Internet Today...

• Is it important?
• Who cares?
• Is this a supernova in information?
• All of the above?
• None of the above?

We all let snippets like the following Yahoo article zip past our eyes each day and barely engage our brains. if you’re like most people you'll go back to whatever you were doing.

If your interested, read on…

Why should you be interested? Because you have the privilege of witnessing the dawning of a new age in human history.

Here's some background.

“By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer
Tue Mar 6, 8:07 AM ET

Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes — 161 exabytes — of digital information last year.

That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.
The previous best estimate came from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who totaled the globe's information production at 5 exabytes in 2003. One of the sponsors of that report, data-storage company EMC Corp., commissioned IDC's new look.”

Wait a minute – how much information? “3,000,000 times the information in all the books ever written.”

But that’s just the start. It is all indexed via search engines. The price of a device that can access it has fallen to <$500 when encapsulated on a mobile phone.

THIS IS THE “BIG ONE.” THIS REALLY DOES CHANGE EVERYTHING.

This is the force 7 hurricane, the 5.0 earthquake, the trip to another galaxy and back, in information storage & retrieval terms. This is equivalent to the wildest projections in science fiction. This dwarfs Marshal McCluhan’s social effects from TV.

What does it mean? What effects will it have on our global society or you as an individual?

In the near term, 10 years or so, we can extend some current trends and take a “swag” guess at others. In the long term, the “law of unintended consequence” will make a shambles of most data storage projections.

Everything will access internet: your car, your phone, your mustic library, your personal personal security and geo-location, the whereabouts of your familhy and friends, your favorite restaurants, your medical history, your personal medical condition as tested continuously by your on-board compuer and on and on.

The underlying fact is the MOST OF THE INFORMATION KNOWN TO HUMANDKIND, CAN BE ACCESSED ON THE INTERNET BY ANY INDIVIDUAL PERSON. If you know how to use it, it represents potential wealth beyond imagination.

This is true for the first time in human history.

Clue!

Increasingly, competition for goods and services will be won by those who have the fastest computers and know best how to use them.

As time goes on, the race for the fastest execution speed will become heated to plasma temperatures. Fortunes will rise and fall on execution speeds.

Current Colleges and Universities – presumably the training ground for our best thinkers – at this writing in 2007, are woefully unprepared to teach anything useful about the theory, practice, ethics and philosophies surrounding the internet.

More than at any time in human history, knowledge of computers favors the rich and powerful who will have the resources to buy the best tools and employ the best talent to help them use those tools.

In addition, the future will favor intelligence and those that can acquire and think through complex variables.

Because of the democratization of knowledge via the internet, expect to find "self-taught genius" across the globe as more and more people find the internet an inexhaustable well of human knowledge leading to wealth.

The key will be a critical understanding of how to use computers to focus on objectives and “drill-down” on topics. The ability to determine the relevance of information and modeling trends and likely outcomes.

The future belongs to the intelligent, the educated, and the informed. The rich and powerful will be privileged beyond any sscale or reference we have today. The privileged will live at a distance from the average person, and that gap will widen for the forseeable future. The definition and practice of “democracy” will have to stretch out of its traditional shape to cover the disparities of the future societies.

Internet and its content is the engine powering these changes. Where are we going? Only the unfolding future will show us the answers. So hang on tight and give it your full concentration, its going to be a wild ride. Like the fictional Captain Kirk watching the universe stream past the front screens of his space-ship's bridge at warp 3 - the future is comming at us so fast objects are blurred into comet-like images.

My one regret is having so little time to watch it.

Terry Wellman

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