Internet 2020: Font of World Peace or Killer Robots?
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a big mash-up of competing visions and predictions about what the Internet will look like in 2020 and its impact on lives, society and governments. Get the full report by clicking here and see the coverage at the San Francisco Chronicle, GigaOm and BBC.
Or, tag alone, as we take a pull out bits and pieces relevant to tech policy....
For context, he report had nearly 750 respondents from a larger pool of invitees. None were "average". Many are familiar oft-quoted names. As the study notes, "participants described their primary area of internet interest as “research scientist” (19%);“entrepreneur/business leader” (12%); “technology developer or administrator” (11%); “author/editor/journalist” (10%); “futurist/consultant” (9%); “advocate/voice of the people/activist user” (8%); “legislator/politician” (2%); or “pioneer/originator” (1%); the remainder of participants (29%) chose “other” for this survey question or did not respond." Some of these folks made predictions about the Internet way back early last decade in a similar effort. You can see how they did here. But, first, back to the future....
Helpful summary graphs of their perspectives on the Big Questions...
And...
Excerpts from the many, many quotes from respondents in the report....
Next-Generation "Network Neutrality" issues....
Peter Kim, senior analyst with Forrester Research: “Profit motives will impede data flow,” he wrote. “Although interconnectivity will be much higher than ever imagined, networks will conform to the public utility model with stakeholders in generation, transmission, and distribution. Companies playing in each piece of the game will enact roadblocks to collect what they see as their fair share of tariff revenue.”
Internet Society board of trustees member Glenn Ricart, a former program manager at DARPA now with Price Waterhouse Coopers, predicts a mix of system regulation. “A few nations (or cities) may choose to make smooth, low-cost, ubiquitous communications part of their national industrial and social infrastructure (like electrical power and roads),” he predicted. “Others (and I'd include the United States here) will opt for an oligopoly of providers that allows for limited alternatives while concentrating political and economic power. Individuals and businesses will provide local enclaves of high quality connectivity for themselves and their guests. A somewhat higher-cost 'anywhere' (e.g. cellular) infrastructure will be available where governments or planned communities don't already include it as an amenity. I believe that the Internet will not be uniform in capability or quality of service in 2020: there will be different tiers of service with differentiated services and pricing.”
Digital Divide...
Jonathan Zittrain, the first holder of the chair in internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, an expert on worldwide access and co-founder and director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, also boiled it down to numbers. “'Anywhere on the globe to anyone' is a tall order,” he responded. “I think more likely 80% of the bandwidth will be with 20% of the population.”
Internet Everywhere...
Bob Metcalfe, internet pioneer, founder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet, now of Polaris Venture Partners, chose to reflect on the arrival of “IP on everything,” the idea that networked sensors and other devices using an internet protocol (IP) will proliferate. “The internet will have gone beyond personal communications,” by 2020, he wrote. “Many more of today's 10 billion new embedded micros per year will be on the internet.”
Which leads to the fear of technology becoming in control....
Autonomous Technology
This prediction was posited:
"By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them."
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), sees extreme danger in the autonomous technology scenario. “This is the single greatest challenge facing us in the early years of the 21st century,” he responded. “We are constructing architectures of surveillance over which we will lose control. It's time to think carefully about 'Frankenstein,' The Three Laws of Robotics, 'Animatrix' and 'Gattaca.'”
The response from the other side of the fence was strong...
Anthony Rutkowski of VeriSign, over the past decade a leader with the Internet Society and International Telecommunication Union, wrote: “Autonomous technology is widespread today and indispensable. Characterizing it as a 'problem' is fairly clueless.” Programmer and anti-censorship activist Seth Finkelstein responded, “This is the AI bogeyman. It's always around 20 years away, whatever the year.” And Alejandro Pisanty, of ICANN and the Internet Society, wrote, tongue-in-cheek: “This dysfunctional universe may come true for several types of applications, on and off the network. We better start designing some hydraulic steering mechanisms back into airplanes, and simple overrides of automatic systems in cars. Not to speak about pencil-and-paper calculations to get back your life's savings from a bank!” Hal Varian of UC-Berkeley and Google wrote, “It's a great science fiction plot, but I don't see it happening. I am skeptical about intelligent agents taking over anytime soon.”
Privacy Versus Transparency
The question posed:
As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals' public and private lives will become increasingly 'transparent' globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture – at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible – this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.
Writer and teacher Douglas Rushkoff: “Things have never been private anyway. The most important thing about transparency is it shows how transparent people have already been, all along, to the institutions that mean to control them.”
Forecaster and strategist Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, says the scenario is “a utopian overstatement.” He explained: “It underestimates the intrinsic flaws in the technology, and the capacity of clever people to subvert the system for selfish ends. The sensor society will be a mixed bag of real benefits and real cost in terms of lost freedoms. That said, we must press for transparency at every opportunity. The only way to control Big Brother is for all the little brothers to watch back. The most we can hope is that we will be able to find a reasonable balance between privacy and the need to know.”
Finally, Hal Varian of Google and UC-Berkeley wrote, “Privacy is a thing of the past. Technologically it is obsolete. However, there will be social norms and legal barriers that will dampen out the worst excesses.”
Most of those "predictions" are so vague they could accurately be applied to anytime in the past 100 years. "Profit motive will impede data flow"? "Communication will increase in flattening world"? "Technology may outpace human control"? Come on.
Posted by: Random | May 13, 2007 at 10:34 PM