Module 5 – Prepare for ‘Future Shock’

I am going to go on a limb here and say the future is already here, actually in went online when Napster came online back in 1999. To explain this in point form is the best.

1. Napster came online in 1999.

2. Increased demand for high speed Internet caused mass roll out of initial 64k to 512k ADSL services.

3. File sharing increased in popularity creating more demand for high speed Internet.

4. Napster’s demise led to the formation of decentralized file sharing networks.

5. Additional services became more common as high speed Internet became a cost effective reality.

6. Telephone networks began (and are still) moving their networks from allowing net traffic to actually being a part of it ie: merging with the Internet.

7. Tertiary non computer devices with Internet access began popping up.

8. Additional services began appearing that use the high speed Internet that most users now have access to.

Rather then a sudden jump from one technological infrastructure to another we are instead seeing a progression of the Internet becoming the dominant communication medium, originally the Internet was just traffic passing through telephone networks but now telephone networks are merging with the Internet for basic operations because the bandwidth is so much larger then what traditional telephone networks have access to. Internet services that use the high speed access that most users in the western world are becoming more pervasive and popular, take for example my computer it has the following programs that fit into this scenario.

1. BOINC.

2. Folding @ Home – GPU edition

Both are classified as distributed computing applications with my contributions to medical science/ astrophysics and physics (LHC), these applications would have never appeared if home users never had high speed Internet access as some of the uploads/downloads these things transmit would take hours for dial up users.

They sit at the bottom right hand corner of the screen quietly calculating and helping science.

We already have web 2.0 services available such as mass blogging/virtual interactive communities/public hot spots etc the future in the sense of the intended meaning is already here however what WE can expect is more pervasive Internet encompassing many things we take for granted an example would be cable television networks transmitting their information to customers through the Internet instead of piggybacking of the telephone network.

The Internet is too big to be upgraded in the traditional from one technological leap to another even though the Internet2 network coloboration transmits data at 2.4gb bps per second it will most likely for the better part superseed the current architecture of the Internet over a period of time perhaps a few decades.

If any technological revolution will come it will be from software an example would be the P2P networks and it is software that will test the limits of the new Internet2 network, its limits and its capabilities.

While the module5 document lists intelligent agents as a possible next step I would argue that it is already here. Take my router for example which has IGMP multicast enabled, what does this mean? It means that my router is talking always (more then me) with routers at my ISP and in the geographical region for best pathway to reach a particular point, intelligence agents already exist but they are not obvious as again it is a gradual change that many users will be not aware of.

Indeed the future of the Internet over time will be pervasive, faster and with more services then all other mediums of communication combined.

This trend of an ever complex ever more pervasive and technologically advancing Internet will continue as long as humans have a desire to communicate.

Possibly perhaps in a thousand years after the extinction of humans, intelligent agents will be self aware and in solar powered servers then for them our real space will become their virtual space.