Not the Internet, it will be the Evernet where you work hard and then work harder.
After reading this, I’m not sure I want the future, not the way it is described here in any case. This from the Saturday Vancouver Sun.
In an interview about the effects of high-speed fibre-optic transmission on life as we know it, Vinod Khosla, 48, by common consent the most important money man in the entire fibre-optic world, who as a young man was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, was asked: What would the future of digital technology and the transparent network (the fibre-optic Evernet) do to us?
“We are enabling a new kind of economy,” Khosla said. “The level of change will be roughly equivalent to what oil did for the industrial revolution.
“The world will be as different 25 years from now as the world now is different from 1900.”
In the future, he said, non-stop connectivity and simultaneous transmission would force all of us to move faster, so much so that slow-moving people, however intelligent, would constantly feel rushed off the feet. In what other ways, I wondered, would we feel discomforted, pushed or even coerced?
“Robots will do a lot of the manufacturing. And 20 years from now 90 per cent of the conversations on the Internet will be generated not by humans but by computers talking to one another. There will be 50 billion computers …Chips will crawl into your clothing, your coffeemaker – your coffeemaker will be looking into your daily calendar.
“We will be connected all the time, monitored by internal chips. Doctors will call us when something is wrong. ‘Your blood pressure is down.’”
The greater boon than mere speed, according to the futurists, will be the explosion of productivity enabled by the Evernet, but that would be possible only if all of us were connected to it.
In the penultimate chapter of his book Telecosm (Free Press, 352pp., $38.50), George Gilder describes a family of the future. Father, mother, daughter and son rise in the morning and immediately begin learning from the Web, shopping on it, doing business and homework on it, even while brushing their teeth. They will save time by accomplishing routine tasks in a few minutes. But then what will they do with the time they’ve saved?
“Since human beings through history have thrived through work, most people will use their liberated time to perform more valuable economic activity. Using the Web, they will be able to work far more efficiently, collaborating with the top experts everywhere and serving the markets around the globe … Under capitalism, this release of entrepreneurial energy will be more morally edifying than the “leisure” diversions that many imagine to be the end and meaning of life.”
So there you have one version of Utopia. We will work so hard and long that we will banish leisure altogether. In the future ruled by Evernet, the time we save isn’t something we can deposit in a bank and then withdraw when needed for gentle use; it is time taken away from the immoral waste of art, entertainment, friendship and thought.
In Gilder’s rapturous enthusiams and Khosla’s hard-nosed projections, the promise of the future as unlimited choice shades unwittingly but menacingly closer to the future as coercion. What of the solitary personality? Those disconnected from the Evernet may discover that their principal remaining freedom is to choose not to matter.
- From “The Speed of Light: The high-stakes race to build the next Internet,”by David Denby in The New Yorker. |
