Shrinking to One Point

Microelectronics, fiber optics, earth-orbiting satellites, and free enterprise are allowing a collection of the best engineering and business minds on our planet to build technology that will be able to instantly interconnect - by text, audio, and visual images - all currently living human minds with one another and with all recorded human knowledge from the present and from the past.

We are all familiar with ways in which this technology has already touched our lives. These have been just a beginning. The advances of the coming decade will astonish even the technologists.

Our libraries will disappear, as virtually all recorded knowledge becomes available at every human location by means of electronic networks and, where preferred, on low-cost plastic disks. Transmission of audio, visual, and textual information will become essentially instantaneous as the bandwidth of this electronic miracle increases far beyond our individual abilities to utilize it.

With the collapse of their monopolies on knowledge stored in libraries and information delivery, educational institutions - from elementary school through college - will be transformed. Most will die. The remainder will be engaged primarily in testing and accreditation.

As far as information and communications are concerned, all human minds are going to be electronically connectable and effectively relocatable to a single point in time and space. Even those minds that are no longer living will be able to occupy this point to the extent that their knowledge has been recorded and retained.

While these changes will transform most aspects of our lives, they will not substitute for all of our activities. A popular myth is spreading that we are moving into the "information age'' and a "post-industrial'' society. It is claimed that, in this mythical new age, even pseudoenvironmentalist energy rationing will be harmless because information technology requires very little energy. This is nonsense.

The maintenance and enrichment of human lives still require steel, concrete, fuel, and all of the other commodities and manufactured goods upon which we depend. We must have food, shelter, clothing, transportation, medicine, and other necessities to survive; and we must have literature, art, music, and the tools to explore new frontiers in the microscopic worlds and in outer space in order to fulfill higher human objectives and needs. Better information can make us more effective in these works, but it cannot substitute for the works.

There is no such thing as a world "post-industrial society.'' Post industrialism can be tried on a local or national level, but the risks are great. The United States is, for example, the current world leader in information technology, but it is rapidly losing its leadership in most other technologies - especially heavy industry. Confiscatory taxation and out-of-control regulation and litigation are driving productive industry out of America and into more favorable environments. It is astonishing that Communist China, while still under the control of a terrible tyranny, is rapidly overtaking American industry because China has lower taxes and less regulation and litigation.

Also, advances in information technology do not stand alone as unalterable advantages because not all information is true - and -even true information is not useful unless it is intelligently utilized.