Prologue
IT is the only sector delivering an exponential growth in capability whilst reducing material and energy costs. Since 1960 our ability to transport information over any distance has doubled each year whilst the use of raw materials and cost has reduced. Today, optical fibre transports over 90% of UK telephone and data communication. Similarly, the packing density of electronic circuits, information storage and processing power has nearly doubled every year with power consumption, raw material and cost falling exponentially. We now enjoy a communication and computing capability that was unimaginable just a decade ago. In ten years we might expect computers 10k more powerful than those of today. Within twenty years the power could increase by 10M, and there is a distinct possibility that in thirty years the power will have increased by 10Bn fold. Machines of such power will evolve human characteristics of adaptability, intelligence and personality. In this paper we consider some of these technological advances and their impact.

Cost Reduction - Capability Growth
In 1956 the cost of a transatlantic telephone call was £2.80/minute - today it is <ý£0.4/minute - computers in the home were unthinkable and the storage and transport of information was almost wholly by paper. Today, we have a rapidly expanding global network of optical fibre already transporting >70% of all the telephone calls. The first pocket calculator on the market in the early 1970's cost over £80 for just four functions - today superior technology is given away - free! A low cost electronic wristwatch now has more processing power than a mid-range computer of the 1960's, whilst the PC is realising an ability for office and home that surpasses the mainframe computers of only 10 years ago. This is all characterised by an exponential growth in power, and a correspondent fall in cost - exponentially more for exponentially less!

The scale of change is perhaps best exemplified by the reduction in raw material usage. BT has installed >3.5Mkm of optical fibre supporting the needs of 28M customers. This infrastructure was manufactured with just 90 tonnes of sand (silica) compared to the thousands of tonnes of copper cable it replaced! Similarly, the latest desk top computers are designed to use materials that are >95% recycled. In both cases the performance and capability are vastly superior, power consumption is lower, and production cost far less than previous technologies.

No Frontiers - No Barriers
Information is now a commodity item, accessible across the planet at insignificant cost. Access progressively easier by the continued advances in chip, satellite, radio and optical fibre technology that is reaching out to the office, home, car, and computer you carry. This information world is breaching the barriers between work play, home and office to radically change the nature of commerce and society. National and international boundaries are being rendered irrelevant - to pose some significant political problems. Governments and regulators seeing control slipping through their fingers. A bit, is a bit, is a bit - there is no difference between a telephone call, CATV, broadcast or data! Regulating the flow, distribution and access to information could is like trying to regulate rain.

Organisations themselves will become increasingly, and perhaps, totally dispersed. They will be virtual and organic with people contributing in an electronic rather than physical space. People will work when and with whom they choose, as appropriate, having access to machine intelligence and information. This will revolutionise the way business is conducted and economies are driven. Already those at the forefront have established group environments where work is passed around the globe, like a baton, from one daylight zone to another. Programmes, projects, developments, creativity and collaboration can be non-stop, non-national, but virtual and very fast.

Interfaces for People
The realisation of a GII presents a major challenge. It will impact on everything - education, medicine, care, leisure, entertainment, business, commerce, shopping, etc. An information society presents substantial human interface problems for all IT related industries. The ideal is to deliver information on demand, in the right form, at the right time, at the right price to a fixed or mobile terminal anywhere. However, today's IT industry has a multiplicity of hardware, software and interfaces that present an immediate challenge. In addition, a combination of technophobia, natural inability and bad interface design has frozen out over 80% of the human race from using IT. The move to GUI based systems has seen some latent ability and demand realised. Perhaps the most important step will be the advent of the really friendly and effective computers you talk to - allowing an even more people easy access. However, the real breakthrough will be technology that realises a human like ability for co-ordinated sight, sound and touch. When augmented by artificial intelligence that is anticipatory, and able to fine tune to the characteristics of the individual user, then we will have a really powerful and user orientated interface.

