Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

Building the Information Marketplace

NII users would fill out different E-forms to, say, order goods, settle transactions, or find people and services. Over time, these E-forms would grow in kind and number and would constitute the common currency, or language, of computer communication via the NII. In time, the typed text on the NII’s [National Information Infrastructure’s] early E-forms might be replaced with speech. To buy a jacket, you might answer voice prompts asking what color, size and material you want.

Building the Information Marketplace

A newer approach, called broadband ISDN or B-ISDN, seems much more promising for the NII. It uses an entirely different architecture, based on a new technology – a new game with the old name.

Building the Information Marketplace

High-speed communications may someday become affordable to everyone. But until then, the information infrastructure must offer a wide range of transmission capacities, or bandwidths, to meet widely varying requirements. Users should pay only for the bandwidth they need.

Building the Information Marketplace

The infrastructure should be flexible in the way it transports these ones and zeroes: Besides routing them to their destinations, it should be able to carry them with varying degrees of speed, accuracy, and security to match different computer capabilities and needs… We … need to endow the NII with a set of widely understood common communication conventions … The information infrastructure, then, is characterized by three key ingredients: flexible transport capabilities, common communication conventions and common servers.

Democracy and Network Interconnectivity

Information revolution technologies empower citizens anywhere to broadcast to the world infractions against their “inalienable rights” by their own government. Thus world pressure can be brought to bear against repressive regimes which can no longer hide their misdeeds as successfully as before … The priority of policies regarding international communication should be at least as high as the priority for foreign economic development and perhaps as high as that of some national security programs.

Down and Out on the Electronic Frontier

Indian villages may never have access to the Internet, but since at the moment they don’t have access to the Cambridge [U.K.] University Library, we’re not disadvantaging them any more.

Down and Out on the Electronic Frontier

The debate about gender and computing is under-theorized. It’s like the debate about mathematics and gender in the early 1970s, when all those pronouncements were made about girls have less-developed spatial ability. Feminists then reanalyzed the tests which were used and found that the differences were not as significant as had been said, and do not explain why women were so absent from maths, science, and technology … [There’s hope in] the way that women use the telephone in ways that no one predicted when it was being used as a business tool.