Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

Code, Decode in Secret

The spectres of uncontrollable terrorism, organized crime and child pornography … would be unleashed if strong encryption were handed to the masses.

Prepared Statement of Senator Patrick Leahy Before the Joint Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property; SUBJECT: Copyright Bills

We must update our copyright laws to protect the intellectual property rights of creative works available online. The future growth of computer networks, like the Internet, and of digital, electronic communications require it. Otherwise, owners of intellectual property will be unwilling to put their material online. If there is no content worth reading online, the growth of this medium will be stifled, and public accessibility will be retarded.

American State Courts, Five Tsunamis, & Four Alternative Futures

In the globally-linked teleworking virtual judiciary of the future, the judge can be on the beach at Waikiki, the defendant at home in Auckland, his lawyer in Beijing, the prosecuting attorney in Paris, the clerk in Nashville, the probation officer in Pyongyang, the witnesses on the Moon, at L5, exploring life in the superhot plumes of an abyssal trench 40,000 leagues under the sea, climbing Mount Everest, between tennis matches at Wimbledon.

American State Courts, Five Tsunamis, & Four Alternative Futures

If electronic, biological, and molecular technologies continue to be developed and used at approximately the same, or greater, rate as they are now, the world of the 21st Century will be even more different from the 20th than the 20th was from the 17th or 18th. It is very difficult to overstate the extent and magnitude of technologically induced social and environmental change over the next decades.

American State Courts, Five Tsunamis, & Four Alternative Futures

Advances in, and the marriage of, television, computers, telephones, visualization, dematerialization, and related technologies are rapidly leading to the emergence of what is being called “virtual reality,” making it possible for individuals and groups, perhaps widely separated in time and space, to create and experience together realities beyond anything Mother Nature ever invented.

Dogs Don’t Bark at Parked Cars

As the electronic revolution merges with the biological evolution, we will have – if we don’t have it already – artificial intelligence, and artificial life, and will be struggling even more than now with issues such as the legal rights of robots, and whether you should allow your son to marry one, and who has custody of the offspring of such a union. Thus during the 21st century all historically experienced human processes – agriculture, industry, commerce, education, you name it – will come to an end … What is actually happening … is the merger of four information societies into one: the 4-billion-year-old genetic information society; the 10,000-year-old cultural information society; the 3,000-year-old civilizational society; and the 250-year-old industrial information society, all merging in the 21st century into one new “coming information society.”

Even Though Oxygen is Flowing, the Plastic Bag May Not Inflate

The “new” technologies of the present and immediate future … clearly imply, in my view, that the challenges and possibilities of the immediate future are in this respect as well, completely without precedent, or adequate analogy, in the immediate, much less more distant, past. … There will be no return to “The Way it Used to Be” for future generations. And I deeply regret that so much time and effort is being spent on trying to make it so.

Selling Chips to Robots: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Virtual Realities

One of the major differences between the youth and aged cultures now will soon become (has already become?) a factor in itself: the media literate vs. the print literate … The post-literate (or, as I hope they will become, media-literate) cultures emerging around us in the present and looming vastly larger in the future, are as different from cultures based on print as print cultures are from those of oral societies. Since we live within the envelope of the dying (or marginalizing) print cultures and the rise of audio-visual ones, those of us who have been conditioned all our lives to “think like a book” usually ignore, disparage, or simply cannot understand those who may learn to think and to express their thoughts through moving holographic images. Being so (literally) brainwashed by print, we can no more truly understand the new cultures that are overwhelming us.