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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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!)