The Future of Technology


The single most important issue for technology will be privacy because as soon as people actually understand what's happening to them, there will be outrage and a period of retrenchment and all kinds of regulations; in fact, the government will get into it in ways that we don't want them to. They'll handle it even worse than the industry does today.

Here's another important issue. Human beings are extraordinarily efficient receivers of information. Even when you're sitting around like a couch potato, watching "Ally McBeal," you're getting the equivalent of millions of bits per second because you're seeing a TV picture. We're extremely efficient machines at seeing something and picking out of it what's important, almost without any conscious effort. And we're pretty tolerant, in ways that machines are not, of moderate errors in that. For instance, if there's one bad pixel on the screen you're watching, you probably won't even notice it; you can ignore that input. So we're efficient consumers of high amounts of bandwidth because we can afford to ignore most of the data that's going into that bandwidth. This marvelous brain of ours allows us to figure out what's important and what's not.

So in five to ten years, we're going to have access, everywhere we go, to a six-megabits-per-second continuous stream of information that we can look at. We're not very good at generating information; it takes us a long time to type a document of a few thousand bits. So we don't send very much up individually, but we sure do suck a lot down. The other big technological imperative of the next decade is going to be getting the bandwidth connection secured to be able to get those six megabits everywhere we go. We'll get it wirelessly in many cases. We'll figure out ways to make the investments and to develop the right business model to get that done, so we can look at anything we want to look at, anywhere we want to go.

We bought our kids an encyclopedia when they were around six years old. My kids never looked at it. They don't even look at the dictionary. They look everything up on the Internet - essentially, the new library of Alexandria. We're going to be able to get that everywhere we go. Our kids will carry these tiny devices that will give them information they need anytime they need it, anywhere they are. Six megabits appears to be what it takes to put full-blown, razzle-dazzle, blow-your-eyes-out, full-motion graphics and video onto the device you're looking at. So getting six megabits everywhere is probably all I'm going to care about for a while. And the one piece of dream technology I really would want to help create is one that would let me get those six megabits through the air by a private subscription channel - emphasis on private. I want a completely secure, private mechanism for finding any piece of information in the world, wherever I am. It's the combination of access and privacy in a secure environment that is the greatest technology this generation will produce.




The CTO Handbook. The Indispensable Technology Leadership Resource for Chief Technology Officers
The CTO Handbook/Job Manual: A Wealth of Reference Material and Thought Leadership on What Every Manager Needs to Know to Lead Their Technology Team
ISBN: 1587623676
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 213

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