A Cautionary Tale

In my lifetime l have seen the first colour televisions invented, men have landed on the moon, cars that now talk to you,mobile phone technology, flat tv screen technology nad supersonic air travel to name but a few, and l feel privileged to have witnessed all of these wonders.

The greatest of these is the World Wide Web, imagine with a few keystrokes you can find everything about anything or anyone :-

Who invented the Web? In the 1960's, Ted Nelson popularized the hypertext concept, and Douglas Engelbart created the first working hypertext systems. In the 1980's, the Web itself was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in Europe, and then rapidly spread around the world over the Internet in the 1990's by Marc Andreessen and the NCSA team that developed the Mosaic and Netscape browsers.

The word "hypertext" was first coined by Nelson in 1963, and is first found in print in a college newspaper article about a lecture he gave called "Computers, Creativity, and the Nature of the Written Word" in January, 1965:

Mike Joyce's Ted Sed Page
Nelson later popularized the hypertext concept in his book Literary Machines. His vision involved implementation of a "docuverse", where all data was stored once, there were no deletions, and all information was accessible by a link from anywhere else. Navigation through the information would be non-linear, depending on each individual's choice of links. This was more than text -- it was hypertext. The web realizes part of this vision, except that there are deletions, and some information is stored in more than one place.
Nelson has continued to develop his theory, and instantiates it with Project Xanadu, a high-performance hypertext system that assures the identity of references to objects, and solves the problems of configuration management and copyright control. Anyone is allowed to reference anything, provided that references are delivered from the original, and possibly involving micro payments to the copyright holders.
For example, the Xanadu system would enable an artist to post their work in electronic form and let it be accessed any number of times, without having to worry about suddenly receiving an insupportable bill for network bandwidth costs. By adding useful structure, the system frees up the information and makes it available to ACM incorporates a principle similar to one named "transcopyright" by Ted Nelson. ACM will hold its copyrighted works on its servers and will give free and unlimited permission to create and copy links to those works or their components. So that readers can locate the context from which an excerpt was drawn, ACM will provide a way of linking a component to its parent work. Readers following links will gain access upon payment of a fee or presentation of a valid authorization certificate to ACM or ACM's agent; ACM or its agent will issue a personalized certificate of ownership to that reader.

With this technology you can contact anyone on this planet anytime of the day or night.

Thankfully at the present we still have the ability to meet our customers and interact with them in order that they can purchase their product dealing with a professional sales person in our family owned company.

In my opinion there is no substitute for meeting someone face to face which is why the annual NADA trip is important to everyone that participates but also all members of staff as it all filters back in one way or another

San Francisco at night

Therefore we must embrace the wonders of current and future technologies for example by the year :-

2012 - U.S Futurist Robert Rice predicts the take off of glasses or retinal displays that augment and enhance your view of the world

2016 - We'll see mood make up that changes colour in response to emotional state according to BT's futuroligist Robert Mannings

2017 - Advanced robot helpers arrive in the home according to BT technologist s Ian Pearson and Ian Neild

2020 - Computer-chip maker Intel believes that they wlill have perfected mind control computer interfaces, negating the need for keyboards

2020 - Smart biosensors are able to monitor the body 24/7 and warn of any medical issues before they happen, says the Techcast thinktank

2022 - Quantam computers capable of performing tasks that would take today's machines millions of years will be the norm, says Techcast

2025 - 3D holographic TV, no glasses required the Maryland based World Future Society forecasts

2030 - U.S. author and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts realistic, full immersion virtual reality for the human race

2039 - Experts polled by the New Scientist suggest that invisibilty cloaks jet packs and x-ray glasses will all be available at this time

2040 - The late Arthur C Clarke predicted universal replicators that use nanotechnology to rustle up any object in any order no matter how complex

2040 - Kurzweil again, we'll be able to upload our minds into quantam computers by the middle of the century in true Tron Style

2049 - Kurzweil goes on to predict that we will all be eating nanotech food, engineered at the molecular level to be nutritionally perfect

ACM incorporates a principle similar to one named "transcopyright" by Ted Nelson. ACM will hold its copyrighted works on its servers and will give free and unlimited permission to create and copy links to those works or their components. So that readers can locate the context from which an excerpt was drawn, ACM will provide a way of linking a component to its parent work. Readers following links will gain access upon payment of a fee or presentation of a valid authorization certificate to ACM or ACM's agent; ACM or its agent will issue a personalized certificate of ownership to that reader.

Wednesday, 24 November 2010

A Cautionary Tale