or .uk or .ne or .com.au, … and wanted the dot-COM TLD (Top Level Domain)equivalent but someone else had it.
2. With Snap names, clients had to pay $60 USD per year for each domain name they wanted to backorder and if the name you want is deleted by the dot-COM domain name registry (Verisign), then they try to get it for you (but there are no guarantees).
3. So along comes Pool.com.
4. Now you can register any domain name that you want to back order for free with Pool.com. Hundreds of thousands do. You only pay if Pool.com is successful at getting your backordered domain name.
5. More than 20,000 dot-COM names are deleted each day. So Pool.com is bound to have many names on its list that drop every day.
6. If there is more than one client that has backordered the same domain name, then here is what they do:
"You pay only when we successfully secure a domain for you. We charge a low US$60 fee which includes a 1 year domain registration. In the case of a domain backordered by multiple users, a short auction will take place and the winning bid replaces our standard fee." Pool.com, December 2003.
7. They are currently doing over 300 deleted names a day (at $60+ USD each), 7 days a week. Note that almost 60% of backordered names are wanted by more than one client so mini-auctions are happening all the time—with an average price exceeding $200 USD, so do the math. This became a $1.5m USD per month business from nothing in just a few months. Gross margins are in excess of 80%.
8. The $60 USD also includes a one year registration so they are automatically locked in to their domain name registrars and Rob can sell them a ton of other things like email, hosting, etc.
9. Having millions of domain names registered with Pool.com gives Pool.com a chance to sell them other things even if their backordered domains never come up.
10. Rob has developed a good algorithm for attacking registry sites with multiple channels (as of November 2005, he has over 120 registrar channels to the registry) so his success rate at getting deleted names is more than 60%. (Snap Names was less than 50 %.) Pool.com’s goal is 80 % with maybe 70+ % actually do-able.
11. All the IP lawyers, speculators and sophisticated Internet users moved over to Pool.com in just a few months.
12. This business is going through geometric growth.
So biz models do count, n'est-ce pas?
Death of IP
No discussion of the
impact of the Internet would be complete without a look at what is the role of
the protection of Intellectual Property in this new age.
To my mind, information wants to be free. MIT has taken the position that it will put all of its course outlines, course materials, even examinations on the web for free. The engineers at MIT are among the smartest in the world. They feel confident that this will enhance the MIT experience; essentially, they are saying that they don't care if someone on another part of the planet wants to teach an MIT course or use their material. They believe that the spread of knowledge can only benefit humankind. MIT will instead, as my friend Professor Tony Bailletti says, sell the 'delta' factor; that is, the opportunity to actually be in a classroom with the creators of the material; to be exposed to their minds; to experience first hand the Socratic method of student/teacher interaction.
What an incredible
opportunity that is for students.
The idea that large
companies should prosecute kids and their parents and grandparents for
‘stealing’ ‘their’ songs by downloading them from the Internet is repugnant.
The real theft is how little artists actually get from mega corporations after
they deduct huge salaries for executives and the cost of their bloated
bureaucracies before giving the creative artist her/his first royalty cheque.
The true delta factor is being at a U2 Concert or a Green Day Concert—now those
are powerful experiences.
Films, songs, books
copied for personal use was supposed to be protected under US law. No longer it
appears.
I have become
convinced that, on the whole, patents are nothing more than restrictions on
trade that drive up the cost of life saving medicines and all other products.
Trademark and
copyright law has become so perverted now that it is practically impossible to
build on the work of others. When Walt Disney created his magical works—Snow
White, Cinderella, Pinocchio …—where do you think he got those stories from,
his own head? No he got them from the commons—the public domain where all work
should end up. What if Shakespeare’s works were still held in copyright? What a
poorer world we would live in. What about Beethoven? Strauss? Wagner?
Now no one can use
Mickey Mouse in any fashion whatsoever without the permission of the Disney
Company, which you would never get. When Mickey’s likeness was about to pass
into the public domain, no worries, the Disney Company just asked the US Congress
to change the law and extend copyright protection for another 80 years.
Ever listen to the
radio? Ever heard a cover tune that you liked better than the original? Sure
you have. What Hip Hop artists are doing with some old songs is fantastic. What
if copyright law were used to prevent any of us from building on the work done
by others? What if scientists and mathematicians started using patents and
copyright law to stop their work from being used by others? They already have.
They are patenting life forms, software code and much more.
This is bad policy,
bad for the global economy, bad for creative artists and makes the world a less
interesting place to live in. Every inch of the planet is owned or claimed by
someone. 20,000 years ago, if you didn’t; like where you were, you could just
up and more. The Internet used to be like that but now it’s full of lawyers
trolling for victims.
Why
do we Need Personal Web Sites?
