The broad benefits of advancing productivity are no solace for someone whose job is on the line. When a person has been trained for a job that is no longer needed, you can’t just suggest he go out and learn something else. Adjustments aren’t that simple or fast, but ultimately they are necessary. It isn’t easy to prepare for the next century, because it’s almost impossible to guess the secondary effects of even the changes we can foresee, much less those we can’t. A hundred years ago, people saw the automobile coming. It was sure to make fortunes, and also to run over some jobs and industries. But specifics would have been hard to predict. You might have warned your friends at the Acme Buggy Whip Company to polish up their résumés, and perhaps learn about engines, but would you have known to invest in real estate for strip malls?
More than ever, an education that emphasizes general problem-solving skills will be important. In a changing world, education is the best preparation for being able to adapt. As the economy shifts, people and societies who are appropriately educated will tend to do best. The premium that society pays for skills is going to climb, so my advice is to get a good formal education and then keep on learning. Acquire new interests and skills throughout your life.
A lot of people will be pushed out of their comfort zones, but that doesn’t mean that what they already know won’t still be valuable. It does mean that people and companies will have to be open to reinventing themselves—possibly more than once. Companies and governments can help train and retrain workers, but the individual must ultimately bear principal responsibility for his education.
A first step will be to come to terms with computers. Computers make almost everyone nervous before they understand them. Children are the primary exception. First-time users worry that a single misstep will cause them to ruin the computer or lose everything stored in it. People do lose data, of course, but very rarely is the damage irreversible. We have worked to make it harder to lose data and easier to recover from mistakes. Most programs have “Undo” commands that make it simple to try something, then quickly reverse it. Users become more confident as they see that making mistakes won’t be catastrophic. And then they begin to experiment. PCs provide all kinds of opportunities for experimentation. The more experience people have with PCs, the better they understand what they can and can’t do. Then PCs become tools instead of threats. Like a tractor or a sewing machine, a computer is a machine we can use to help us get certain tasks done more efficiently.
Another fear people express is that computers will be so “smart” they will take over and do away with any need for the human mind. Although I believe that eventually there will be programs that will recreate some elements of human intelligence, it is very unlikely to happen in my lifetime. For decades computer scientists studying artificial intelligence have been trying to develop a computer with human understanding and common sense. Alan Turing in 1950 suggested what has come to be called the Turing Test: If you were able to carry on a conversation with a computer and another human, both hidden from your view, and were uncertain about which was which, you would have a truly intelligent machine.
Every prediction about major advances in artificial intelligence has proved to be overly optimistic. Today even simple learning tasks still go well beyond the world’s most capable computer. When computers appear to be intelligent it is because they have been specially programmed to handle some task in a straightforward fashion—like trying out billions of chess moves in order to play master-level chess.
The computer has the potential to be a tool to leverage human intelligence for the foreseeable future. However, information appliances won’t become mainstream for publishing information until almost everyone is a user. It would be wonderful if everyone—rich or poor, urban or rural, old or young—could have access to one. However, personal computers are still too expensive for most people. Before the information highway can become fully integrated into society, it must be available to virtually every citizen, not just the elite, but this does not mean that every citizen has to have an information appliance in his house. Once the majority of people have systems installed in their homes, those who do not can be accommodated with a shared appliance at a library, school, post office, or public kiosk. It’s important to remember that the question of universal access arises only if the highway is immensely successful—more successful than many commentators expect. Amazingly, some of the same critics who complain the highway will be so popular it will cause problems also complain it won’t be popular at all.
The fully developed information highway will be affordable—almost by definition. An expensive system that connected a few big corporations and wealthy people simply would not be the information highway—it would be the information private road. The network will not attract enough great content to thrive if only the most affluent 10 percent of society choose to avail themselves of it. There are fixed costs to authoring material; so to make them affordable, a large audience is required. Advertising revenue won’t support the highway if a majority of eligible people don’t embrace it. If that is the case, the price for connecting will have to be cut or deployment delayed while the system is redesigned to be more attractive. The information highway is a mass phenomenon, or it is nothing.
Eventually the costs of computing and communications will be so low, and the competitive environment so open, that much of the entertainment and information offered on the highway will cost very little. Advertising income will allow a lot of content to be free. However, most service providers, whether they are rock bands or consulting engineers or book publishers, will still ask that users make a payment. So the information highway will be affordable, if used judiciously, but it won’t be free.
A large portion of the money you will spend on highway services you spend today for the same services in other forms. In the past you may have shifted money you spent on records to buying compact discs, or from movie tickets to videotape rentals. Soon your spending for videotape rentals will go to video-on-demand movies. You will redirect part of what you now spend on printed-periodical subscriptions to interactive information services and communities. Most of the money that now goes to local telephone service, long-distance service, and cable television will be available to spend on the highway.
Access to government information, medical advice, bulletin boards, and some educational material will be free. Once people are on the highway, they will enjoy full egalitarian access to vital on-line resources. Within twenty years, as commerce, education, and broad-scale communications services move onto the highway, an individual’s ability to be part of mainstream society will depend, at least in part, on his or her using it. Society will then have to decide how to subsidize broad access so that all users will be equal, both geographically and socioeconomically.
Education is not the entire answer to the challenges presented by the Information Age, but it is part of the answer, just as education is part of the answer to a range of society’s problems. H. G. Wells, who was as imaginative and forward-looking as any futurist, summed it up back in 1920. “Human history,” he said, “becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe” Education is society’s great leveler, and any improvement in education goes a long way toward equalizing opportunity. Part of the beauty of the electronic world is that the extra cost of letting additional people use educational material is basically zero.