Site-Seers' Guide to Some Way-Out Internet Futures

By John Schwartz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 3, 1996; Page A01

Sometimes the future looks bright. Sometimes the future looks scary.

And sometimes the future looks plain goofy.

Take Steve Mann. At the sixth annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference earlier this year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student was showing off his brainchild: a wearable computer system that keeps him linked to the World Wide Web while he walks around.

A special visor put before his eyes the images normally seen on a computer screen, while a head-mounted video camera relayed images via radio waves to a Web computer so that anyone could check in and see the world from Mann's point of view. His computer hung on a belt bag. Shambling around the conference, hoping to demonstrate the technical feasibility of full-time connections on the go, he resembled a "Borg," the human-computer chimeras of "Star Trek -- the Next Generation."

Pioneers often look strange to their contemporaries -- think of the early aviators with their goggles, scarves and cloth-covered contraptions. We won't know for years whether Mann will make a dent in technology or be forgotten. But many of his colleagues are much further along with new products and services. The future is already here, it's just in beta testing, the high-tech world's final smoothing-out of kinks before products and services go public.

Here's a sampling of best-guess predictions for what is coming soon, followed by some longer-term crystal-gazing about what our children may -- or may not -- see:

The Web will become a sizable marketplace. While stores of the brick and mortar variety will remain very much with us, millions of Americans will do some of their shopping online. Technology companies will solve security problems and make Americans comfortable with shopping and banking on the Web.

Showing the way will be companies such as Douglas Crockford's Electric Communities. Software it has helped develop allows buyers and sellers to find each other in cyberspace and to conduct transactions in an open marketplace -- "a global flea market," Crockford says, for "the very big players, the very small players and everybody in between."

The Electric Communities software could be commercially available some time next year. The idea is that if Aunt Ida's Bytes Bazaar offers wares at a better value than IBM's, you'll be able to figure that out and make the purchase, the company promises. Though some retailers have resisted cooperating with computer-based searches that yield the lowest price, many experts say they'll be swept along by the tide.

Agents will do your bidding. Software "agents" are programs that act like personal assistants. Some of them go out from your computer and automatically search for information you desire, saving you the trouble of wandering from computer to computer yourself. Mobile agents have been released into cyberspace by companies such as General Magic Corp. to handle such jobs as scheduling meetings.

Java, a programming technology developed by Sun Microsystems Inc., allows Web surfers to pull software off of Web pages to work on their machines. In use already at various Web sites, Java could also open the way for widespread use of agents by making it easier to create them and establishing standards.

One promising Web site that employs rather advanced agents, "Firefly," grew out of the MIT Media Lab. The agent program helps introduce people to music and movies they might like by quizzing them about their interests and then comparing their favorite records and films to those of people with similar interests.

Launched at the end of January, Firefly already boasts a database of more than 100,000 users. Firefly spokesman Ted Kamioneck said his company is planning to expand the site's functions to help people spot interesting Web sites and to keep up with the news.

The Web will go mobile. Not in the 24-hour way that Steve Mann is demonstrating, but a few minutes at a time.

Americans already use 39 million cellular phones and 34 million pagers. Many experts believe that large numbers of people will jump at the chance to send and receive data on the go -- to check an airline's schedule from a taxi headed to the airport, say, or call up a stock quote.

In this country, the Federal Communications Commission has opened up large chunks of the radio spectrum to wireless data transmission in the past year. Companies have pledged billions of dollars toward licenses to offer services.

Companies such as Nokia of Finland have developed hand-held devices that use a small liquid-crystal screen to give basic access to the Web. They're already on sale in Europe.

The World Wide Web will go 3D and TV. Most of what you see on the Web is presented in two dimensions, the same as the printed page. But the technology that puts numbers, letters and pictures up on the screen also can offer a convincing illusion of depth.

That is the promise of VRML (virtual reality modeling language), a developing "three-dimensional" technology that lets you look at, around and behind objects presented on the screen as if you were walking through a room. VRML isn't true virtual reality -- you don't don wrap-around headgear and see the projected image as if it were all around you -- but it will bring new depth, as it were, to the Web-surfing experience.

