1994-04-16|Sunatori's Concrete View of Information Superhighway and Civilisation
To whom it may concern
I am, however, preparing an article (possibly for the World Future Society's "The Futurist" magazine) primarily on the "personal" issue in the so-called electronic superhighway. The topics would range from the evolution of electronic communication in terms of telex to FAX to E-mail (failure of FAX to preserve abstraction, as seen in Optical Character Recognition, while the original bytes could have been transmitted through telex, which could have directly evolved into E-mail had there been a standard for transmitting pictures) to never-ending story in standards development with a special attention to the role of governments, especially the successful MINITEL in France. Here is a very early draft for your information, and I could make it a Citizen essay, if you are interested. (See some irony and hypocracy here?)
As for so-called electronic superhighway, the hype was there when NABU was launched using Canada's Telidon (later, NAPLPS), but it was soon gone. Also, the ALEX service, modelled from France's MINITEL, is now officially dead. The ISDN has not taken off. Canada alone has chosen CT2 Class 2 as the PCS/PCN standard. Stentor is using co-ax instead of fibre for the curb-to-home delivery medium. All these seem to indicate to me a lack of long-term vision in the development of human civilisation. The superhighway thrust is great for public awareness, but it does not necessarily guarantee a success. This is especially true when entertainment is emphasised as the major application of the information superhighway. It is a joke to fill the 500 channels with staggered movies.
One of the market researches has shown that the consumers would love to have staggered movies, called "Near Video On Demand". Yes, of course, if you ask them whether you prefer with or without staggered movies, without presenting the alternative of interactive system. All of the proposed standards up until and including the recent Grand Alliance for the HDTV system have 16:9 aspect ratio. It was based on a series of perception tests to come up an optimum aspect ratio by the viewers watching small-screen TV sets at a time when few large-screen projection TV sets were available and the paradigm for future systems was the 35mm or 70mm movie formats. However, more recent IMAX films, which few people had seen when the tests were conducted, feature near 1:1 aspect ratio on a huge screen that almost covers the viewer's entire sight. All the headaches with creating and printing documents with letter- or legal-size or European A/B size, or landscape or portrait orientation would be non-existent if simple 1:1 was the only aspect ratio for every human interface!
There is also a myth of information explosion and the need for broadband services. There is no question that broadband is superior to narrowband, but the knowledge explosion is in reality a publication explosion where "cross-posting" is quite common. Even without desktop publishing, researchers can and do send a dozen of slightly-modified results to professional journals out of a single 30-minute experiment. The increase in knowledge level is minuscule compared with vast amount of data and information in terms of overall civilisation, not somebody's curriculum vitae. Instead of going through lots of menu levels and postings in Free-Net-type service channeled through a broadband service, what I want to do is get an answer to the question "what day and time can I sprinkle my lawn without violating a municipal bylaw?" The search would take place in a server at the other end, and a simple 1-line answer would go through a narrowband telephone line, in a synthesised-speech voicetex, and I would be extremely happy. I would even pay a few bucks for such a 1-900 service since I have saved time and sanity in searching for 1 hour in the Free-Net database.
Groupware and Workflow Automation may be steps in the right direction. However, it simply leads to information overload, as seen in USENET newsgroups on the Internet where very little knowledge is buried in tons of noise. Information filter, as in E-mail filtering software, is seen as an emerging trend, but the right thing to do is to code the information into knowledge-base management system in the first place so that it can be processed by artificial intelligence. This is analogous to sending an EDI-coded message instead of a free-format E-mail text, for example, or worse a 3rd-generation FAX which must be re-keyed or OCR'ed. Technically, it is very possible today for the government to institute an EDI-format for the T4 form, employers to send it in X.400 E-mail, an intelligent agent to automatically receive and processes it into a Personal Information Management System, then have a tax algorithm create an EFILE together with other E-receipts and eventually send/receive E-money to/from the government. Or better, have a personal information server constantly deal with every routine aspect of life, including tax, social assistance, purchases, etc. and have it flag only things that are worth flagging to the user. The realisation of such a lifestyle is a question of mentality in paradigm shift and a political will.
