Статьи 5 семестр / _The immaterial world 1

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

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THE NEW VIRUSES

Bernard Le Guenno

Pasteur Institute

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Seth Lloyd

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Devra Lee Davis

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The Molecular Logic of Smell

Imploding a Building

Young Binary Stars

Thomas Edison's Notebooks

Trends: Evolutionary Psychology

ON SALE SEPTEMBER 28

The Immaterial World

Review by Charles Herzfeld

being digital, by Nicholas Negroponte. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995 ($23).

For those who are not content to wait and see what the 21st centu­ry will be like, Being Digital gives a better hint than most prognostica­tions. As the founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology, Nicholas Negroponte is well placed to peer into the future, and he is frankly optimistic about what he sees. His most important message is that a new world, a new way of life, is upon us. This emerging world is character­ized by the ever more efficient produc­tion, analysis and consumption of in­formation— specifically, information in digital form. As the book's title sug­gests, digital information will be used for work, for play and for just about ev­erything one may wish to do.

Negroponte explains well what the digital approach is all about and gives many trenchant examples of its power. Until recently, for instance, libraries and

books existed only as huge collections of atoms, whose bulk makes them hard to transport and awkward to interro­gate about the information they con­tain. But the data in books can be, and increasingly are, kept in digital form, al­lowing them to be easily moved, edited, combined, compared and consumed. The Internet has become the metaphor for what lies ahead, although the net of the future will be fuller, more interest­ing and easier to access than it is now.

Being Digital is loosely based on a se­ries of columns by Negroponte in Wired, the monthly magazine that aims to cov­er "everything" digital. This pedigree is both a strength and a weakness: the book's coverage is broad and breezy but occasionally superficial. The author is quite witty and has a nice sense of the ridiculous, as when he points out that "virtual reality" is a top-notch oxymo­ron. But one wishes for more informa­tion on certain subjects, such as com­plex systems and innovative ways of doing science in the digital world. The book's index shows similar lapses. Nei­ther John von Neumann (whose work on logical design during the 1940s and 1950s forms a cornerstone of modern electronic computers) nor J.C.R. Lickli-der (who, while at M.I.T. in the 1960s, mated computer science and psycholo­gy in an effort to make computers easi­er to use) is listed in it, even though both appear in the text.

Nevertheless, important ideas abound in Negroponte's writing. His notion that in our "post-info age" each of us will be

an audience and a market of one, and that our wants and needs will be thor­oughly documented, not only repre­sents a plausible future, it is already on the way. Tomorrow's newspapers may be delivered on-line, specially tailored to each reader's interests. Digital custom­ization would permit browsing of the paper, enhanced by easy access to in- " depth) information on one's chosen items. The pleasurable feel of the print­ed page could be mimicked by a display panel having the proper texture and flexibility. Negroponte proposes a clev­er idea, that computers should observe us and learn to guess our real wants, as revealed by our body language, vocal inflections and so on.

One question posed several times— and quite effectively—concerns how we will cope with the enormous number of

Information about

information will

become essential.

choices that will open to us in the digi­tal world. We may soon have access to 15,000 television channels, a few hun­dred million books and billions of pag­es of journals. Information about infor­mation will become essential. Interac­tive, intelligent guides will become a new technology as well as a new art form; I foresee a major industry niche devoted to filling this essential need. Current efforts along these lines, such as software "agents," are still primitive compared with what appears possible.

An important part of Negroponte's story involves recounting how we got to where we are now. The part of this his­tory in which I was a player—the crea­tion of the Arpanet, which led eventual­ly to the Internet and to the opening of the new digital world—is hinted at but not clearly described in the book. I was the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (arpa) in the 1960s and approved the plan to build the first long-distance computer network. It was a true team effort involving universities, companies large and small, and govern­ment, including benevolent oversight from the U.S. Congress during the 1960s and 1970s.

Many writers have referred to the In­ternet as an example of a technology born out of military necessity that has found unanticipated civilian use, but rarely have I seen this aspect of the In­ternet accurately described. It is too bad that Negroponte misses an opportunity to set an important part of the record

214 scientific american September 1995