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I do not believe there will be a Bit
Police. The FCC is too smart. Its mandate is to see
advanced information and entertainment-service
proliferate in the public interest. There is simply no
way to limit the freedom of bit radiation any more than
the Romans could stop Christianity, even though a few
brave and early data broadcasters will be eaten by the
Washington lions in the process. - 1993
~~~
Why are we worrying about billions
of bits per second into the home when we haven't used
1.5 to 6 million bits per second creatively? Yes, I will
need those billions when I watch holographic television
or expect a can of spinach to be teleported into my home.
But in the meantime? Dear telephone companies, now that
your argument prevailed, please take advantage of your
installed base of copper twisted pair, which can provide
so much more than you are telling people - including
video on demand. - 1993
~~~
If the broadcast model is colliding
with the Internet model, as I firmly believe it is, then
each person can be an unlicensed TV station ... Most
telecommunications executives understand the need for
broadband into the home. (Recall, broadband, for me, is
1.5 to 6 Mbits per household member, not Gbits). What
they cannot fathom is the need for a back channel of
similar capacity. - 1994
~~~
Most people generally make a false
assumption that more bits are better. More is more. In
truth, we want fewer bits, not more ... Just because
bandwidth exists, don't squirt more bits at me. What
I really need is intelligence in the network and in my
receiver to filter and extract relevant information from
a body of information that is orders of magnitude larger
than anything I can digest. To achieve this we use a
technique known as "interface agents." Imagine
a future where your interface agent can read every
newspaper and catch every broadcast on the planet, and
then, from this, construct a personalized summary.
Wouldn't that be more interesting than pumping more
and more bits into your home? - 1994
~~~
All of us are quite comfortable with
the idea that an all-knowing agent might live in our
television set, pocket, or automobile. We are rightly
less sanguine about the possibility of such agents living
in the greater network. All we need is a bunch of
tattletale or culpable computer agents. Enough butlers
and maids have testified against former employers for us
to realize that our most trusted agents, by definition,
know the most about us. - 1994 The future of the computer
and communications industries will be driven by
applications, not by scientific breakthroughs like the
transistor, microprocessor, or optical fiber. The
problems now stem not from basic material sciences but
from basic human needs. - 1994
~~~
The money to be made is in the
blades, not the razors ... What I am talking about is
information about information, and the processes by which
we filter the onslaught of bits. The computer
industry's blades may not only be modeled after Bambi
or Tetris. Instead, I see a huge market in the agent
business, modeled more after the added value of an
English butler or the Librarian of Congress. Yes, making
and owning the bits is certainly better than simply
carrying, storing, or churning them. But there may be
another bit business: understanding the bits. So far, in
the theater of Wall Street, the personal information
filter business has only played a bit part. I assure you
that it will be tomorrow's lead role on the stage of
success. - 1994
~~~
Privacy may be more attainable in
the world of bits than in the world of atoms. But we can
also lose it faster if we don't pay attention. -
1995
~~~
The next Bill Gates is not Marc
Andreessen ... There will be many browsers, hundreds of
them ... Netscape is but one awning on the Virtual
Boulevard of Digital Cafes. Java is the coffee. -
1995
~~~
The information superhighway may be
mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about
tomorrow. It will exist beyond people's wildest
predictions. - 1995
~~~
The entire economic model of
telecommunications - based on charging per minute, per
mile, or per bit - is about to fall apart. As human-to-
human communications become increasingly asynchronous,
time will be meaningless (five hours of music will be
delivered to you in less than five seconds). Distance is
irrelevant: New York to London is only five miles further
than New York to Newark via satellite. - 1995
~~~
We are clueless about the ownership
of bits. Copyright law will disintegrate ... Bits are
bits indeed. But what they cost, who owns them, and how
we interact with them are all up for grabs. - 1995
~~~
Fashion accessories will take on new
roles, becoming some of the most important Internet
access points, conveniently surrounding you in a
Person-Wide Web. How better to receive audio
communications than through an earring, or to send spoken
messages than through your lapel? Jewelry that is blind,
deaf, and dumb just isn't earning its keep. Let's
give cuff links a job that justifies their name ... And a
shoe bottom makes much more sense than a laptop - to boot
up, you put on your boots. When you come home, before you
take off your coat, your shoes can talk to the carpet in
preparation for delivery of the day's personalized
news to your glasses. - 1995
~~~
