Annotations by Jerry Michalski, Mark Slouka, Denise Caruso, Steven Johnson, and Stefanie Syman.
The Road Ahead
A Revolution Begins
"There will be a day, not far distant, when you will be able to conduct
business, study, explore the world and its cultures, call up any great
entertainment, make friends, attend neighborhood markets, and show pictures
to distant relatives -- without leaving your desk or armchair.You won't leave
your network connection behind at the office or in the classroom. It will
be more than an object you carry or an appliance you purchase. It will be
your passport into a new, mediated way of life..." (pg.4-5)
"The highway metaphor isn't quite right, though. The phrase suggests
landscape and geography, a distance between points, and embodies the
implication that you have to travel to get from one place to another. In
fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of this new communications
technology is that it will eliminate distance..." (pg. 5)
"Let's say you're thinking about trying a new restaurant and want to see
its menu, wine list, and specials of the day. Maybe you're wondering what
your favorite food reviewer said about it. You may also want to know what
sanitation score the health department gave the place. If you're leery of
the restaurant's neighborhood, perhaps you'll want to see a safety rating
based on police reports. Still interested in going? You'll want
reservations, a map, and driving instructions based on current traffic
conditions. Take the instructions in printed form or have them read to you
-- and updated -- as you drive."
Paths To The Highway
"Key encryption allows more than just privacy. It can also assure the
authenticity of a document because a private key can be used to encode a
message that only the public key can decode..." (pg. 110)
"...This extraordinary security will enable you to transact business with
strangers or even people you distrust, because you'll be able to be sure
that digital money is valid and signatures and documents are probably
authentic." (pg. 111)
The Content Revolution
"It will be possible for a software program to fabricate scenes that will
look as real as anything created with a camera. Audiences watching Forrest
Gump could recognize that the scenes with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and
Nixon were fabricated. Everyone knew Tom Hanks hadn't really been there.
It was a lot harder to spot the digital processing that removed Gary
Sinise's two good legs for his role as an amputee...The ease with which
PCs and photo-editing software already manipulate complex images will make
it easy to counterfeit photographic documents or alter photographs
undetectably. " (p. 129)
Friction Free Capitalism
"The information highway will extend the electronic marketplace and make it
the ultimate go-between, the universal middleman. Often the only humans
involved in a transaction will be the actual buyer and seller. All the
goods for sale in the world will be available for you to examine, compare
and, often customize....This will carry us into a new world of
low-friction, low-overhead capitalism, in which market information will be
plentiful and transaction costs low. It will be a shopper's heaven." (pg. 158)
"...We will have to find some way to force people to turn their volume down
so the highway doesn't become an amplifier for libel or slander or an
outlet for venting irritation."
"...What we will most likely end up with is a series of categories, like
the ratings given movies that will indicate whether shrill voices have been
controlled and whether an "editor" has deleted messages he thought were out
of line with the policies of the group involved." (pg. 162-63)
Education: The Best Investment
"There seems to be a universal commitment to having more computers in
schools, but the rate at which they are being supplied varies from country
to country...I believe most countries will decide to make increased
investments in education and computer use in schools will catch up to
its use in homes and businesses. Over time -- longer in less developed
countries -- we are likely to see computers installed in every classroom
in the world." (pg. 187)
Critical Issues
"In a world that is increasingly instrumented, we could reach the point
where cameras record most of what goes on in public...The prospect of so
many cameras, always watching, might have distressed us fifty years ago, as
it did George Orwell. But today they are unremarkable...I can easily
imagine proposals that virtually every pole supporting a street light
should also have one or more cameras." (pg. 269)
(January 12, 1996)
Here's the latest from our reader response, courtesy of Christopher Locke:
"...The reason so many people are buying this book is simple: Gates is, shall we say, inordinately well off (to avoid the crudity of filthy stinking rich). Americans are not simply intrigued by wealth; they worship it... But the reason Gates is rich is that he seems to know something about making software work and selling the software he makes. Microsoft was not a shoe-in from the start. Love it or hate it, you have to give it credit for doing that better than most contenders in the field. Far better..."What do you think about Gates' vision of the future? Are we headed for "friction free capitalism" or the suburbanization of the mind? Send in your own annotations on "The Road Ahead." Click on the Feedbag icon below and start posting!
