kunst pole elu

In the years ahead, more and more of the information-processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centers located out on the Internet. The nature and economics of computing will change as dramatically as the nature and economics of mechanical power changed in the early years of the last century. The consequences for society - for the way we live, work, learn, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even think - promise to be equally profound. If the electric dynamo was the machine that fashioned twentieth-century society - that made us who we are - the information dynamo is the machine taht will fashion the new society of the twenty-first century.

Human consequences are determined not simply by advances in science and engineering but also, and more decisively, by the influence of technology on the costs of producing and consuming goods and services.

Over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin.

What the fiber-optic Internet does for computing is exactly what the alternating-current network did for electricity: it makes the location of the equipment unimportant to the user.

We may find, twenty or so years from now, that the personal computer has become a museum piece, a reminder of a curious time when all of us were forced to be amateur computer technicians.

The time of Gates and the other great software programmers who wrote the code of the PC age has come to an end. The future of computing belongs to the new utilitarians.

Electricity made possible the radio, the telephone, motion pictures, the microphone, the amplifier, the loudspeaker, the trolley, and the spectacular lighting displays in theaters and along the Great White Way(of the urban main street). Less obvious but no less important, electricity made available artificial daylight, precise delivery of heat and ventilation, the escalator, and the elevator. Americans used it to create new urban environments: the skyscraper, the department store, the amusement park...The sober conservation of energy no longer seemed necessary in a world where the power supply seemed unlimited.

We shape our tools

and thereafter they shape us.

In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards.

The shift from scarcity to abundance in media means that, when it comes to deciding what to read, watch, and listen to, we have far more choices than our parents or grandparents did. We're able ton indulge our personal tastes as never before, to design and wrap ourselves in our own private cultures. "Once the most popular fare defined our culture, " explains Chris Anderson. "Now a million niches define our culture."

More choices don't necessarily mean better choices. Many cultural good remain expensive to create or require the painstaking work of talented professionals, and it's worth considering how the changing economics of media will affect them. Will these goods be able to find a large enough paying audience to underwrite their excistence, or will they end up being crowded out of the marketplace by the proliferation of free, easily accessible products?

While the politicans struggle with the baggage of history, a new generation is emerging from the digital landscape free of many of the old prejudices. Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.

Not only will the Internet tend to divide people with different views, in other words, it will also tend to magnify the differences. As Brynjolfsson and Van Alstyne suggest, this could in the long run pose a threat to the spirit of compromise and the practice of consensus-building that are at the heart of democratic goverment. "Internet users can seek out interactions with like-minded individuals who have similar values and thus become less likely to trust important decisions to people whose values differ from their own," they conclude. Although they stress that it's too early to know exactly how all of these forces will play out, they warn that "balkanization and the loss of shared experiences and values may be harmful to the structure of democratic societies."

We're still a long way from knowing where our clicks will lead us. But it's clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists - that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding - should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes.

As the Venezuelan scholar Carlota Perez has shown, goverments tend to be very slow to respond to technological revolutions. Even as entrepreneurs ahd financiers, not to mention criminals and other bad actors, rush to exploit commercial and political disruptions, politicians, judges, and bureaucrats remain locked in the past, pursuing old policies and relying on outdated legal and regulatory schemes. The interia magnifies the social and economic regulatory schemes. The inertia magnifies the social and economic uncertainty and upheaval. In the worst cases, it lasts for decades, exacting, as Perez puts it, "a very high cost in human suffering."

"There is this naive idea that the Internet changes everything. But it doesn't change everything. It doesn't change the laws of France.".

Google and its competitors are not imposing personalization on us against our will. They're just responding to our desires.

"Artificial intelligence is the next step in evolution. It could provide a means of remedying man's mental shortcomings, of fixing the "bugs left over history, back from when we were animals."

"I'm ready, plug me in."

At that point, we'll be able to interact directly with computers by merely thinking.

In the real world, most of the time," Dyson explains, "finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It's easier to draw something that looks like a cat, for instance, than to discribe what, exactly, makes something look like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and eventually something appears that resembles a cat. A solution finds the problem, not the other way around.

What makes us so smart is that our minds are contantly providing answers without knowing the question. They're making sense rather than performing calculations.

In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.

The number of people who remember life before the arrival of Edison's bulb has dwindled to just a few, and when they go they'll take with them all remaining memory of that earlier, pre-electric world. The same will happen, sometime toward the end of this century, with the memory of the world that existed before the computer and the Internet became commonplace. We'll be the ones who bear it away.