Noncontact coupling between your
body and weak electric fields can be used to create and
sense tiny nano-amp currents in your body. Modulating
these signals creates Body Net, a personal-area network
that communicates through your skin ... Your shoe
computer can talk to a wrist display and keyboard and
heads-up glasses. Activating your body means that
everything you touch is potentially digital. A handshake
becomes an exchange of digital business cards, a friendly
arm on the shoulder provides helpful data, touching a
doorknob verifies your identity, and picking up a phone
downloads your numbers and voice signature for faithful
speech recognition. - 1995
~~~
When you buy a can of Coke, you are
paying a few cents for the drink and the can, and
nanodollars for television advertising. No doubt, the
means of financing the bits will look strange to our
great-great grandchildren. But for today, it's what
makes television work. Eventually, we'll find new
economic models, probably based on advertising and
transactions. Television will become more and more
digital, no matter what. These are givens. So it makes no
sense to think of the TV and the PC as anything but one
and the same. It's time TV manufacturers invested in
the future, not the past - by making PCs, not TVs. -
1995
~~~
It doesn't matter whether you
call the receiver a TV or a PC. What's going to
change is how those bits are delivered. They don't
have to be in real time. They can trickle in. They can
come in bursts. They can come on demand. They can be
pulled in by your machine because it looked at the
headers and decided which programs it wanted. Gone will
be the days of lock-step obedience when everyone stops
eating at 8 o'clock to huddle around the screen and
be there on time for the bits. People are going to look
back on those days as truly ridiculous. - 1995
~~~
By the year 2005, Americans will
spend more time on the Internet than watching network
television and videocassette rentals will have been
replaced by easily available video-on-demand services. -
1995
~~~
In 2020, people will look back and
be mighty annoyed by our profligate insistence on wiring
a fiber-coax hybrid to the home rather than swallowing
the cost of an all-fiber solution ... This is one of the
few benefits of a government-owned monopoly: Italy will
have a far better multimedia telecommunications system
than the United States by 2000. - 1995
~~~
It will take us years to build
digital libraries and longer to retool copyright law ...
In a digital world, the bits are endlessly copyable,
infinitely malleable, and they never go out of print ...
Pass a Bill of Writes - a digital deposit act - requiring
that each item submitted to the Library of Congress be
accompanied by its digital source. Make it illegal to
obtain copyright otherwise ... Instead of being the
"library of last resort," it might become the
first place to look ... A Library of Progress could be in
the pockets of tomorrow's kids. Having a Bill of
Writes now means that we can spend the next 20 to 50
years hammering out new digital-property laws and
international agreements without stunting our future. -
1995
~~~
The power of the word is
extraordinary, and if the word is embodied as text, that,
too, is powerful, regardless of whether the text lives as
ink on pulp or signal on fiat-panel display. Words
aren't going away, and I think the book/no-book
argument is dumb once you realize that all we're
talking about are variations in display technology.
I'm not anti- book or anti-print; it's just that
soon we're going to be doing our "printing"
in a different medium. - 1995
~~~
The Net makes it impossible to
exercise scientific isolationism, even if governments
want such a policy. We have no choice but to exercise the
free trade of ideas ... For example, newly industrialized
nations can no longer pretend they are too poor to
reciprocate with basic, bold, and new ideas ... Now that
ideas are shared almost instantly on the Net, it is even
more important that Third World nations not be idea
debtors - they should contribute to the scientific pool
of human knowledge ... To think you have nothing to offer
is to reject the coming idea economy. In the new balance
of trade of ideas, very small players can contribute very
big ideas. - 1995
~~~
Will we one day have robots running
around who used to carry our groceries but are now
hurling paving stones at us? I doubt it. I don't
foresee a time when we are treated like pets by a culture
of super computers that have us on invisible leashes
while we are house training ourselves walking on the
grass. Hans Moravec thinks that once computers are
smarter than humans, we'll retire, and computers will
become even smarter. I think the issue has more to do
with consciousness and volition than being smart.
Machines will be smarter than people, but I don't
believe in artificial consciousness. - 1995
~~~
Being digital is positive. It can
flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize
control, and help harmonize people in ways beyond not
knowing whether you are a dog. In fact, there is a
parallel ... between open and closed systems and open and
closed societies ... The nation- state may go away. And
the world benefits when people are able to compete with
imagination rather than rank. - 1995
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