Societal Impact

Information makes the world go round. The truth in that statement has been growing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and will go on doing so for at least the next 25 years. Between now and 2008, the amount of human labor required the material goods needed by the society will decrease. We will undergo a transition to an information economy, an age offering more opportunities for the full development of human potential than any before.

The standard of education will increase. The need of the electronic society for skilled citizens will be coupled with the increased availability of information and will produce better education. Although the resources may not be dedicated to the task immediately, by 2008 the change will have occurred. As the society becomes aware that it has passed the age of manual labor, it will begin to train its members for the age of mental work. This task will be greatly eased by the existence of a full-scale information distribution system. It may not be possible to pinpoint the moment of change, but the child of 2008 will have a greater opportunity to attain its intellectual capacities than does the child of today.

The move to an information economy will not be all for the good. Increasingly many people will be divorced from the soil: most of the society will have no idea of how basic survival works. While children will be taught that milk comes not from a cardboard box, but from a cow, their understanding may be limited by never meeting a cow. There are some who would argue that this will mean greater disregard for the environment. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, the belief that subsistence societies have any greater respect for the land than do industrialized societies has no basis in fact. The difference is that technology allows the same attitudes to do far greater damage. Second, as the electronic age becomes a greater part of our daily lives, we will come to cherish wilderness more. The roots of this attitude could already be found ten years ago, today, the attitude is quite apparent, by 2008, the ecological ethic will be an integral part of the information age. And third, we may even find a move back to the country. A comprehensive electronic communication system in a computer age could make cities obsolete.

Privacy may also become obsolete. There is a great threat to personal freedom hidden in the coming electronic era. For example, the potential price of being able to buy anything, anywhere by electronic funds transfer is that someone, somewhere can know when, where, and what you bought. The disadvantage of electronic mail is the ease with which it may be read... By 2008, however, society will have adapted. Some of the problems related to the increased availability of personal information will be fixed by technical means: seemingly unbreakable digital cryptosystems already exist, for example, and fiber optic communication lines are much harder to "tap" than electrical ones. Some of the problems will be removed by social and political means: we may find legal means to prevent unauthorized access to private information, and we simply change our notion of private. By 2008, we may not expect true privacy while connected to the electronix society, but only when we remove ourselves, and we will find our freedom in the great outdoors.

The next 25 years will be a period of transition. We will have to adapt to the electronic age. We will see the systems we are creating abused by lawmaker and lawbreaker alike. The computer criminals who will become as much a part of American mythology as the outlaws of the Wild West will come and go as we cross the frontier to the 21st century. But as the technology and the society develop and grow together, the good will gradually overtake the bad. Westward ho!