Will Everything Be Digital?

By Nicholas Negroponte

The important thing to remember is that bits are bits. In the digital world there are no movies or magazines or pieces of music. There are just 1s and 0s, for which we did not even have a name until 1946 when Princeton statistician John Tukey concatenated the words binary and digit into the term bit.

For the next 25 years, bits were of interest only to a few specialized members of the scientific community. But of late, bits have become important to everybody, because we can represent anything as bits--anything. In the not-too-distant future, we'll be able to describe the human body with bits and try out new drugs on these models rather than on living beings.

Books and magazines and newspapers are not the meaningful element. What matters is words. And words are not going anywhere; they are one of the most powerful and efficient forms of human communication. A few words--i.e., a few bits--can create religions, can make war or peace. Those words when presented to the eye (vs. the ear) are presented as text. In the past we could render text only by printing it on paper, carving it in stone, writing it with smoke.

Today we can do something new. We can reduce the text to bits (which we cannot see or hear), take this new representation and store it, manipulate it or transmit it, and then later render it on a computer display or a piece of paper. The same is true of music, movies, still photographs. While this is widely recognized, few people have a sense of the quantity of bits needed to achieve one representation vs. another. For example, when you read a book, you consume (if you read as fast as I do) about 3 million bits an hour. When you look at television, you consume 3 million a second. Obviously, all bits are not created equal.

UNDERSTANDING BANDWIDTH

Bandwidth is the ability to move bits. Broadband is the ability to move a lot of bits per second. Though everybody seems to do it, likening bandwidth to the diameter of a pipe is misleading, because our consumption of bits is not analogous to drinking from a garden or fire hose. We don't necessarily consume bits in a continuous fashion (like water), and even if we did, that does not perforce mean our computers have to receive them that way.

One of the most profound changes afforded by the digital world is the ability to be asynchronous, in the smallest and largest time scales. In the smallest sense, this allows us to use efficiently our channels of communications; for example, interleaving people's conversations--packetizing them--so that many people share the same channel without being aware that they are. In the larger sense, we can expand, contract and shift our personal time in new ways, leaving and receiving messages at mutual convenience. On a yet larger scale, social behavior will also become more asynchronous, with all of us moving in much less lockstep rhythm and with more personal cadence than we do today. Our great-great-grandchildren will find it very odd that their ancestors commuted in traffic or huddled around a TV set at a particular time.

But in this new world, more bandwidth is not necessarily good, or even what we want. And, when we do want it, it is not necessarily in order to sit in front of a device and consume a few billion bits an hour. It is more likely that we will want a million bits in a fraction of a second followed by a pause. Our future consumption of bits will be very conversational and bursty.

Moreover, the dominant user of the Net in the future will not be people at all. It will be machines talking to one another in ways we cannot imagine. For them, trickle charging information or blasting at a billion bits a second are options not directly meaningful to people. Increasingly, these bits will arrive wirelessly.

BEING WIRELESS

Plugs are the past. The need to be tethered is disappearing for two reasons: better battery technologies (and less power-hungry devices) and improved use of radio frequencies, so-called RFs. Eventually, everything electric will talk with everything else electric, using very fine-grained, wireless communications. Ultimately, all long-distance traffic will be fiber and all short-distance traffic will be RF.

Today you may have one or two dozen wireless devices (radio, cell phone, TV, pager, car key, a gaggle of remote-control units). Tomorrow, you will probably have thousands of them.

One place you'll find these micro wireless devices will be on packaging, when RF identification tags replace the universal product code--those little vertical bars read by supermarket checkout scanners. With emerging print technologies, it will be possible to print active tags directly onto containers--tiny computers that broadcast their ID, price and other characteristics (such as the expiration date). A refrigerator or a medicine cabinet can thus know what is inside it. A container could be aware of the absence or presence of each pill. In the future, all these inanimate objects will be able to talk to one another and pass messages among themselves.

Computers are coming out of the box. Our grandchildren will look back at the personal computer as a quaint artifact, as common tomorrow as an ice chest is today.

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

It has taken technology forecasters far too long to realize that the Internet will have a billion users and carry $1 trillion worth of e-commerce within a year. Now they seem to get it, but they are making a new mistake. The have got the pie right, but the distribution wrong.

Typically, the future of the Internet is described as being 50% U.S., 40% Europe, 5% Japan and Korea, and 5% the rest of the world. Boy, is that ever wrong! Be prepared to be very surprised by the rest of the world. Within three years, the developing world will represent more than 50% of the Web. Three years after that, the most widely used language on the Internet will be Chinese.

One reason we miscalculate the developing world's ability to leverage the power of the Internet is that we underestimate the power of imperatives. A single connection can be shared by many people and provide access to a whole world of libraries to a school that previously did not even have books. The one-on-one use of computers we enjoy in the U.S. is not the only way to be connected. For some reason we understand that a small and poor company can suddenly compete with big and rich ones, but we do not realize that a small and poor country can compete on the world market with big and rich ones too. And they will, to everybody's surprise. You watch.

Nicholas Negroponte is co-founder and director of the M.I.T. Media Lab and author of Being Digital