What Will Be: A Look at Life in the Information Age

Lee Ridgway

In his wide-ranging book, What Will Be: How the New World of Information 
Will Change Our Lives (HarperEdge), Michael Dertouzos weighs in with his 
views on the twenty-first-century Information Age. Dertouzos looks at 
the future from a special vantage point: as Director of MIT's Laboratory 
for Computer Science, he has been present at the creation of many of the 
technology developments that have brought us to where we are today, as 
well as those that may take us beyond 2001.

Dertouzos, a good storyteller, builds his narrative on whatever 
resources he needs to establish context, make his points, and keep the 
reader interested. This means that we get not only predictions, but also 
history, philosophy, and anecdotes. Given Dertouzos' role at the 
forefront of computer research, education, and policy-making, many of 
his stories are autobiographical. It is this personal experience that 
lends credence to even the most far-out of Dertouzos' visions, for he 
has witnessed technological fantasy become reality in his labs.

The bulk of What Will Be presents new and often fantastic technology, 
its application to human lives, and our interactions with it. Examples 
include auto-cooks, Guardian Angel software that contains a person's 
complete medical history from birth, and the ability to experience a 
remote concert "live" from the comfort of your own living room. 
Automatization, which Dertouzos refers to frequently, will occur "when 
interconnected computers `understand' enough about one another to work 
together." One example of automatization is electronic forms (e-forms). 
These will depend on industry consensus on terms  - so that, for 
example, you could query any airline's reservation system and book a 
flight in a matter of seconds.

While provocative, and presented in scenarios that readers can relate 
to, many of these developments will be familiar to those who keep up 
with technological visionaries (for example, William Mitchell in City of 
Bits and Mark Stefik in Internet Dreams). What sets Dertouzos apart in 
this book is that he takes a realistic look at where we are and what may 
be possible. He also points out what is hype or unlikely to happen for 
decades.

The Information Marketplace
Dertouzos sees information technology exerting such a profound socio-
economic change on the world that it will equal in scale and impact the 
Industrial Revolutions of the mid-eighteenth and late-nineteenth 
centuries. The Industrial Revolution made possible the off-loading of 
muscle work onto machines. Similarly, the Information Revolution will 
off-load a considerable amount of brain work onto machines.

In Dertouzos' view, the centerpiece of the twenty-first century will be 
the Information Marketplace, where people and computers buy, sell, and 
freely exchange information and information services. In this 
marketplace, just about anything can be classified as information. 
Dertouzos uses clever examples to define what information is and how it 
can be thought of as a noun (e.g., a memo or database) or verb (e.g., an 
accountant's work on a tax return). The latter, which Dertouzos also 
calls "information work," is equivalent to physical labor during the 
Industrial Revolution - and he sees no fundamental difference between 
the economic value of physical and information work.

Accepting the possibility that huge numbers of physical things, events, 
and actions can be described as information leads to Dertouzos' Five 
Pillars of the Information Age. These Pillars, expanded upon in the 
book's Appendix, are his way of explaining in minimal terms what the new 
technologies of information are all about.

1. Numbers are used to represent all information.

2. These numbers are expressed with 1s and 0s.

3. Computers transform information by doing arithmetic on these numbers.
 
4. Communications systems move information around by moving these 
numbers.

5. Computer and communications systems combine to form computer 
networks. These are the basis of tomorrow's information infrastructures, 
which in turn are the basis for the Information Marketplace.

A Human Context
Dertouzos often discusses technology at great length before addressing 
its broader social and cultural implications. Many of the developments 
envisioned by Dertouzos have to do with very intimate, physical, and 
exotic interfaces and processes between human and machine. Such 
interactions raise serious ethical and moral questions. Dertouzos 
recognizes this, but does not probe these issues as fully as he examines 
the technology itself. Thorough discussion of these topics could fill 
another book.

One of Dertouzos' aims in What Will Be, very much related to his 
consideration of the human context for technology, is to reconcile what 
he sees as the polarized views of technologists and humanists - what he 
calls the humie-techie split. The origins of the split are in the 
Enlightenment, when the pursuit of reason, scientific thinking, and 
technology became separated from the concerns of faith, morality, and 
the arts. This split became more pronounced during the Industrial 
Revolution and into the twentieth century. This polarization could be 
aggravated further by information technology, with its disregard for 
people's physical proximity and its disembodiment of reality into 
virtuality. 

In the closing section of the book, "The Age of Unification," Dertouzos 
discusses the need to resolve the humie-techie split. In so doing, he 
reveals the roles faith and reason play in his own thinking about 
technology and life. He makes a strong case for how they can strengthen 
our thinking and actions if we learn to use them in concert. The humie-
techie balance Dertouzos seeks in his own life needs to be extended to 
the larger world, where technological and social issues have become 
increasingly intertwined. In an optimistic, closing flourish, Dertouzos 
sees technology and humanity reunited and paving the way for greater 
understanding of ourselves.