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''A 2020 vision''

Things are moving fast. The Ratio I am talking about was published in 2000. Ten years or so later let's look to 2020, assuming that by then, even many of the '3 billion' will be on a much more level playing field with the rest of the world in this ubiquitous, mobile device and access sense.

We need to contend with three 'laws' that we find frequent enough reference to: Moore's law which suggests that computing power doubles every 18 months, the 'disk' law which says that storage power doubles every 12 months, and Gilder's law which says that communications power doubles every 2 to 3 years. Whether or not you give too much credence to these as 'laws', the trend is clear enough – rapid, indeed phenomenal development.

Let's assume that by 2020 the mobile device will be the Internet access tool for most of the world's people, and that certain boundaries, e.g. between personal and work time, between physical and virtual presence, will be much more blurred. What will all this do in terms of human relationships? I can't answer that in any precise form but I can think about a world where, at least on a personal basis, everything is available all the time, information is available on demand, people can create content at will, social networking (via the kinds of devices we have been discussing) will really matter, people can easily time-shift and space-shift, conversations get 'bigger' (more people involved), 'deeper' (in the sense that technology allows this sort of depth, and that they can be archived for recall. All this undoubtedly affects human relationships.

Maybe that is putting things mildly! While preparing these thoughts, I have been reading two wildly different approaches to technology, both predating the digital era as we now know it. One is a short story, a rather long one, by E.M. Forster, written precisely 100 years ago in 1909, called ''The Machine Stops''. It is an apocalyptic piece, but astounding for its prophetic character in that it foresees realities like email and videoconferencing, and explores the effects of technology (future for Forster; now, for us) on human relationships. The other is ''The Phenomenon of Man'' by Teilhard de Chardin. He, not Eric Raymond, known for his piece 'Homesteading the noosphere', gave us the term 'noosphere', which he describes as a 'membrane of thought' covering the earth. Bear in mind that although ''The Phenomenon of Man'' was first published in the late 1950s, it was written in 1938. A 1947 article by Chardin actually represented what may be his last published thinking on the subject. In this essay, entitled “The Formation of the Noosphere,”(''Revue des Questions Scientifiques'' (Louvian), pp. 7–35, January 1947, found in Teilhard de Chardin’s ''The Future of Man'', pp. 165–166 New York: Harper & Row, 1964), Chardin discussed the necessity of a mechanical infrastructure for this sphere of thought. Although his focus for such an infrastructure was radio and television networks, he also mentioned the possibility that computers might one day provide the mechanical infrastructure of the noosphere. Internet, then? His is a far more hopeful vision than Forster's. Chardin saw a final point where spirit would descend into matter in a final act of convergence and transcendence.

Integration(:nl:)