The Global Course of the Information Revolution: Technological Trends

Reports on a conference sponsored by the National Intelligence Council in May 2000 that concentrated on technical trends in the information revolution, focusing in particular on the resulting new artifacts and services that might become widespread during the next 20 years. Participants saw a convergence of voice and data communications and a quantum jump in bandwidth during the next two decades, along with limited machine translation. A multitude of diverse, powerful, inexpensive sensors and devices capable of limited-distance wireless communications will come onto the market and computing and information systems will become much more ubiquitous, with convergence of wireless telephones, voice and e-mail messaging, and smart appliances. A likely shift in business emphasis from products to services will have an impact in such areas as health care, education, entertainment, and supply-chain management. Participants also discussed individual and societal tensions that could arise from these developments, such as battles between advocates of “open” and “closed” worlds of protocols and standards, and the threats to intellectual property rights and to individual privacy.