From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Aug 02 2002 - 21:59:50 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> To rephrase my recent comments in another, perhaps simpler,
> way, the government (or telecoms) need to demonstrate to me
> (before I support legislation, increased fees, etc.) how
> drinking from the information firehose will qualitatively
> make my life much better.
Will your life get better if applications you cannot even dream
of yet (well, not you personally <g>) are build that enhance
your life? At what point in increasing technology can you prove
before hand that the demand from the "consumer" (how I HATE that
word) will be there? Could you have predicted it when the first
TRS-80 or Apple II came out? You certainly couldn't have by
talking to industry heavyweights, almost anyone in government or
the average "consumer". When you yourself or your proxies can
drink from that firehose quite comfortably and fill outgoing
pipes of equal size then will the pipes be there? Certainly
these augmentations and devices will not be there without the
communication bandwidth. Are you satisfied to have MS own the
servers of the world as well as the desktop or a few
"content-providers" limit what is available and how much you can
get of it? I certainly am not. With fat enough and open enough
pipes the number of sources and sinks of information and the
interconnection into a distributed computing resource grows
tremendously. Without it the status quo hangs on too long imho.
>
> The internet era has clearly put any of us who are interested
> in "intelligently" processing information into information
> overload. For those who are not processing the information
> from an "intelligent" perspective overload is still a problem
> (how many sports channels do satellites now carry???).
>
Who would bother to count? Does it matter?
> I fail to see how the high bandwidth final mile will significantly
> advance society, culture, or humanity as they currently exist.
> Only when the end recepticles have a much higher bandwidth
> than those currently in place (i.e. we have posthumanist
> entities) does it seem to me that higher bandwidths will
> be useful.
>
But we, here on this list, are all about changing and changing
radically all of these things "as they currently exist". We
cannot do it very easily without tools and especially without at
least ubiquitous connectivity and also bandwidth. You can't get
to posthuman without the bandwidth beforehand. Oh, maybe you
could in some scenarios, but why make it more difficult?
- samantha
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