Primitive video programming already is flowing over the Web -- rock groups such as the Rolling Stones have broadcast concerts this way. For now the pictures are dim and jerky. But as transmission capacity increases, the Web will likely emerge as an important source of video news and ultimately as a competitor to cable television. Movies might be stored at Web sites. People would connect to them, make a payment electronically, then sit back and watch.

The Web will become more social. At present, it is better at the one-way broadcasting of information than it is at linking people for one-on-one communication. But many sites are starting to introduce virtual worlds that we enter with "avatars," graphical representations of ourselves. If your avatar enters a room depicted on a screen, it does so too on the screens of other people. You can talk to them; they can talk to you.

For now, avatars are simple animations. In short order, they're sure to evolve into realistic images. People could use them to socialize, walk through an electronic shopping mall, attend a lecture, look for love.

The idea is to bring to the Web the two-way abilities of text-based services that have been on the Internet for years: The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) service has let people from around the world drop into a typed conversation on any of thousands of live "channels." The "newsgroups" on the online entity known as USENET allow people to compose longer messages and present ideas and arguments in thousands of discussion groups.

As the technology for person-to-person communication on the Web improves, says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future, a California think tank, we will discover something far more compelling than mere information: each other. That will transform the still-evolving medium into "the hottest salon venue on the planet. We're not going to surf in cyberspace, we're going to hang out in it."

The Web will get bigger, bigger, bigger. As increasing numbers of people and organizations get connected, "Metcalfe's law of networks" will kick in. The law, attributed to computer communications pioneer Robert Metcalfe, is deceptively simple: "The more people join a network, the more that network increases in value."

By the end of the decade, some analysts predict, the Web will be an almost ubiquitous information appliance in homes, offices and schools. More people will have their own "home pages," from which they will be able to pay bills, shift money between accounts, stay in touch with family and friends and entertain online visitors.

The Web will grow in as well as out, as companies and institutions convert their internal communications networks to Web-based "intranets" that spread company information to employees and customers. Already, intranets are the fastest-growing part of the Web. "The intranet is where we sell 70 to 80 percent of our software," said Netscape Communications Corp. co-founder Marc Andreessen.

As the snowball becomes an avalanche, businesses that do not offer information and wares online will lose out as surely as if they tried to do business without telephones. The Net will become another of the things that we take for granted, and consider absolutely essential.

The Other Side of the Page
But hold on. Let's step back a moment and consider that there's also a school of thought out there that the Web could fizzle.

Already the sheer number of people who try to get on it every day slows the transmission speed for everyone. Even the judges in Philadelphia hearing the legal challenge against the government's restrictions on Internet "indecency" this spring saw their Internet demonstration slow to a crawl at late morning with the daily rush of Internet traffic as California awakened, stretched, and logged on en masse.

Even if the Web gets around the capacity problem, there are other potential crises. Should businesses decide that the money they are lavishing on creating Web pages isn't worth it and pull out, a great deal of the impetus for Web development could collapse before the new medium truly reaches the mass market, leaving little more than the original rump of enthusiasts.

Or it could happen that the Web turns out to be a craze, which people abandon as fast as they flocked in.

Other scenarios point to a less sudden decline in the Web, but one that would leave it much diminished from its present yeasty state.

Stewart Baker, former counsel for the National Security Agency who is now a partner at the Washington law firm of Steptoe and Johnson specializing in online law, says the "free-wheeling, anything-goes attitude" found on much of the World Wide Web could become less prevalent as big business moves in.

"It will always be there, but will comprise a smaller and smaller percentage of what goes on on the Web." Early amateur radio and pirate radio were dwarfed by the growth of commercial broadcasters, Baker says, and it could happen again: "People get tired of hearing other folks rant, and they want more organized entertainment."

