This fantasy aspect has been discussed heavily. Putting on the Eyephones and realizing you’re surrounded by a sea of screaming women, and you look down and you have a guitar in your hands. It’s the classic fantasy of a teen-ager, to be a rock star. The ability to do that isn’t too far off, and if you were careful and tricky you could probably do that right now.
If the United States is to maintain the lead in high-performance information technology, the early investment must be made. Some say “let industry do it.” In my view, that is not a logical request … Competition in technology is not “won”; there is a continual competition … Government funds the long-term, the high-risk research, and industry aggressively exploits the new opportunities to build market and to take global leadership … If government investment in high-performance computing research falters, then I believe we will have reduced opportunity for U.S. industry to sustain what continues today to be our lead.
Information technology has been regarded not only a midwife for new democratic processes, but a handmaiden of the Truth … Inequitable access to these technologies at present and in the foreseeable future profoundly diminishes the diversity of opinions that are vetted electronically. Electronic communities may provide genuine benefits to isolated individuals, but if these communities are to be presented as providing global rather than partial access to political discourse, this promise may be squandered. Finally, although freedom of information may hamper some dangerous actions, more information alone is not a substitute for the development of critical or compassionate faculties. Data may reveal the existence of injustice, but data alone rarely generate the political will either to make difficult trade-offs or to discover creative solutions to perennial problems.
All-optical communications will, for years to come, face competition from electronic communications, whose price continues to drop while its performance improves. Nevertheless, an all-optical network offers compelling advantages. It would provide so much capacity that the exhange of video and large computer files would become routine … One can only begin to imagine the uses for a network in which bandwidth becomes as inexpensive as electricity, gas or water.
One of the principal challenges … is to multiplex and switch these packets of data without having to convert them to an electronic signal. A fiber may transmit a total of 100 gigabits each second, but is divided into designated time intervals so that 10 users, say, can each send 10 gigbits per second. Each sender of data can be assigned a slot of time in which to place packets with 10 gigabits per second of data onto the network, or it may transmit them in any unused time slot. The packets from one sender get interspersed with packets from other senders, each of them having a different time interval in which to transmit a message. Because communications capacity is apportioned by time, not wavelength, the technique is called time-division multiplexing.
Although some new policies have already been formulated to deal with the privacy … Many of the so-called “privacy” issues raised by computers might be better understood as power issues, in that they have to do with the growing power of large bureaucracies (governmental agencies and private institutions) to affect dramatically the lives of individuals … Individuals do not have control over that information and, hence, do not know whether these agencies are basing decisions on accurate or appropriate information.
The main problem with computer software is that it has not been clear that we could grant ownership of it without, in effect, granting ownership of numerical sequences or mental steps … The ethical issues that arise here take us back to the philosophical basis for property rights. What should be owned? What entitles one to own something? Are there things that should never be priavately owned?
We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do … We don’t much care if you approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.
I would actually like to see good encryption packaged as an option with, say, all e-mail systems, and have the user have the option to use it or not, just by selecting an option … Nothing is ever secure. Encryption is one of a number of things one can do to improve the security of communications.
There is an incredible potential for international friction in the fact that the Net is neither centralized nor censored. What happens when some college prankster posts chapters from “The Satanic Verses” to soc.culture.iranian? Not only do we not yet have solutions for these kinds of problems, but we also have relatively few policy experts who recognize that these are problems. But whenever problems begin to arise routinely from human interaction, it’s a safe bet that lawyers will soon appear.