|
 , the principal architect
currently developing Open Croquet, is also CTO,
for 3Dsolve. He's been focused for 20 years
on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new
user environments and entertainment. He created
"The Colony," the very first 3D
interactive game and precursor to today's
"first-person shooters" like Quake. He
co-founded Red Storm Entertainment with Tom
Clancy, and Timeline Computer Entertainment with
Michael Crichton. Croquet is the culmination of
his work on 3D architectures for complex
peer-to-peer environments.
What is your
greatest fear for the future of networked
technologies? I don't have any
particular fears per se. There's the standard
fear that in the future everyone will be given a
button they can press that will destroy the world
– everyone will have their own. That's
probably not too far from the truth as these
things that we are doing, these things that we
are creating are extraordinarily powerful.
Biotech, computer technologies, personal nukes
– it's all happening. It's all
going to be available. I actually think that as
we mature socially … once we sort of
balance the scales a bit, these risks will be
mitigated to a large degree.
What technology
will have the greatest impact on our everyday
lives the next 10 years? Massive
collaboration, and not just centralized but very
decentralized collaboration using various media
types we haven't even imagined yet. Right now
we have very narrow bandwidth between users,
between people. The scope of that bandwidth is
going to grow dramatically to be an absolutely
huge amount of information being exchanged
between users dynamically as part of their
everyday life. In fact, you'll never not be
connected. It's sort of like having your cell
phone always connected to all of your friends all
the time … Imaging that's much bigger
and its always there so I'm always in touch
with the 10 most important people to me at any
given instance – it's not like I have
to do anything, they're just there as part of
the clothing I wear.
What do you think
policymakers should do to ensure a positive
future for networked technologies?
Clearly the net got to where it was because of
its total openness and because it really is a
dumb network with intelligent edges. That was the
whole idea around it when it was created –
it wasn't an accident. And the scalability it
has had and will continue to have is a direct
result of those early decisions. It's a
system that is very hard to break –
basically impossible to break. It's a system
that continues to evolve in really interesting
and valuable ways and it's precisely because
of a lack of control and oversight that
that's been achieved. By trying to control
it, by trying to direct it, they'll basically
be killing the system that's probably
responsible for the greatest source of innovation
in the last 20 years.
Looking out more
than 10 years, what development will have the
greatest impact on society? Obviously,
the biotech revolution – we're just
beginning to see the tip of the iceberg on that
one. That will permeate everything in ways that
we can't even imagine at this point. Computer
technologies, I think, in particular the
technologies that allow for rich, deep
collaboration are really interesting.
Re-imagining the computer as a communication
device – which is happening right now. Cell
phones are computers that are used for
communication – unfortunately those two
pieces of the cell phone are sort of independent;
they don't really work together really well;
but once they do, I think that's going to be
a sort of interesting revolution in its own
right. So fostering communication and
collaboration with computers is a central task,
central aspect of transformation in the
future.
|