Physical Travel
Why do we travel vast distances just to cluster together to work in offices? The answer to this question is complex, but - we come together to communicate, interact and organise ourselves in a tribal and ritualistic way. With IT this is no longer necessary nor relevant in the strict sense. Many already go home to do real work! The office has become an information exchange, an area of interaction and high chemistry. Solitude, isolation and concentration have to be sought in new places. Moreover, the chemistry of interaction can be achieved using an electronic medium and we face the prospect of increasing numbers of home, or dispersed, workers. This is happening now, and is evidenced by the empty offices and buildings throughout the West. It has been estimated that the empty office space across North America is equivalent to that occupied, or not, in San Francisco!

New Capabilities
It is evident that developments in AI, visualisation, VR and telepresence will realise new capabilities. Humans were never designed to cope with spread sheets, the written word, keyboards and small screens that only present a partial picture of a wider activity. Imagine a VR interface where your visual cortex is flooded by information from a spectacle mounted projector or active contact lenses augmented by directional audio input, tactile gloves and prosthetic arms and fingers that give you the sensation of touch, resistance and weight. Imagine also the prospect of a surrogate head that is either machine or human that can allow you to be teleported into environments anywhere on the planet with great accuracy and reality. This might lead to the euphemism: "what you see I see, what you hear I hear, what you feel I feel"! Also contemplate the convenience of large displays with high definition in 2D or 3D People could appear in full proportion, with the right colour, a voice that emanates from the lips in a distortion free and convincing manner. All of these technologies lead to a feeling of being there! What is more, they are already available today, at various stages of research and development.

Information
In Europe there are over 6M photographs of church windows on record, and within five years we may have VoD systems offering a choice from 10,000 videos. The library of congress requires 3.5km of new book shelving every year to accommodate all the new publications. It has also been estimated that the total of mankind's published material - doubles every year. It is also clear that a huge amount of information becomes irrelevant, out of date and represents a meaningless clutter.

It is interesting that when addressing a problem the finding and assembly of all the related information represents the major task and the least interesting one. It is the manipulation of the information it's preparation and presentation that require a great deal of human input and perhaps the former can be overcome by artificial intelligence realised as autonomous software agents. It has been estimated that professionals can spend up to 80% of their active time trying to find information, and as little as 5% formatting it and making decisions. These proportions are probably true of much of the creative population. Apart from serendipity, the looking for information is no fun, it is frustrating and a waste of time and energy.

Technologies are needed to help us navigate through the growing field of information, find what we want, access and manipulate data so we can get down to decision and action! Such technologies are all under development with AI for navigation and location, plus Hebbian mechanisms for filing, and automatic text summarisation. However, there are still significant problems associated with the complexity and size of systems, data bases and connectivity expected by the year 2000. At this juncture much of the display, software, hardware platforms and interfaces will be available to a wide proportion of the population.

More for Less
In the 15th Century the Vatican library had <400 books and it was one of the biggest libraries on the planet. Today most of us own more books as individuals and the library of Congress has an estimated >24M volumes. To access and keep up to date in an information space so vast is impossible. We cannot afford the trees, the paper the energy and, most of all, the sheer inaccessibility. We have CD-ROM technology delivering 650MBytes - capable of storing all the classics and most of the specialist books we could desire on a few tens of discs. Complete encyclopaedias, art galleries, museums and, perhaps most importantly, with animation and interaction are increasingly available. At the present rate of progress we should each have enough storage capacity at work and home to hold the contents of the Library of Congress in < 15 years. But this is not the whole story - we only need access - we do not need copies of everything. Some book stores on Internet sell soft volumes at <5$ each At this price our purchasing algorithm changes! Buy it and try it - who cares - it is so cheap I can afford to throw it away if I don't like it!

The publishing industry is thus undergoing a revolution far greater than the move from the scribe to the printing press. We might recall an old Chinese proverb:-

I hear and I forget
I see and I remember
I do and I understand

To date well over 20,000 volumes are already in digital form and sell at a fraction of their paper predecessors. Some publishing houses are already predicting that they see the end of paper publishing in sight. For technical and reference volumes this is happening. For the rest it might not be - paper is very user friendly - but then again there are alternatives such as talking books!

