Over a billion people (16% of the world) are connected to the Internet. The digital gap continues to close, and VoIP is expected to account for 75% of world voice services by 2007. Many worry about drowning in endless streams of e-mails, while gigantic growth continues in multimedia storage and communications facilities will connect anyone to everything via a single affordable device. Nanotechnology will make handheld multi-terabyte devices possible.
The blogosphere is doubling in size every six months, with 37% of blogs in Japanese, 31% in English, and 15% in Chinese, forming a new medium for personal creativity and self-organized political and social action. A number of social networks, virtual reality “second worlds,” and on-line games each have millions of participants. Search engines now retrieve multimedia material and satellite imagery. The Semantic Web will allow applications to “understand” each other’s data. Whole libraries are being placed on the Internet, as are free MIT courses. But such a global commons could end as telecommunications broadband carriers and Net providers battle over “net neutrality” legislation to prevent the former from imposing additional charges or restrictions on transmissions, threatening the users with new complexities and unintended consequences.
The Internet is the most powerful force for globalization, democratization, economic growth, and education, facilitating international management of everything from avian flu prevention to World Cup planning. This new means of production in the knowledge economy is cutting through old hierarchical controls in politics, economics, and finance. Ubiquitous computing will help connect people, ideas, resources, and markets. It will democratize the coming knowledge economy with tele-nearly-everything, providing self-organizing mechanisms for emerging collective computer/human intelligence and management systems. This “planetary nervous system” will make cyberspace and 3D space seem to become a continuum of reality. Yet no country has made increasing collective intelligence a national education or ICT goal.
Over 45% of people in the world have telephones, and 27% have mobile phones. E-commerce is helping to close the rich-poor gap. On-line business in China increased 58% in 2005 to $69 billion and there are over 2,000 e-commerce Web sites in rural areas. Combining forecasts from Forrester and Gartner, global e-commerce is growing about 175% annually, to about $8 trillion in 2005. At the same time, civilization has become vulnerable to cyber-terrorism, financial market vulnerability, fraud, loss of cultural diversity, terrorist communications, power outages, viruses, spyware, information warfare, and information pollution. Counter measures create unprecedented challenges for democracy. Mi2g Ltd. estimates that global economic damage from all types of digital risk reached $470–580 billion during 2005. However, spam fell from 77% to 68% of the 60 billion e-mails per day during 2005 due to increasing legal penalties, better filters, and more user “delete before reading.”
Challenge 6 will be addressed seriously when Internet access and basic tele-education is free and available universally and when basic telemedicine is commonplace, making best medical practices available everywhere. MIT’s “one laptop per child” plans to sell some computers by mid-2007 for under $150. Roll-up thin films could replace print and video media screens to reduce size and resources per unit. Massive investments in educational software and multilanguage voice recognition and synthesis will be necessary for the poor majority. Procedures for equitable compensation for entertainment on the Web are needed. We should encourage global “collaboratories,” invent incentives to provide training for all, develop solar robot antennas that hover at high altitudes above the weather instead of a proliferation of microwave towers on land, use existing software to block offensive materials and spam, use tele-volunteers to help poorer regions, and redesign the PC to prevent damage from attacks.
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