What Will Be: How the World of Information Will Change Our Lives

What Will Be: How the World of Information Will Change Our Lives

" What Will Be is an engaging and visionary guide to the future, filled with insights.... Whoever takes part in the coming Information Revolution -- and that's just about all of us -- needs to know What Will Be." --Bill Gates " What Will Be is a rich, detailed look at the future texture of our daily lives." --Esther Dyson Tech oracle Michael Dertouzos -- head of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and author of the bestselling Made in America -- offers a learned, accessible and fascinatingly detailed preview of new information technology and the ways it will remake our society, culture, economy and private lives in the next century. Speaking to every reader affected by technological change and written by a key architect of the very revolution it describes, What Will Be is the first detailed roadmap to the world of the technological future. Many have predicted what emerging technology will mean for society. Michael Dertouzos, an Internet pioneer and Head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, has been among the few who've been pretty much right so far. Now he reaches into the coming century to paint a compelling, rationally developed picture of what's ahead. Dertouzos' fluid freedom from the pollyanna-ism or paranoia that afflict so many of his contemporaries brings to his visions the ring of both conviction and plausibility--and excitement as well. His crystal explanations and fascinating examples are irresistible. The result is a book as enjoyable as it is important. Dertouzos's vision, modeled on the Athens flea market, is the Information Marketplace, where people and their computers will buy, sell, and freely exchange information. Dertouzos, head of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, sees the Internet as just part of this marketplace's infrastructure and culture; it also will have powerful human-machine interfaces with great potential for medical applications. New software tools termed electronic bulldozers will increase human productivity, and electronic proximity will increase in the manner of a global business market and virtual community (cf. Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community, Addison-Wesley, 1993). In his scenarios, Dertouzos presents both "techie" and "humie" elements, seeking balance and unification. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Laverna Saunders, Salem State Coll. Lib., Mass. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Michael L. Dertouzos' new book refreshingly attempts a return to basics, eschewing hype and spectacle. He envisions the emerging world of information as a "21st-century village marketplace where people and computers buy, sell and freely exchange information and information services." . . . Mr. Dertouzos winces at the kind of sweeping predictions we expect from latter-day futurists. He asserts that the information marketplace "will be just another manifestation of ancient humans expending their ancient human lives in search of ancient human goals through new human tools and artifacts." There are highly readable explanations of "bodynets," virtual reality and electronic commerce. His utopia is a plausible, neighborly place, not so far from where we are now; that is the great prognostic value of his book. -- The New York Times Book Review, Rick Prelinger Tech oracle Michael Dertouzos (1937-2001) offered a learned, accessible, and fascinatingly detailed preview of new information technology and described how it would remake our society, culture, economy, and private lives. Since 1974 Michael Dertouzos had been Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). For more than a quarter century, MIT has been at the forefront of the computer revolution. Its members and alumni have been instrumental in the invention of such innovations as time-shared computers, RSA encryption, the Spreadsheet, the NuBus, the X-Window system, the ARPAnet and the Internet. The Lab is currently home to the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations led by the Web’s inventor. Dertouzos had spent much of his career studying and forecasting future technological shifts, and leading his lab toward making them a reality. In a 1976 People magazine interview, he successfully predicted the emergence of a PC in every 3-4 homes by the mid-1990s. In 1980, he first wrote about the Information Marketplace, with an ambitious vision of networked computers that has emerged as the trillion-dollar engine of commerce transforming our economy. Most recently, Dertouzos has been an advocate for what he calls "human-centric computing" -- a radical transformation of the way we use computers. As part of this effort, LCS recently unveiled the $50 million Oxygen project, intended to make computers easier to use and as natural a part of our environment as the air we breathe. Born in Athens, Greece, Dertouzos came to the U.S. as a Fulbright Scholar. Following a Ph.D. from MIT in 1964, he joined the MIT faculty, where he had been Professor of Co