Instead of buying a complete newspaper, magazines, books and databases, to discard large sections that are of no interest, we have the option to pay more for less. The focused news, articles, detail, data and information is far more beneficial. The future retailing, supply, updating, validation, security, charging, copyright, and format of publications thus pose major challenges.

Telepresence
The developed world's population is getting older and there will not be the resources to provide the care that is necessary. In Japan programmes are underway to manufacture robots to take on the task. Other alternatives involve the teleportation of expertise, experience and presence itself. Technologies allowing surgeons to be positioned inside the human body through an endoscope or a surrogate head peering into an incision are already with us. The prospect of remote diagnosis, inspection and surgery is real. Surgery over the ISDN has already been tried in the UK and robots are being used in hip replacement, brain and eye surgery. Visiting a doctor's surgery or hospital outpatient's department could become an automated and remote activity. Further developments include the remote monitoring of patients through body mounted electronic interfaces. For the diabetic, drug and medicine dependent it is possible for them to be monitored at a distance by remote computers that administer and optimise dosage. So far experiments have been confined to hospital wards, but there is no reason why this cannot be realised globally.

All of this can be extended to other disciplines including the repair and maintenance of oil rigs, electronic and power installations and even the home. Being able to call experts, teleport them to your location, and then have them guide you through the necessary steps to affect a solution is only a short step away.

Remote Education
The vast majority of universities are small, with departments stretched by a widening curriculum. Staff have to cope with larger numbers of students and teach a wider range of courses in a shorter time. Why then do we have fifteen lectures giving the same lecture on different days to different groups of students? It is possible for all the students to attend any one of the lectures, or indeed, for the one lecture course to be prepared and delivered by a small team at one university. This would allow specialism, an increased efficiency and depth, an opportunity to conduct meaningful research and an ability to allow students to mix and match modules and create their own degrees at a distance. The distributed degree among several universities would then be a real possibility!

The nature of teaching and education can also be expected to see radical change. Since the ancient Greeks we have hardly strayed from scratching in the sand. Moving to the white board and overhead projector is hardly revolutionary given the technology at our disposal. Might we expect experiments on the screen to become as respectable as experiments in the laboratory? After all, they are actually far more powerful and instructive! On-line tutorials, lectures and interactive teaching packages for the rapidly expanding science and technology based curriculum would seem a necessity. Packages are already being introduced in medicine and other professions. The dismantling of high tech structures; simulation of air flow across an aircraft wing; current flow in an electronic circuit; or the dissection of a frog or human organ are already available on trial systems. In many European universities it is becoming impossible to get a degree qualification without your own personal computer.

Perhaps in the not to distant future we will be able to cruise the world's institutions, virtual or real, and drop into a course presented by an internationally recognised expert - anywhere, anytime! Perhaps project reports and theses will become active, and interactive documents and high quality visualisation will offer immediately informative representations of physical or other situations, rather than the traditional erudite and oft confusing prose. Most radical of all, mathematics and the physical science may be opened up to all through visualisation and VR.

Buying Bits - Shipping Atoms
In the networked economy the wholesaler and retailer have no place. They serve no purpose as they are zero value add components. Buying software currently means a costly trip into town, a struggle to park, a long walk and VAT on top of an already inflated price. Alternatively, you can go on the net direct to the manufacturer in the USA, pay American prices and by-pass VAT in both countries. Similarly, the purchase of hardware (atoms) can entail travel and high prices. An on line electronic market can get you the goods at a lower price. transport from the manufacturer direct to your home is the only overhead - and VAT of course! It is curious to think that we can customise and purchase car on line, but not a pen or a shirt. But soon.....

Limits to Change
All the technology briefly considered results in a reduced need to travel, a positive contribution to a greener planet, and a wider choice of experience for all concerned. A further outcome is likely to be the restructuring of conurbations. The distributed society working in an information world will create new environments, new cities of the mind, new places to meet and work. The rate of change is unlikely to be limited by the evolution rate of the technology, more the inability of society to subsume advances and make use of them in a positive and economic way. A networked economy might just be the ultimate challenge, and opportunity, for humanity - we can opt out, but we cannot escape.