填空题

What Will Be
We’ve now acknowledged some fundamental ancient human fumes and the ways they will affect and be affected by the Information Marketplace. It is time to consider the greatest changes that the Information Marketplace has to offer. To get to it, let’s reconstruct the key discoveries we have made, which together describe "what will be."
We began with a simple but fur-reaching model of the future world of information as an Information Marketplace, where people and their computers will buy, sell, and freely exchange information. Our first discovery was that this Information Marketplace can indeed be built on a technological foundation: the information system. We went on to explore the many human-ma-chine interfaces people will use to get in and out of this new edifice, from virtual reality and fancy bodysuits to the lowly keyboard, and singled out speech interfaces as perhaps the most significant and imminent. We explored the pipes that will carry our information and the ways we will bend them to give us the speed, reliability, and security we need. We also saw how a vast array of new shared software tools will evolve on this system, shifting the attention of the entire software business from individual to interconnected computers. The arrival of this foundation is certain, but it could be delayed by a decade or more if the key players continue their wars for control and their indifference toward the shared system they all need. We saw too that there won’t be just a handful of winners that will survive these wars; the field is vast, rich, and full of challenges for almost every supplier and consumer of information to be a winner.
Our second major discovery was that the Information Marketplace will dramatically affect people and organizations on a wide scale. Besides its many uses in commerce, office work, and manufacturing, it will also improve health care, provide new ways to shop, enable professional and social encounters across the globe, and generally permeate the thousands of things we do in the course of our daily lives. It will help us pursue old and new pleasures, and it will encourage new art forms, which may be criticized but will move art forward, as new tools have always done. It will also improve education and training, first in specific and established ways and later through breakthroughs that are confidently awaited. Human organizations from tiny companies to entire national governments will benefit too, because so much of the work they do is information work.
Putting all these detailed uses in perspective, we came to realize that they are different faces of two major new forces: electronic bulldozers and electronic proximity. Each has broad consequences for society. The electronic bulldozers’ effect is primarily economic, increasing human productivity in both our personal lives and the workplace. The rapid, widespread distribution of information in the form of info-nouns (text, photos, sounds, video) and especially info-verbs (human and machine work on information) is one simple way in which productivity will increase. Automatization is the other powerful effector; machine-to-machine exchanges will off-load human brain work the way machines of the industrial Revolution off-loaded muscle work. We concluded, however, that to enjoy the productivity benefits we will have to avoid and correct certain technological and human mistakes.
The second of the two major forces—electronic proximity—will increase by a thousand times the number of people we can easily reach and will bring people together across space and time. Many social consequences, good and bad, will arise as this new proximity distributes powers of control from central authorities to the many hands of the world’s people. Groupwork and telework will further help improve human productivity. Democracy will spread, as will people’s knowledge of one another’s beliefs, wishes, and problems. The voiceless millions of the world will come to be heard and be better understood, provided that the wealthy nations help the less wealthy ones enter the Information Club. Ethnic groups may become more united, as people belonging to a certain tribe use the Information Marketplace to bind themselves together regardless of where they may be. At the same time, the Information Marketplace will help shared cultures grow in nations that thrive on diversity. And though we need not change our legal framework in any major way to accommodate the Information Marketplace, different nations will need to cooperate on shared conventions for security, billing, and other transnational issues that will surely arise as shared information crosses international barriers. On another level, electronic proximity will foster a shared universal culture, a thin cover on top of all the world’s individual national cultures. We hope that this property of the Information Marketplace to enhance the co-existence of nationalistic identity and international community will help us understand one another and stay peaceful.
Given all these possibilities for change, we considered what might happen when they meet the ancient human beings that we are and have been for thousands of years. Predictably, we discovered that we will have difficulty coping with the increased social and technological complexity and overload brought forth by the Information Marketplace. Though we will be potentially close to hundreds of millions of people, we will be able to deal with only a very few of them at any given time. Yet we saw that we might be able to reduce some of these complexity problems by making the artifacts of the Information Age easier to use—a primary goal for the technologists of the twenty-first century.
The Information Marketplace will make of us urban villagers—half urban sophisticate, roaming the virtual globe, and half villager, spending more time at home and tending to family, friends, and the routines of the neighborhood. If our psyches tilt toward the crowded urban info-city, we will become more jaded, more oriented toward the self, and more indifferent, fickle, and casual in our relationships with others, as well as less tightly connected to our families and friends. If we tilt toward the village, we may be surprised by a revival of more closely knit families rooted in our tighter human bonds. Indeed, if we use it correctly, the Information Marketplace can be a powerful magnifying lens that can amplify goodness—employing disabled and home-bound workers, matching help needed with help offered via the Virtual Compassion Corps, and helping people learn and stay healthy, among many other possibilities.
The wise eye will also see that file Information Marketplace is much more influential than its parts—the interfaces, middleware and pipes that make up the three-story building on which we stand. Once they are integrated, they present a much greater power—the power to prevent an asthmatic from dying in a remote town in Alaska, to enable an unemployed bank loan officer to find and succeed at a new form of work, to allow a husband and wife to revel in the accomplishments of a distant daughter while also providing emotional and financial support. These powers are far greater than the ability to send an e-mail message, or to have five hundred TV channels.
The Information Marketplace will transform our society over the next century as significantly as the two industrial revolutions, establishing itself solidly and rightfully as the Third Revolution in modem human history. It is big, exciting, and awesome. We need not fear it any more or any less than people feared the other revolutions, because it carries similar promises and difficulties. What we need to do, instead, is to understand it, feel it, and embrace it so that we may use it to steer our future human course.
We are at loss what to do in the future world of information.