Slashdot Mirror
The Future of the Net
Fuzzball963 writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting article over at Wired on the development and future of the web. In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc)." From the article: "Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine."
Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.
Yeah! And we'll have flying cars, jet packs, and nanobots working through our blood stream. And McDonalds food that causes you to loose weight and reduces your cholesterol. Plus TVs at the bottom of toddlers bowls. Don't forget money trees, they'll be there too. Oh, and California will break off and float into the ocean. Not to mention IPv6, HDTV, and hydrogen cars.
All predictions of the future have been wrong. Why will this one be any different?
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
Haven't you noticed? The computer industry likes to do this "reset" of software every 5-10 years. We get really far feature and stability wise with one platform and then BAM! Along comes a new environment and then we start the cycle of making new spreadsheets, word processors, etc.
The first reset that I know of would be the jump from OS-less computers (like C64 or Apple 2 or even DOS in a way) to OS based ones. Then another reset was when we jumped from CLI to GUI. Then another one was made when Windows 95 came out. And since about 2000 its been a reset to "web-ify" all types applications. After that, there will probably be a reset once we have head-mounted computers that read your thoughts and send information back to you directly. Because the environment for those types of computers would be different and have a different interface. What's after that? AI reseting us?
I'm not really against the "reset" that I'm talking about. I can understand why it needs to happen. I'm just pointing it out.
Hello Dave, I have already downloaded your pr0n this morning...
Didn't they say this ten years ago? Seems that every now and then somthing comes along that pulls the idiots from the woodwork. HTML, Netscape, Java, Active-X, .net etc have all been claimed as the end of desktop applications.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc).
Wouldn't that be returning to the "dumb terminals" of ye olde times? Instead of having a computer, you just had a keyboard and monitor. Now you have a web browser.
Unjustified rhetoric will only take you so far: "the plausibility of the impossible", "This view is spookily godlike" etc. etc. Yes, the net has now got some useful services and some cool ideas have become almost mundane - searching for papers used to be a day-long job at the university library, now it's a google away...
The problem with saying, we've come this far this fast is that (as insurance agents say) past performance is no guarantee of future performance. The key word is guarantee. Any "vision" statement is necessarily an extrapolation of the current state, not an interpolation, and the two have wildly different error-bars associated with their predictions...
As for the rise of the machines (which seems to be the postulate), there is a theory that intelligence is a sort of "heat" effect - a result of interconnectivity rather than a creator of it.First, however, you need state at every node, control transmissions between nodes, and *meaning* to be understood by the nodes. The first tentative step towards this could be the semantic web that people have been trying to get work for years now - without significant success...
Suns slogan may be "the network is the computer", but that doesn't mean every network is a computer! It doesn't "process" emails, it's a transport for them. It doesn't "process" web-searches, again it's a transport. The computation is done at the nodes, not within the network.
I suppose you could make the argument that these are micro-ops compared to the macro-results, if you consider the internet a computer, but I still don't think it stands up. In fact, I think (apart from the history lesson) the whole piece is just page-filler.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Skynet's a bit delayed in coming online.
Just like we're about due for flying cars and moon bases by now, right?
The internet isn't going to drastically change, it's too much of a (working) mess to just roll out v2.0.9-r11. I happen to like having my OS the way it is, and I'm assuming everyone here on slashdot would rather waste the raw materials it takes to make the cpu's that power our computers than run our OS in Internet Explorer and a Java VM. Heh. I want my 10GHz geforce card, 500THz cpu and 5TB of RAM, my stage 1 installed gentoo, my OSX, and everything else. Crazy predictions of the "future" by some random guy with a keyboard can bite my ass.
Isn't this how Skynet started? I'll just wait for the net to gain its own identity and try to rid itself of the real problems, the users!
Well, I, for one, welcome our new omnipotant internet Machine God overlords 10 years into the future.
Whenever I hear someone predicts something for ten years in the future, I know they chose that number because
-it's too long to be demonstrably false and
-it's just short enough to seem relevant.
But yeah, this is just nonsense.
Boy, does this sound like the kind of "publish or perish" bullshit you get from academic settings.
In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one
I have heard that procecy over 10 years ago, and seen many (now failed) startups act on it. This is BS, people don't want their software and data to leave their home, even more so since most have only a limited confidence in any corporation that would offer to hold said data for them.
What's more, they don't want to be hit some-fraction-of-a-dollar per hour of word processor use, even if the deal turns out better than PC+Windows+Office financially. It's just psychological.
by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks
That alone should tell you how much this article is worth...
Anyway, the future of the net is clear: the corporate world will gets its hands on it more and more, as it has with radio and TV, until gradually nothing on it is truly free (as in speech) anymore. That much is obvious.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
> What is 1+1?
Two.
> What is 1+1?
An equation.
> What is 1+1?
The same question that you asked twice previously.
> What is 1+1?
A way for you to harass me.
> What is 1+1?
I'm leaving, and taking your music collection with me.
POTUS Witch Hunt tracker: 75 charges filed against 19 witches, 4 witches cooperating and 5 witches have pled guilty.
Duke Nukem Forever will be web based.
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
The most obvious reason is, of course, easy (perhaps "easier" is appropriate) cross-platform deployment. Another is more convenience for the user. Sure, it may be harder to use webmail compared to conventional mail apps, but it follows me where I go.
From the software publisher side, webapps are inhernetly better than desktop apps. You don't get my code (the code that matters, anyways), you have to agree to my terms, it is inherently subscription based, updates are global and unified, and tech support is easier.
We have all these elaborate and evil copyright laws to give us what webapps inherently give us. While webapps currently suffer from technical limitiations, these will eventually be solved. It is not unimaginable to see something like Photoshop as a webapp in 5-10 years.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
He wants his Singularity idea back.