With bigger businesses comes more caution, Baker warns: "As the people who provide that [entertainment] become bigger, they are exposed to the inexorable quid pro quos that government exacts." Already, the U.S. and German governments are trying to restrict the Internet's sexual content; other governments are concerned about political content. Restrictions won't be 100 percent effective, Baker says, but will nonetheless have a chilling effect.

Baker foresees two levels to the Web. "In among the dinosaurs there will be a bunch of mammals interacting and sending messages. Only when they get big enough to be noticed will they get stomped on by the dinosaurs," he says.

Such a scenario could lead to a gradual dimming of the Web's potential. The early rosy predictions that television would bring the nation together and kick off an American renaissance eventually gave way to FCC Chairman Newton Minow's declaration, more than three decades ago, that television had become a "wasteland."

Awaiting the Way-Out Web
But let's switch gears again and assume the Web will continue to expand. This is the mainstream view. But the Web won't remain in its current form. Rather, it will evolve into something else that will drag us along with it. "The Web is the shiny object of the moment, and has generated a lot of attention," said Crockford of Electric Communities. "But it's not the last stage in the evolution of the network."

Out there, along time's far horizon, there are electronic realms that might seem more like science fiction than fact. But science fiction has a way of coming true sometimes, for better or worse. Jules Verne took us to the moon a little early. Author William Gibson named a place called "cyberspace" and now many of us all but live there.

Sometimes writers and creators of the new world come to the same point simultaneously. Software representations of people interacting online, for instance, are part of Electric Communities' game plan -- and part of novelist Neal Stephenson's rollicking novel "SnowCrash." Crockford and colleagues were working on the concept before Stephenson's novel came out, and even hit on the same name -- avatars.

So what else is Stephenson predicting? He gives us the prospect of the "wet net." This fanciful notion, explored in his novel "The Diamond Age," links human brains through ultra-tiny computers passed from person to person by contact. The exchange of processors creates a giant meta-computer harnessing the processing power of each participant's brain. The unified entity greatly exceeds traditional wire-and-silicon computers in power. As far-fetched as it might sound, the wet net is with us in very seminal form today: When people gather online, the ensuing brainstorm can produce ideas that the individuals would never have come up with on their own. It's the Net that's uniting the far-flung intelligence, combining creative powers.

Last summer, when the Internet community was up in arms over a Time magazine cover story that many believed strongly overstated the threat of cyberporn, activists on the Net collaborated on research to discredit the study that the story was based on.

Stephenson won't say when he expects the real "wet net" to appear -- but he doesn't doubt it's on the way. "Some kind of interface will be developed -- a more direct interface with the brain," he says, referring to traditional problems of how to link the user and the computer. "I'm a bit skeptical about how effective it could be. Even if it were minimally effective, it would probably be pretty damned interesting."

Let's peer as far as we can without getting too dizzy now, and think about what we will have brought into the world if something like Stephenson's vision is achieved.

The folks at Sun Microsystems coined the slogan "the network is the computer." But imagine, if you can, the next step: "The network is us."

Through today's Internet, we already can explore and form communities of interest that aren't constrained by geography. That's how volcano scholars and stamp collectors and other specialist groups find and keep in touch with kindred spirits nowadays. If the Net becomes so much broader and deeper, however, we could have become a truly global village. And maybe, something more: a new kind of organism.

In his speculative book "Out of Control," Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly foresees just such a world in which people are all connected electronically. He compares it to the "hive mind" of bees. He sees it as the next step in our evolution, without predicting whether it will be a step up or down.

"As we wire ourselves up into a hivish network, many things will emerge that we, as mere neurons in the network, don't expect, don't understand, can't control, or don't even perceive," he says.

Back to planet Earth now.

If change scares you a bit, you can take comfort in something that Paul Saffo likes to say: "Don't confuse a clear line of sight with a short distance." Despite all the talk about impermanence and breakneck rates of change, people are people and it takes time to bring about fundamental shifts.

And don't expect the Web to go away. "It's likely to always be with us," says Crockford of Electric Communities. "In the history of media, whenever you get something that's really good, [it tends] to change but [it doesn't] disappear." After all, he notes, "we still have radio."

© Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company