As intellectuals, we have a valuable and perishable resource—our minds and our
individual knowledge and experience. We invest a great deal of resources in
training ourselves, learning our professions and practicing what we have
learned. We learn by doing and we learn by failing too—we learn from experience
and sometimes we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes.
The concept of a PWS is that if we host our personal intellectual property (IP) on our PWSs and develop it in a rigorous manner over our entire careers; we have a way of preserving and sharing our expertise with others that has never been available to any generation that has gone before.
Your PWS is, however, your opportunity to contribute to and be a part of this new world-wide 'hive' mind. Ultimately, if your personal IP is important enough, your PWS will make money for you 'while you are lying on a beach'; that is it will create value separate from hourly effort and independent of its creator and it will outlive you too.
I only wish that the web had been as functional when I was twenty; thirty-three years ago!
I also have a somewhat selfish reason for wanting the students to have PWSs; instead of emailing their assignments to me and
clogging up our network with huge files or, alternately, giving me a wad of
paper, I just want their URLs. It also is a resource for future classes to be
able to see what previous students have done and, reversing out the work to
students, I am now letting them upload their files to their PWSs
instead of trying to do it all myself!
What
does a Student PWS Look Like?
Well, initially, a student will have his or her résumé on their PWS. They can post their assignments there for their Profs to review. They can post corroborative work there for other student team members to browse and contribute to. Wikkis allow people to cooperate and work share more efficiently now than ever before. The largest collaborative project ever has become something of world-wide project with 100,000s of contributors: http://wikkipedia.com/.
PWSs can have password protected spaces where they can post family history, family photos and other important parts of their lives.
Students can preserve some of their best work; their portfolios; letters of reference (some of the latter presumably in a password protected space).
Young people will find myriad uses that can't even be imagined now; their PWSs will become their alter egos; their personal diaries of a life lived and a journey with many twists and turns. Music, photographs, video, audio, personal radio, text, drawings and every form of communication is a potential addition to a PWS that accretes over a long period of time: it is like the sedimentary layers of the ocean floor, quite impressive, given enough time.
So
What Type of Other Uses can you Put your PWS to?
Well, we have pretty basic ones for student PWSs, like helping them get a job. There is also the
advantage of having a domain name that belongs to you, for life. It comes with its own email address, also for life—where
people can contact you forever. Never allow your PWS to be hosted by your
employer or, even if you are an entrepreneur, by your own company.
Why you may ask? Because you could part
company with your employer and he or she may argue that your personal IP and
your personal email address book belongs to them. Now look where you are. You
have lost an important part of your personal network. I have over 3,500 email
addresses in my address book and I enjoy getting email from former students
from around the globe as they move through their careers.
Don’t think for a moment that you can’t lose
control of your own company, by the way, you can. You may have built that
business from the ground up but someone else could end up owning it, you never
know. It happens. Tough. Move on. Get a (new) life. But at least have your PWS
and your personal IP stay with you—never pledge that for a loan or leave it
under someone else’s control. Comprehendo?
For the Senators (Ottawa Senators Hockey
Club), their most valuable possession, other than their player contracts, is
their list of season tickets holders and sponsors now all email or mostly email
contacts. How would you like it if your lifetime list of contacts was in the
possession of someone else?
The most valuable thing you actually own is
your training and experience, your creativity and education. When you walk out
the door from a JOB or your last startup, it goes with you. And it doesn’t hurt
if all your personal research, writing, email contacts and other material is
safely stored on your personal ws. And don’t forget to make a physical back up
of your data—don’t just use an online backup service. Make CD Rom and DVD
backups and remember the most reliable data backup by far is still an acid free
paper copy stored in a safe, dry place.
It is possible that future generations of
archaeologists will rue the advent of the computer age—the latter part of the
20th Century and the 21st Century may be huge information
voids to them. Information on your hard drive is fantastically perishable; CD
ROMs and DVDs are a bit better but we are talking about a few years, a decade
at most. Compare that to the millennia of cave paintings, papyrus and clay
tablets. The Digital Age could be a disaster in terms of passing on our
accomplishments to future generations and no species on the planet is more
dependent on the accurate transmission of data, knowledge and know how from one
generation to the next than humans.
Anyway, try to choose a domain name that has
personal meaning for you (don’t use things like cooldude103.com; you might think
that is pretty neat when you are 15 but it looks ugly when you are 25). And host your PWS with someone reliable.
So what might go up on your PWS or what uses
you can put your PWS to? Here is my list:
- Résumé
- Memories of a life lived and a personal journey
- Great work done by you
- Family and friends spaces
- Ways for you to make money with your personal IP
- Your personal data and files
- Your personal applications
- Links to important places
- So many other uses I can’t enumerate them all.
Your PWS has to take advantage of things like:
- Reversing out the work (i.e., the world is becoming a self help place)
- Process automation
- Groupware or shareware
- Source Control
- e-payments
- Data Management
- Relationship management
- Supply chain management
- Customization using standard inputs (moving up the value chain)
- Simplicity and focus (at least in terms of making money from it)
- Guerrilla marketing
- Marketing by media release
- e-commerce
- e-business
- the browser
- intricating the web in work flow processes (move your desktop to the web-- everything is on the web (either in a public space or private, password protected space) unless you specify differently; e.g., the MIT model: IP wants to be free but 'tools' cost you money.)
- Making money while you lie on a Beach
- Mapping Interface
Your
PWS is a first step towards a weightless computing future and one in which you
can live forever. Weightless computing means that one day soon you will be able
to be anywhere, in an Internet café in
Now just take your credit card and your back pack with you and you can work from anywhere.
I
can’t really work at all now without my personal ws. It isn’t just that I post
assignments to it for students or use it to further my research. I mean, sure,
I use it to do surveys and collect interesting (at least to me) data. I also
enjoy publishing stuff to it and people tell me they enjoy reading it (at least
some do). But it is much more than this. I notice that at a local
Some day, you may find ways to create new value for yourself with your PWS—maybe it’ll make money for you while you lie on a beach.
I include here a scanned in obituary of a gentleman (see below). I don’t usually read the obits but somehow I was drawn to this one. I read about his achievements, his service in the RCAF and his many other involvements and it struck me, how sad that upon his passing, all this is lost.
And then I thought, don’t let this happen to you. Build a PWS that creates value for you during your life and value for your heirs after your passing. See the Story of Rachel for example.
Imagine if creative types like A. A. Milne (creator of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin and the 100 acre wood, for example) had access to the web during his life? Maybe Mr. Milne could have created value for his family (for a period of time until his worked passed into the commons after his passing) instead of just the Disney Company and some others who now have control over his work.
The Internet at Age 50
What will the
Internet look like at age 50? No one knows. No one knew the incredible
diversity of uses that electric power could be put to at the dawn of the age of
power.
But we can speculate.
I think that the use of stereoscopic space will be one of the most far reaching
changes the Internet will bring to the planet. You should read Neal
Stephenson’s Snow Crash, not because
it is a particularly good novel but because his description of the metaverse is terrific.
The architectural
uses of stereoscopic space are likely to have a significant impact on building
design and city sustainability. Stereo space harnesses individual left eye and
right eye feeds for graphics, text, animation and video together with sound,
vibration and music so that architectural spaces can be used in new ways to
educate, entertain, inform, interact, travel, meet, communicate, work,
co-operate, produce, research, consult, sell, market, host and teach—all without
the physical requirement of moving people, goods or services around the planet.
The impacts of
stereo space on the software of our cities will assist the system in moving to
higher levels of sustainability both in terms of reduction in environmental impacts
and much higher utilization of existing infrastructure as homes become
workplaces and workplaces become homes leading to both a safer environment and
a more efficient form of urban agglomeration with fewer pressures on
transportation systems.
In Stephenson’s metaverse, people are represented by their
avatars—representations of self, rendered by their PCs. These avatars from
anywhere on the planet with a fast Internet connection can meet, greet, mingle,
discuss, seal deals in the metaverse without having
to leave home. (Stephenson’s feat is even more impressive given that he wrote
Snow Crash in 1989 and 1990, long before the Internet had resonated with the
masses.)
What is the fastest
growing part of the Canadian and
Stereo
space will almost certainly appear in the next two decades, especially if
Maybe the best way to think about stereo space is to take the Spiderman ride at Universal Studios in FLA; imagine giving a lecture to thousands or tens of thousands of students in 3D stereo space or imagine a concert, soccer match or football game ‘live’ in stereo space where you can goggle in and watch the event from anywhere, even the field of play or from the conductor’s viewpoint.
"The
best way to predict the future is to invent it," Computer Scientist
Alan Kay, Founder, Xerox’s
Email will be far
less important but work sharing will be far more advanced than it is now.
The Internet will
almost certainly eat television, radio, telecommunications, film, video,
photography, books, music, teaching, meeting, selling, negotiating, letter
writing, newspapers, classifieds, yellow page directories, home selling, home
building, service businesses, product businesses, consulting, software, gaming,
gambling, warfare, security, pretty much every type of activity that humans
engage in except perhaps eating and procreating.
Where
does this New Journey Take You?