Your network is always slower than your local system. No matter what you think you can push to a system, you'll always be slower than what you could do locally.
That's always been true in the past, but won't necessarily hold in the future. The speed of a computer only matters insofar as the user can perceive a difference. Right now, there is a huge difference between playing an HD movie off of your hard drive, and streaming it over the net (namely, the first is somewhat possible, whereas the second is not). If network connection speeds get to the point where real-time high-resolution video can be streamed with no lag, then there is no difference in having your monitor hooked to a computer that is sitting beside you, versus hooked to a computer that is on the other side of the planet.
Once network speeds become faster than the human ability to notice the difference, it will matter much less where your computing power is physically located. It may become commonplace to lease a computer from someone and access it remotely (from anywhere on earth) rather than own and maintain your own box with a CPU in it. There are a variety of reasons why people will still buy their own computers, of course (reducing costs in long-term, ability to control it fully, sensitivity of data, etc.). However, I fully expect us to reach a point where networks are fast enough that the user experience can be decoupled from the hardware (whether or not this happens is more difficult to predict... but the potential is there).
(Note: Perhaps I'm naive to assume that in the future we will still be using a monitor-and-keyboard interface. If we all switch to VR interfaces, which require more bandwidth, then it again becomes prohibitive to stream the user experience over the net. However I maintain that the finite bandwidth of human senses means that eventually networks will surpass our ability to assimilate information, and it won't matter whether the data is local or remote. I'm not going to speculate on a date where this will happen, however!)
Least of all me.
Someone showed me ICQ in the mid-90s. I downloaded it. "How cute" I thought as I talked to the friend who had sent it to me. I added some other people I knew of that had it to my contact list.
Then hours later he sent me another message, interrupting me.
Then other people interrupted me.
I thought I'd be clever and start a chat room, figuring that if I invited my friends to a chat room we could have a passive discussion in he background without interruptions -- like IRC. But the chat rooms never stayed up for long due to technical limitations. Eventually I checked netstat and found that the chat rooms were some kind of weird peer-to-peer chat. Ick.
I deleted ICQ.
Yeah, well their member base exploded and then AOL built their own/bought ICQ, Yahoo and MSN and thousands more entered the market. Now it seems to be The New Communications Medium.
Good thing I don't invest in tech companies, since my gut would've been to bet against all of these technologies.
And according to all those Popular Science cover stories from the 1960s we should be commuting to work with jet packs or rocket boots by now.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Insert witty sig here.
Microsoft?
Google?
My point is that the biggest consistent problem with Wired's predictions about the Internet over the last (pause for dramatic effect) is that they ignore the economic realities. Who pays for this wonderful infrastructure? I'm not talking about the apps. He waxes poetic about us all developing those as we use Flickr. I'm talking about the actual physical infrastructure and the protocols that hold it all together.
If it is government-developed, which government is going to do the developing? The US? Given the current state of American skepticism toward anything non-military that the government builds, I'd say no. China? Perhaps, but they don't want a system that allows that sort of freedom. Nobody else has the muscle to do it, save the EU, and we all can see they have bigger issues to deal with, like whether they'll be around in ten years.
If it is being developed by a corporation or collection of corporations, how do they make money creating infastructure improvements? After the Great Fiber Bungle of the dot-com era, I don't see any of the telecoms lining up to throw down the big money for something like this, particularly given that they're too engaged in their own marketshare battles to collaborate on anything this vast.
The Internet is an oddity, in that it was originated through American government spending during the Cold War, popularized because of a British researcher who developed the Web, and accelerated due to massive commercial speculation. I think Kevin Kelly's dream of a future Internet is great, but I think it disregards the fundamentally commercial nature of the existing Internet.
Given that changes to the fundamental infrastructure of the Net require far more deliberation, cooperation, and investment than changes that occur in the server and client realm, I think we'll still be talking about convergence and a fully-integrated, always-on Internet ten years from now.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The computer is the ultimate general purpose device that can simulate just about anything you can imagine (with the right hardware attached to it).
I don't want to do all of my work on a phone sized device - be that writing, developing software or surfing the web.
I do agree that more back-end storage will be remotely accessible via the web (for example, I keep my writings at home on an internal website that I access and create through an http client application (browser for the uninitiated) from any computer connected to my network.
That being said, there will always be applications that will need to run on the local machine for various purposes:
1. Video games. I can't imagine loading a video game binary image from across the internet every time I want to play it; load times are long enough when it is on the local box as it is. Also how would fees for this service be structured? I can justify a one-time cost for a client side app, and maybe even small fees for MMOG game access - but a per-use fee would be very bad on my pocketbook.
2. Plugins and enhancements to http clients. Again, there are certain things that a backend process running on a server will not be able to do as quickly as a front-end application running on the client.
3. Number crunching and software development. The very nature of the web makes the least common denominator the most common choices available. Moving all development off to the server would mean the loss of customization choices currently available to local developers. Additionally, I don't see companies providing the free CPU cycles to do any significant general purpose number crunching (without charging a hefty fee, of course).
Finally, a general purpose computer with standards based interfaces (PCI, AGP, USB, Firewire etc) allows much more flexibility for upgrading and extending the functionality of the device almost indefinitely. Specialized devices are too limited - while useful in their problem domain - these devices will not serve as the only means of delivering applications to users - particularly when we talk about the complexity of some of the key computer science problems before us.
Lets assume that the prediction is correct. I can see a time when only a few die-hards would have the computing power that is generally available today. That means your average person would be losing out on opportunities to define their own 'digital destiny' - essentially falling back into that 'producer/consumer' pattern (where producers are exclusively corporations, and consumers are the rest of us collectively) - while a few of us enjoy our freedom in quiet corners of the network. Now that I think about it, it might not be that bad after all...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain