Your home is not a terribly convenient place for storing data. By and large you want your data to be where you use it: You want it in your office, you want it when you’re on the airplane. Having your own home computer is kind of like having your own home electric generator.
Health care will shift its center of gravity away from last-minute, traumatic, intensive, expensive, short-term hospital-centered care, and toward early- as-possible, preventive, long-term, intimate, inexpensive application of information in the community and the family.
New technology increases the value of the judgments made by librarians and online searchers as they pick and choose what their customers might want to read. Eventually, publication may come to mean no more than somebody grabbing a document from the author’s networked computer. Even before that, the editorial judgment of the librarian attains value and importance equal to that of the editor.
As the changes add up over time, those most transformed may well be libraries themselves.
By breaking down the walls that separate libraries from each other and from their users, librarians dissolve the barriers that separate libraries from publishers. This will change the economics of publishing, and with that, the way in which ideas are disseminated and culture is made.
The broader and perhaps more dramatic social impact of the hyperlearning revolution will be the large-scale displacement of traditional “employment” by a new form of human capitalism in which ownership of intellectual capital progressively replaces labor.
The days when browsers could be dismissed as throwaway shell programs or glorified shareware are drawing to a close. Browsers are, in fact, windows to a new world of networked libraries, communities and commerce.
GUI-based operating systems … will get pushed to the background as invisible providers of file, communications, print and memory/task management services.
Embedded browser functionality and communications protocol stacks will be available as dynamic software libraries to all client applications. Documents penetrated by any client application will be able to embed URLs, allowing users to jump to the referenced Web site by clicking on an embedded icon or highlighted text string from within the receiving application.
Operating systems and even applications themselves will begin to disappear, as the emphasis shifts to hyperlinked documents and applets-on-demand.