A Million MHz CPU? If Seth Lloyd’s Right, Someday We’ll Have ‘Quantum Computers’ 100 million Times More Powerful Than Today’s Pentium-Based PC

If Lloyd’s hypothetical model can be built, the world will have computers that could be 100 million times as powerful as a Pentium-based PC … In a quantum computer, there would be no flow: electrons would orbit their home atoms, and each bit of data would be registered by changing the energy level of a single electron. A bit would be shifted by copying the energy level from one atom to its neighbor, for example, by physically pressing the two atoms together.

A Million MHz CPU? If Seth Lloyd’s Right, Someday We’ll Have ‘Quantum Computers’ 100 million Times More Powerful Than Today’s Pentium-Based PC

Let’s be bold for a moment and suppose that a smaller, cheaper, simpler way is found to read data out of a molecular array, and the array can be made from a substance stable at room temperature. At this point, the consequences become truly mind-boggling … you could store the complete texts of a billion books. Online access to reference sources would become irrelevant; each of us could own the Library of Congress, every piece of music ever recorded, plus immaculate digital reproductions of art from every museum in the world. Meanwhile, every domestic device, from a sound system to a hair brush, could possess artificial intelligence at a human level or beyond.

You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You: Surveillance in the Workplace is Getting Digitized – and Getting Worse

There are always these trade-offs between what’s useful and what could be done to us. The benefits to be had are so great; we just have to be sure that the people who are in control respect our privacy.

You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You: Surveillance in the Workplace is Getting Digitized – and Getting Worse

[Roy] Want has developed a personal digital assistant he calls the PARCTab. About half the size of an Apple Newton, Want’s palm-held PDA sends and receives wireless data signals to another network of infrared detectors … It’s part of Xerox PARC’s “ubiquitous computing” project, an attempt to banish paper from the workplace. Want can program [it] to trade e-mail and other files with his workstation, and he can access the Internet … Want sees the tabs getting thinner and lighter. Each of us would have dozens scattered around the office, in the car, and at home. Detector “cells will start appearing in public places or the home,” he says. “The device will tell you where you are, wherever you are.” Of course, it might also tell them where you are.

You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You: Surveillance in the Workplace is Getting Digitized – and Getting Worse

While privacy tribunes see active badges as an ominous new development in the brave new workplace, [Roy] Want and his colleagues see them as “a double-edged sword,” with the potential for both benign and malignant uses. “If you can build the system correctly with the appropriate privacy, encryption, and access safeguards, then I think you’ve built an acceptable system.”

You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You: Surveillance in the Workplace is Getting Digitized – and Getting Worse

This stuff often increases the gap between managers and workers. If managers really believe in monitoring, let’s apply it in a more universal way and require managers to be monitored electronically … now with the mediated and potentially unseen nature of this, it creates a sense of fear and stress, because employees really never know when they are being watched.

You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You: Surveillance in the Workplace is Getting Digitized – and Getting Worse

Privacy advocates and employee unions have been pushing for fair-monitoring legislation … The bill … would require employers to tell new hires that they may be monitored via phone, computer, or e-mail. It would also force managers to notify workers when they are being surveyed – possibly by a beep tone or red light – and to explain how the data will be used.

You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You: Surveillance in the Workplace is Getting Digitized – and Getting Worse

“Employees often think that they should have privacy in their personal electronic-mail communications. But in practice, there really is no legal safeguard within the organization.” Several years ago, e-mail privacy advocates lost an important test case … [The ruling has left civil libertarians glum about the future of e-mail privacy at work.] … “I don’t think you’re going to see any more e-mail litigation. If we can’t win that case in California, we can’t win it anywhere.”

You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You: Surveillance in the Workplace is Getting Digitized – and Getting Worse

Any manager who purchases network-operating software is probably getting built-in snoop features … A technically inclined boss or network administrator can turn any employee workstation into a covert surveillance post … Products like Dynamics Corp.’s Peak & Spy; Microcom Inc.’s LANlord; Novell Inc.’s NetWare … turn employees’ cubicles into covert listening stations. Other software applications count the number of keystrokes per minute, the employee’s error rate, the time it takes a worker to complete each task, and the time a person spends away from the computer … The Orwellian potential of such technology has privacy advocates and working stiffs a bit paranoid. But are concerns about employee monitoring irrational?

Savvy Sassa: If Mass Media is Obsolete, and Pointcasting is the Future of Media, Why Would Anyone in Their Right Mind Want to Buy a Broadcast Network? (Or What Does Turner Entertainment’s Wunderkind President Scott Sassa Know That You Don’t?)

Don’t forget: just like there are only so many Monets and so many Picassos, there are only so many filmmakers who can make a “Citizen Kane” or a “Gone With the Wind” and capture the imaginations of tens of millions of people. Not everybody can do that. Really great artistic talent is not a commodity. It’s always a scarce resource. So yeah, Hollywood’s going to have to reinvent itself. But Hollywood as a leading cultural force … that’s never going to change.