With the incorporation of IITA activities, the HPCC Program will advance intelligent system interfaces, real environments augmented with virtual environments, image understanding, language and speech understanding, intelligent agents aiding humans “in the loop,” and next-generation data and object bases for electronic libraries and commerce.
The mostly white, well-off, “wired” segment of society is now boarding a new computer-generated ark and setting sail – yet again – for the promised land. Don’t be late, people, because a hard rain is gonna fall on those who miss the boat, if only because there aren’t going to be many jobs for those not on board.
The next generation of personal computers will offer multi-media capacity including animation, full-motion video and context-organized instructional databases. When high-bandwidth networks become easily accessible, adult education has a prospect of becoming the growth industry of the 21st century.
A nationwide information and network infrastructure could open new avenues for mutual cooperation and support among our workplaces, schools, neighborhood centers, community groups, and government. This new digital environment has the potential to enable a richness in information access and sharing that could help us restore a sense of community within and between the public and private sectors.
To what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? … These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more often reduced to mere numerial objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children … It is to be expected that the winners … will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology … they tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say from whose point of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.
I think in the next two or three years we can implement a small handheld personal device that uses speech and handwriting recognition and can communicate both voice and data.
The best way to get broad access is to have vital, competitive, aggressive industries – which, in the process of competing with each other, drive down the costs and therefore bring the goods or accessibility to a larger and larger number of people.
The change in the technology is so dismaying to so many people, to so much business that there may be an attempt to just lock it in and say, “OK, Bill Gates, run the world. Everything’s going to be Microsoft, everything’s going to be on the Net, and the computers – that’s it. Let’s have one standard and slow things down so versions come at a predictable pace.” There’s not a lot of competition which drives things too fast, it’s too confusing. Let’s just make it stable. That would be people asking for a monopoly in order to manage creative technological change.
Cable TV services with 500 or more channels are just too much for a printed guide to describe in any kind of usable format. Instead of scanning TV listings, users will have to start using a combination of search methods and agent-based program recommendations.
There will be a new taste to our news-gathering process. Online news offers a satisfying wholeness – rather than knowing how to design a page or write a headline, we can become the information experts of a newborn profession.