Instead of justice being meted out from monstrously large edifices built to manage an endless flow of bodies, Feinblatt’s 21st-century vision calls for dozens of smaller complexes scattered around an area and linked by computer. They wouldn’t be designed as courthouses, but restoration centers, with everything from schools to hospital clinics interlinked with the courts.
Neural networks are more flexible, adaptive, just like living systems, with the ability to evolve, to learn from making mistakes … We’re not going to take over the entire world in five years. Whenever you’re fighting uphill against an entrenched technology, you have to pick the right thing where you have a little bit of an edge.
Some people say that MOOs are the perfect model for the Infobahn, or whatever it’s being called this week, making the whole mess of navigating on and between networks invisible, hidden in MOO’s clothing. Maybe. In any event, I doubt these things will go away. With each new MOO, a new community begins and new cultures emerge to socialize a place where anything is possible. The Big Surprise of the Information Age is what people use their computers for: to communicate.
The next step beyond representative democracy is direct democracy. Why didn’t we all get to vote on NAFTA? It impacted on all of our lives. Why didn’t we all vote on the supercollider in Texas?
There’s going to be more optimism – as people get linked up all over the world and feel they’re running their own lives. That will lead to more optimism.
The individual is the basic unit. This is a triumph and a new celebration of the individual. Some things will be universal, partly because everybody’s experiencing everybody else. And some things will differentiate this tribe from that tribe. The riddle of the 1990s is, what’s going to become universal, and what’s going to remain tribal?
Telecommunications is creating one single global economy, but at the same time empowering individuals and small groups by providing them opportunities that only big companies had before … Many small players are global forces.
The next big jump in computing, potentially as important as the jump that created the programmable electronic computer, must be inspired by biology … It may be that the successor to that type of machine is gestating far from the hotbeds of computerdom, in an obscure corner of the chemical business: a field called process control … Such computers will not be much like human-programmed digital computers … They will be less like the idiots that digital boxes are now, utterly dependent on flawless programming, and more like dogs: trainable, but with an inherent set of instincts and abilities, herding our processes and reactions and systems like a border collie runs a flock of sheep.
The overriding danger to an open standard is Microsoft … One way or another … Mosaic is going to be on every computer in the world.
To keep the Web from fragmenting into smaller communities with more rigid technical requirements, the authors of Web tools will have to share their ideas and coordinate the development of new standards. This is fine in the nonprofit research and academic worlds. But in the private sector, coordination could mean a sacrifice of competitive advantage. Mosaic Communications could hardly become the DOS of cyberspace if it developed its product in a way that encouraged competition from scores of other more or less interchangeable Mosaic browsers.