In the middle of the twentieth century, people
feared that advances in computers and communications would lead to the type of
centralized control depicted in George Orwell’s 1984. Today, billions of people
have eagerly put Big Brother in their pockets.
CAMBRIDGE – It is frequently said that we are
experiencing an information revolution. But what does that mean, and where is
the revolution taking us?
Information revolutions are not new. In 1439, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing
press launched the era of mass communication. Our current revolution, which
began in Silicon Valley in the 1960s, is bound up with Moore’s Law: the number
of transistors on a computer chip doubles every couple of years.
By the beginning of the
twenty-first century, computing power cost one-thousandth of what it did in the
early 1970s. Now the Internet connects almost everything. In mid-1993, there
were about 130 websites in the world; by 2000, that number had surpassed 15 million. Today, more than 3.5 billion people are online;
experts project that, by 2020, the “Internet of Things” will connect 20 billion
devices. Our information revolution is still in its infancy.
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