Technology Trends 6 互联网的预言

Elgan: Will gadgets make knowledge obsolete?
When everyone can find out anything, anytime, anywhere -- why learn?
By Mike Elgan
Neuromancer, author William Gibson describes a future in which people can acquire knowledge by buying special chips called "microsofts" that plug into a surgically installed jack behind the ear. Once you plug in the chip, your brain can access its database and — voila! — knowledge!
It‘s an interesting and creepy idea, but one that we‘re going to have to face eventually. No, not painful implants; we‘re going to have to face the problem of education in a world in which nearly all knowledge is available to everyone, instantly, all the time.
A mere 20 years ago, almost no one had heard of the Internet, had ever used a cell phone or even knew what "GPS" stood for.
Today, most people I know over the age of 12 use the Internet every day, access data all day on their cell phones and use GPS gadgets to get from one place to another. Mobile broadband is rapidly getting faster. Mobile devices are getting radically better screens and user interfaces. And the whole world of data access on mobile devices is quickly bringing us to the point where we can find out just about anything from anywhere.
Where will we be 20 years from now in terms of our ability to access any information from anywhere? The mind boggles. Let‘s look at a few trends.
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Trend No. 1: The rise of Internet-connected smart phones. Smart phone shipments are up 29%, according to market research firm Gartner Inc., and now represent 11% of the worldwide cell phone market. In many countries, they represent the majority of sales. As handset prices drop, and data plans and online services become more compelling, smart phones will largely replace "dumb" phones for just about everybody and become totally mainstream.
Trend No. 2: The increasing speed of data connections. Both the number of people upgrading to mobile broadband, and the speed of those connections, are rising very fast. Cell-phone maker Ericsson predicts that mobile broadband subscribers could reach 2.2 billion within five years. As of January, there were 204 HSDPA (3.5G) networks in 89 countries either fully operational or well on their way. This level of performance will quickly go mainstream, and users will start looking forward to 4G, or Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) performance on their phones, which will be capable of downloads as fast as 280Mbit/sec., two orders of magnitude faster than DSL on a desktop PC!
Trend No. 3: Improvements in user interfaces. The Apple iPhone and its ginormous, high-quality screen and intuitive user interface reset the bar for how easy and appealing grabbing online data over a phone should be. Imitators abound, and all are scrambling to produce ever better mobile-data experiences.
Trend No. 4: Advancements in voice recognition and artificial intelligence. Voice command is slowly creeping into our phones. Little by little, our phones‘ GPS functionality, applications and Web browsing will be controllable with the spoken word. Increasingly, our commands will be processed on remote servers that can "learn" and figure out what we‘re looking for, and present it in the way that‘s most usable. As services like GOOG-411 (dial 1-800-466-4411 to try it) become more popular, people will increasingly use voice-command systems to get information anytime, anywhere.
Trend No. 5: More information online. There are more than 168 billion Web sites on the Internet, according to an Internet services company called Netcraft. The total number of sites — not pages, but sites — increases by roughly 3 million each month. That‘s a primitive measure, but it‘s clear that knowledge is going online. Newly generated information increasingly shows up on public servers, and old books and other sources of knowledge are being scanned and digitized at a feverish pace. There are currently more than 2 million English-language articles on the Wikipedia, a number that has doubled since 2006.
Trend No. 6: Improvements in search. The success of Google, which largely leveraged high-quality search to place itself at the center of the technology universe, has focused competitors to innovate in search as well. Now Google has created a search-centric mobile platform called Android that should drive major improvements in cell-phone Internet searching.
If all these trends continue to develop over the next 10 years, what will the result be? It‘s impossible to predict, but you can bet we‘ll all be carrying phones that, with a simple voice command, instantly retrieve exactly the information we‘re looking for 99% of the time, and from anywhere, 24/7.
What‘s the difference between this cell phone of the future and Gibson‘s vision of "microsoft" chips? The only difference is that the microsofts seem clunky, useless and antiquated in comparison to the breathtaking knowledge machine everyone will carry in his or her pocket or purse.
When schoolchildren know with certainty that they will never be without a device that tells them any information they could ever want to know, how motivated will they be to sit there and memorize state capitals and other such trivia? How motivated will schools and teachers be to force this on kids?
The idea that knowledge could become obsolete is a creepy and objectionable one. The pursuit of knowledge is among our most cherished values. But mobile devices and the mobile Internet are already enabling us to deliberately remain ignorant on specific topics we used to have to know. Here are just a few examples.
GPS: In the past, if you wanted to drive to somewhere new, you had to gather information like maps or directions and study them. I‘ve noticed that GPS users come to rely on things like turn-by-turn directions and stop trying to learn anything about where their destination is or how to get there. We hop into our cars in blissful ignorance, simply plugging in an address and obeying our GPS‘s commands.
Laptops: I do a lot of radio and have noticed that everyone on the radio these days — the hosts, the guests, etc. — is sitting in front of an Internet-connected PC or laptop while on the air. Both guests and hosts are on the radio because they‘re experts or they know something. Yet there‘s literally no downside to supplementing knowledge in real time with online resources. People outside broadcasting do this, too, on telephone conference calls and other situations where you can hear the person but not see him. They are, in effect, using their laptops as Gibsonian microsofts to augment their knowledge. Using an Internet-connected device when called upon to know something is simply what people do whenever they can.