The federal government is quite admirable in setting directions such as EFILE, Acquisition 2000 (EDI), and also the X.500 Directory Service for federal employees. In order for such bold initiatives to really benefit individual citizens, there must be a mechanism to address each and every citizen who wishes to benefit from EDI. This can take a form of giving each citizen an X.400 E-mail address, just as most citizens have a telephone number. It could even be an extension of a already-unique telephone number (C=CA; A=Telecom.Canada; S=Sunatori; DD.ID=+1-819-595-9210), looked up in an electronic telephone directory, which can be extended to a public X.500 Directory Service, containing SIN number, various account numbers, even a digitised picture. This way, there is no need for a smart card containing everything on a card. The directory service can be accessed by governments, merchants, friends, or anybody who wishes to access my personal information. It can even replace a passport. Of course, elaborate encryption, signature, access control mechanism and on-line verification mechanism must be in place, but such a system will eliminate the need for me to state my name, address, telephone number, etc. almost every day in government forms and commercial transactions. It will give my medical records (at least blood type) available to medical emergency staff regardless.
Government should have a right, as an organisation, to use a single number to deal with a citizen. There is no question of privacy here within the government. Cross-checking takes place anyway between tax returns and UIC, for example. It should extend to provincial governments as well to be able to use a "single citizen number" at least on a voluntary basis. Society as a whole should value prevention of fraud more than privacy among governments. To a citizen, the ideal dealing be with a "government" not with multitude of different levels of government departments and agencies. Thus, those who publish their personal information should get the benefit of automation and much less bureaucracy. As an Ottawa Citizen story has proven, it is possible to gather a vast amount of personal information from bits and pieces now anyway. I should have a right to make my information public since I have very few things to hide. I would like to control, however, what to hide from whom. As is, I have no idea what the obscure credit agencies have on me, or who these agencies are, let alone how to contact them. It is completely a matter of personal discretion, instead of a blanket privacy statement from a privacy commissioner, who has every right to worry about privacy, but should have no business in preventing me from publishing my personal information. This is based on my philosophy of absolute individualism. In a matter of privacy versus convenience, I would choose convenience most of the time, but it is strictly up to an individual to decide. The Personalised Information on the Net is indeed the killer application.
MTS (Multi-XXX XXX) was the golden opportunity for Canada, an officially bilingual country, to explore bilingual broadcast. The technology has been established for years, and the only missing action was a technology leadership by the government telecommunications regulation to require every new TV set sold in Canada to have the MTS feature, just as the U.S. government regulation mandating Closed Caption feature on every TV set greater than 14-inch sold in the U.S.
One of the reasons why Internet and most on-line information service and bulletin-board systems are still using only text is the lack of standards. The SGML/HTML ISO standards are finally getting attention, but SGML has been around since 1988. How come it takes close to 10 years just to move from plain ASCII file to some kind of structured text with optional graphics? The ASCII character set will eventually be superseded by 16-bit Unicode, but god knows when it will happen. It will happen!
Speaking of standards, it is a joke that so many versions and variations of standards show up. UNIX, for example, is understandable since it is not a de jure standard but a de facto standard. Some of the real ISO standards have incompatibilities, e.g. SGML, VHDL, ... The standards body should get out of the document publishing business and produce coded core algorithm, machine readable and understandable to be used by the standard adopters.
