A world of connections - Signal Lake Venture Fund

things as “seamless” (that is, integrated) as possible, he advocates keeping some
networks and data apart.
Belle Mellor
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government
has come up with a more innovative proposal: requiring information to be deleted
over time. He describes this as a legal and technical version of human forgetting.
Today's computer systems do not do that; tomorrow we may wish they did.
We are in the early stages of the creation of a new industry, reminiscent of
computing in the early 1970s when companies began to adopt it in earnest. There
was plenty of resistance. The systems were difficult to operate and seemed to be set
up for nerds. The economic benefits were questioned. There were privacy and
regulatory worries. Yet in time the rough edges were smoothed and everybody
benefited.
Technology rarely evolves in the way that people think it will. When Marconi invented
his wireless telegraph, he never imagined broadcast radio. A decade earlier Heinrich
Hertz had famously declared: “I do not think that the wireless waves that I have
discovered will have any practical application.” To the men at Bell Labs in 1947 the
transistor was simply an efficient replacement for vacuum tubes; they had no inkling
of its use in computers. Today these technologies are omnipresent: televisions in
every home; computers in every office; phones in every pocket; radio towers
looming overhead.
What is different about new wireless communications is that people will barely notice
them. Machines will talk to machines without human intervention. But humans will
nevertheless be laying the foundation of a new infrastructure which, like the
electrical power grid, will become a platform for subsequent innovation. There is no
saying how it will be used other than that it will surprise us.