Cell phones: Internet-connected smart phones are becoming the Mother of All Knowledge Replacement Devices. For general information, people head straight for Google or Wikipedia and to more specialized sites, which are increasingly mobile-friendly, for detailed, often job-specific information. The availability of this information is making people more relaxed about knowledge in general.
So whether the idea of knowledge obsolescence strikes you as horrible or not, it is already happening and is tied directly to the quality and availability of gadgets.
Maybe this is an opportunity
The truth is that we forget just about everything we learn in the 12 years we go to school. Yes, much of that lost knowledge served as building blocks for subsequent knowledge and intellectual abilities that enabled us to develop into who we are now. But broadly speaking, the difference between an educated 40-year-old and a 40-year-old moron is not how much they learned in school but what those people have done since graduating. A curious, active reader who uses reference materials promiscuously is going to be far better educated than someone who doesn‘t read and doesn‘t care about knowing anything.
In other words, the current educational system is deeply flawed. How many new high school graduates come across as people who just devoted the last 12 years of their lives to learning? Would we all be better off if we had spent more of our precollege education on skills, including how to find and process knowledge, than on memorizing facts that will soon be forgotten and can easily be retrieved later?
Maybe mobile devices will free us to transform our educational system into one that doesn‘t kill children‘s curiosity and sour them to the idea of reading a book. Maybe if kids don‘t have to spend so much time forcing themselves to memorize facts they‘ve already got in their pockets, they can have less homework and regain their childhoods. Maybe we‘ll come to realize that knowledge — the storing of data in our brains just in case we might need it someday — isn‘t valuable to us. And if we can let the computers do that part for us, we can focus on what we do best, which is to recognize patterns, explore ideas and follow our curiosity.
Will knowledge become obsolete? I have no idea. But I do believe that carrying a hundred Libraries of Congress in our pockets changes our relationship with knowledge and will force us to rethink how we acquire it.
Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. He blogs about the technology needs, desires and successes of mobile warriors in his Computerworld blog, The World Is My Office. Contact Mike atmike.elgan@elgan.com or his blog, The Raw Feed.
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google何时灭亡？互联网的预言
历史和现实表明，互联网起源和进化的最终目标是为了实现人类大脑的充分联网，这一目标产生了强大的拉动力，不断引导互联网向前发展，这就是互联网发展的规律。互联网进化的最终结果是，第一，实现人类大脑的充分联网。第二，形成一个与人类大脑高度相似的互联网虚拟大脑。
包括google与微软在云计算的竞争，第二人生的出现。SNS网站的兴起，威客的发现等等显露出互联网进化规律的影响。无论我们是否意识到，我们任何涉及互联网的创新和发明，都应该是人类大脑充分连网和互联网虚拟大脑的进化阶段性产物。
通过对互联网进化论的研究，我们提出如下五个互联网发展趋势的预言：
第一个预言是GOOGLE的辉煌将会过去，它再也不能随意抓取其他三维空间的信息，供自己的盈利所用。知识的价值化，三维信息的技术壁垒，互联网三维空间管理者的法律禁止声明三个因素将形成共振的拐点，共同导致GOOGLE毁灭。我们预言操作系统的三维化将是下一个互联网发展重点，GOOGLE将会在互联网的操作系统三维化后完成它的历史使命，走向灭亡。属于若干个互联网三维世界自己的搜索引擎将会出现，被GOOGLE掠夺和占有的互联网信息财富将会归还给它的创造者. 但我们也因该指出，在互联网进化力量摧毁GOOGLE之前，它会用已经掠夺和占有的互联网信息财富创造自己的互联网三维世界，目前形态的GOOGLE一定会死去，但另一种生命形态的GOOGLE可能会延续下去，这取决于GOOGLE领导层的决策速度。
第二个预言是各个网站之间的兼并和服务器的合并将会加剧，主要是解决虚拟神经元的分散问题和互联网虚拟大脑的统一问题。人们不可能在众多网站上注册和接受服务，互联网进化规律作为看不见的手引导巨型网站出现，替代若干同质网站的竞争。
第三个预言是人类接驳互联网的手段将越来越充分，手机以后，眼镜式接驳设备和晶状体式接驳设备将会出现。最终视频信号会直接接驳的人的晶状体中。人们可以轻易的在虚拟和现实世界中切换。
第四个预言是互联网信用体系会越来越发达，从身份证到指纹再到DNA式信用验证会成为又一个进化链条。DNA式信用验证会和晶状体式接驳设备联系到一起。
第五个最重要的预言是在2050年左右，唯一的，完整的互联网虚拟大脑将会出现，它和人类大脑的结构会非常相似，互联网虚拟大脑同样会包含虚拟神经元，虚拟运动神经系统，虚拟躯体感觉神经系统，虚拟视觉和听觉神经系统，虚拟记忆系统等。这对于我们解决人类大脑的未知之谜将会起到决定作用，我们已经通过对比互联网，预言人的大脑中也会存在地址编码系统和信息的搜索引擎系统。
这些预言是否真实还需要接受实践的考验。
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