* check the board presentation notes, merge into one document? Technology, Community, and Privacy Dennis 110 @ 9a ---------------------------------- Welcome, who I am, short. Work in technology? Work with technology? Familiar with Bill Joy's recent article about the dangers of technology? What I'm going to talk about today: 1) Brief history of technology, a short look into the future 2) Geographical communities and interest communities 3) Privacy, access, and control 4) The future - Bill, Ted, and Ray 5) Reading list Questions as we go and at the end 1) Brief history of technology, a short look into the future ------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about technology generally, although lots of examples are from the specific area of computers. In some ways it's one thing we're looking at. Three generations of underlying hardware support so far, mechanical, electrical-mechanical, and solid-state. Based on principals developed in the 1700's and 1800's (slide rule (Napier) and Babbage.) First electro-mechanical computers built in 1930's (Germany) and then England and US during WWII. Solid-state devices developed in the 1960's, basically same underlying technology in use today, just much more powerful due to advances in materials science. The same is true for communication media. The basic principles are (relatively) old, it's the advances in media and related work with integrated circuits that has really driven the change. technology = computers = semi conductor, for our purposes. most of what's driving technology has been the development of the semi-conductor, integrated circuits, and communication media. let's look at the rate of change over the past 50 years by examing the humble memory chip. it's everywhere from a greeting card, a cell phone, your car, laptop, super computer. no - 3 ways to do things, memory, disk, and cpu. They have all advanced at roughly the same pace since they were developed in the '50s and '60s since they are all primarily based on semi conductors so we'll just look at one, memory. 1950 32 Bytes 10^0 one short sentance phone booth 1975 640KBytes 10^3 thesis (200 pages) shoe box 2000 256MBytes 10^6 300 books credit card 2030 about the size of a human brain (storage only) future - same chart for bandwidth and cpu and size of memory chip Six orders of magnitude over 50 years, that's incredible. It's rate of change that's important, not the absolute numbers. Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, was the person to first observe this trend, it's known as Moore's law. Generally it says that every 18 months the price drops by 1/2 (or the power doubles.) If the same were true of advances in farming and food production over the same time period by now any person in the world could grow all the food they need for their family in a garden the size of a shirt-pocket (organically!) The primary paradigm for organizing the instructions and data that make-up the software and information aspects of technology was developed by a mathematician in the 1950's, von Neuman's stored program computer. Most of the advances described above were done within this architecture. Things are getting harder though, transistor density in particular is causing a variety of problems. We could still have another (the fourth) hardware evolution in the pipe, building on this same von Neuman approach. It's also very likely that other ways to organize information and to perform tasks will become as widely utilized as the stored program model. Since we've never really gone through a full paradigm switch before it's difficult to say what the effect of one may be. * quantum computing, nano technology, robotic technology, combinations of these (genetic engineering) NBC vs GNR - 20th century technology vs 21st century technology (nuclear, biological, chemical - genectic, nano, and robotic) * our ability to predict the uses for and affects of the technology we develop is pretty poor * it's the network that's really important, do the same scale up for bandwidth Bandwidth is important now, in ways that it never has been before. Given the focus it may be more likely that a big leap will happen in this area. So what are we doing with the technology, well the Internet, cell phones, pagers, GPS, houses, and drip-tape. 2) Geographical communities and interest communities ---------------------------------------------------- How is it affecting the various communities which make-up society? Geographic communities and interest communities. The net is a great tool for both geographical communities and for interest communities. WayNet, Wayne County Government (marriage, GIS, tax rate, immunizations, local technical people (small scale management issues that parallel what the InterNIC does), others? Linux, and the Open Source movement generally, is the best example of an interest community. It's a social movement as well but only in a relatively small way. It's possible that a broad enough slice of society is becoming comfortable enough with the technology that more strictly social movements will harness that same power. (If you can replace Microsoft think what might be done for education or health-care or local zoning issues...) At the same time that technology makes interest communities much more possible it inhibits the traditional development of geographical communities. Weaving one with strands removed from the other (strands are time and events). The people that brought you the Internet for the most part also brought you Open Source software. This is a new model for doing things. Communities of people around the world can now share their resources to solve problems with technology. We can bring more minds together on a problem then even the largest corporation. IBM's support for Linux, Microsoft's efforts to deride the open source movement. Open source software is slowly but surely getting somewhere. In one sense this may be one of the most important outgrowths of the net, and wouldn't have been possible without it. Oh, btw, it can be a very destructive tool if it's used as TV seems to be these days. Technology doesn't have to isolate us from one another as TV does, it can in fact bind us together in very powerful ways. I think the ability to remove ourselves, to become soley individuals rather than participants in communities, is how technology can be bad for society. TV is a prime example of this. 3) Privacy, access, and control ------------------------------- Privacy and free speech are fundemental rights in this country and they seem to have done a fairly good job so far. The Internet isn't really any different with regards to either right so they should be fully extended to cover the net as well as newspapers, letters, etc. This has been challenged a couple of times, most notably by the telcom act of 1996. Most democratic media, no censorship (yet?), designed and built in the public domain. Still mostly controlled in the public domain! Lower cost of access than any other media, more universal access than other media (although we have a long way to go, about 50% of the people and they are all at the top.) Almost anyone can "tap" an Internetgram to some extent, so it's important that people be careful and consider ways to safeguard themselves. Privacy and universal access will help to ensure that net continues to be the most democratic media. Centralized control can lead to abuse of power, look at the Federal Government. Carnivore. 4) The future ------------- Calm technology, passive computing, body area networks. More and more bandwidth and merging of the media. Always being connected. Merging of various technologies that are still mostly separate. More bandwidth. Open source, Microsoft, and the end of American dominance in software. Danger Will Robinson, Big Brother could be watching you. The problems associated with having all that information easily available to a wide variety of people, not all of whom you can trust. people can only accept, adopt, etc. so quickly. this pace is forcing us to consider things when we may not want to. boats that don't want to be lifted by the rising tide are under a lot of stress. example of the rate of adoption of the phone. a communities ethics and morals used to develop slowly and carefully into strong, widely held, deep, values. the capabilities of the technology are pushing things more quickly than we can apapt, which makes providing a good set of role models difficult. example of sending email to all students, competing needs of spam, free speach, relationship between students and faculty and administration. Our ability to predict the effects of technology on society and communities is pretty poor. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Arthur C Clark, 2001 author.) One of the difficult implications of this is that "intelligent" people often tend to dismiss magic, until it may be too late to contol it's effects. The new Luddite challenge, from Ray Kurzweil's book. Each chapter starts with a quote, this one is about the potential affects of our increased dependance on technology. 5) Reading list --------------- Stephen Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines Beyond Calculation - The Next 50 Years of Computing John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information