The Human/Computer Interface has come a long way in the last 60 years. Computers were initially developed by the allies in WWII as de-encryption tools. The interface has evolved from the teletype to punch cards and from there to line commands and now to the GUI. If Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is right, the Human/Computer Interface will move to an avatar based one. People will ‘goggle’ into the Internet and use their avatars to meet, greet and exchange information. By the way, in a survey done by Business Week a few years ago, something like 36 of the top 50 tech. executives had read this book so you should probably read it too.)
Developing Your PWS, Avatar and
Cyber-borg
Your avatar and your personal agent (a software agent that helps you navigate the web) will be combined with your PWS to create a powerful new tool for self expression and learning. They will alert you to new IP that might interest you, new films or music too. They will make travel arrangements for you and keep your calendar too. They will become your friends; they will learn from you and you will learn from them. They may go to school with you and will certainly be on the job with you. Your avatar gives you corporeal form in the Metaverse; your personal agent is a learning and personal services tool.
After your PWS, avatar and personal software agent reach a certain minimum level of sophistication, it becomes self actualizing. It is neither robot nor cyborg- it is a cyber-borg. Your cyberborg has access to all the tools on the web including increasingly sophisticated AI software agents that can help you in everything from figuring out the best mortgage deal for the new house you and your partner just bought to an investment strategy that will allow you to retire early to the optimal rate of flow (maintaining laminar flow, say) in a water supply network you are designing.
The cyber-borg learns what you learn; it knows what you know. It is created when you are created; it experiences what you experience. It is given control over a Real Life (RL) entity at nano scale that uses telepresence to go where you go and interface with RL. It transcends RL and the Metaverse. It can continue to exist after you die and preserve the knowledge and experience you have gained in a lifetime of effort.
Your cyber-borg needs to be taught morality and discipline. It needs to respect Isaac Asimov's rules of robotics (slightly abridged here):
Rule 1- I shall cause no harm to humans;
Rule 2- I shall not stand by and allow others to harm humans;
Rule 3- I shall protect my own existence except where such effort conflicts with Rules 1 and 2.
After you pass away, your cyber-borg will need to have a job. It will compete for resources in the Metaverse; higher skilled cyber-borgs will be in greater demand and will be paid more, one assumes. An architect's cyber-borg can presumably get a job in an office running a CAD system; setting up functional programming surveys and much more. It needs to get along with people and other cyber-borgs. It needs to be able to work in teams. I suppose they will compete for resources so that they can get more real estate (for data storage, say) or, more fundamentally, so that no one pulls the plug on a useless cyber-borg that simply takes up netspace or breaks the law (see below).
ps. Cyberborgs may
become unstable. Since they are lifelong companions and capable of learning,
they are likely to experience a wide range of human emotions without the
ability to express these fully by, say, experiencing pleasure, falling in love,
getting relief through sleep, etc. Cyberborgs would
have to be subject to the same types of sanctions as their human counterparts
for breaking the law including remediation or even, ultimately, termination.
Conclusion
We could get even more fanciful in our description of the
Internet Age at 50. Perhaps we will have bio implants so we are wired to the
Internet at all times. I know that I have wanted to ask the
But from what I can see of Crackberry addicts (Blackberry addicts), this may not be a great idea. We may already have too much ON time and too many communications channels and too much interaction. I have a PC at my University office, one at my real estate office, one at home (one of seven in our house); I have at least 15 email addresses. I run more than a dozen web sites and have started a blog. I have four phones (three with voicemail on them) and one cell phone (also with voicemail). It’s way too much. Clients sometimes get mad at me if I take a day off from my consulting practice. I refuse to let my students email me, preferring to stay after class for 45 minutes to answer their questions.
I think people are already dying of overload from all of this stuff coming at them at the speed of light. Maybe your personal AI (Artificial Intelligence) cyberborg will help stem the tide by sorting through the chaff. I know that I have organized my email so that if anyone marks their message as URGENT or wants an automatic answer as soon as I open it, these messages AUTOMATICALLY go to the bottom of the pile. If everything is urgent, nothing is.
I certainly notice that everyone’s patience is wearing thin. If you were out of town and missed a credit card payment, used to be that the card company wouldn’t bother to call you for at least a couple of months. I mean, big deal. You don’t pay on time, they get to charge you interest usually at usurious rates. But now, there is a whole system that comes down on your head within a couple of days. You forget to pay your rent to your residential landlord, you get maybe two days of grace but probably only one.
Some of my clients want one hour (or five minute!) turnaround on their emails. They want to IM (Instant Message) me; interrupting my work flow with no regard to my privacy or wishes. It’s too much.
The Internet is the greatest productivity tool ever invented and we have seen just a fraction of what it can do. But if we don’t watch it, it will become the preserve of mega corporations, mega governments and mega bureaucracies and they will control our lives through it.
Copyright. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, B. Eng. (Civil), M. Eng.-Sci., PhD.,
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/