Need a vision with 100-year outlook, Frame of Reference at +100 years and imagine looking back 100 years. As for fibre, would a 3-stage process (existing phone cable, co-ax cable, followed by fibre) better than a 2-stage process (existing phone cable with ISDN, followed by fibre), given the long life of average residence? The Stentor Beacon Initiative of fibre-coax option gives me a headache of modifying some twisted-pair wiring in my home. Why not a single headache of going directly from twisted-pair to fibre, then? I truly believe that any hybrid approach will eventually fail. Those who advocate moving picture on the telephone should realise that much more business productivity could be achieved by sharing a document/information on-line than somebody else's face. To me a static face in a stored directory would do just as good. Moving pictures are, however, very important for much intimate context, such as communication between long-distance family members or friends. This could be met by an entrepreneurial arrangement at a hotel where cyberspace get-together can be realised with broadband ATM/SONET interactive 2-way communication.
Where is the promise of a single number to reach a person? It seems that every time a new product or service is introduced, there is a new phone number or an address. For me, it has led to a situation where I must maintain more than 50 accounts and passwords. Also, every time there is a software upgrade, there seems to be a compatibility problem. It is because there are so many layers of complexity: hardware, operating system, graphical user interface, application, communication. These headaches can be eliminated if there is a high-speed on-line service to provide direct-loading of application software on the fly as you use. Thus, the memory levels is just 2, not backup-hard disk/floppy/CD-ROM-RAM-cache.
The explosion of Internet may be encouraging, but its TCP/IP protocol-based infrastructure was not designed to handle so many nodes. There is a great opportunity for the Internet designers to come up with the right solution, rather than a series of ad-hoc quick fix patches, including the solution to the humongous flat file which specifies every domain name in favour of X.500 directory system somehow. The World-Wide Web and its Mosaic user interface, although non-linear hypertext, is still one-way interaction where information is bombarded to the users. Here is a yet another great opportunity to come up with a method for intelligent customisation using the Personal Profile facility to allow dynamic menu build, for example.
The WWW is emerging as the most popular Internet application. It has the open architecture and will make just about everything else obsolete if the high speed communication link and transaction processing speed improve. It will eventually supply video-on-demand. Note a remarkable similarity in conceptual model between WWW browsers and Apple HyperCard.
The on-line services are growing more and more, yet those offered by the Telcos seem to be losing more and more ground. Worldlinx's "The Net", formerly by Stentor and before that Bell Mediatel, is essentially similar in function to CompuServe, Prodigy, America On Line, offering on-line airline information, etc., as well as secure E-mail with X.400 and EDI. It was pioneering in E-mail to FAX and EnvoyPost capabilities. It has been around for a long time, but somehow there seems to be no progress or even regression where very useful services such as Postal Code search system and E-mail to Letter in the U.S.A. have been quietly dropped.
Mobile wireless systems are becoming popular in both Cellular and PCN/PCS. What is missing is the mechanism to inquire and get an answer "Is there a MacDonald's restaurant in this town, and if so, where is it?". To do this, an agent technology like Magic General's Magic Cap TeleScript to query from an up-to-date knowledge base is required. Such a service should charge fees only when a desirable answer is found.
There is a CD-ROM claiming to contain every single telephone number in the country. This product is a joke since the listing are re-keyed into the computer from a paper version in an off-shore country with very low wages. The Telcos had and still have an opportunity to come up with a directory on-line and/or on a CD-ROM directly from their source which is machine readable.
Direction for Future Civilisation: Open Your Mind and Learn from History. Do you obey the traffic lights? I do, as I used to answer in the Scruples Game question that asked if you stop at red light late at night if there is nobody watching. Eventually it would not be the traffic lights but some kind of intelligence in the road system and the automobile. Thus, if there is no vehicle going East-West and you are going North-South, there would be no reason for you to stop!
Always check to see if technological developments are consistent with long-term future vision. For example, Atari vs. Nintendo/Sega, Beta vs. VHS, ... Physical cassettes, CD-ROM, records will be replaced by on-line access.
Importance of standards. Why 8-track, quad failed? Need universal standard with quantum-leap improvement from existing one. CD vs. Beta/VHS. There is also an established notion that the standards creates bureaucracy, thus inhibit innovation and progress. While it has been true in the past, electronic discussion and meeting and minutes would speed up the process and the standards would act as a promotion of progress, as seen in WWW and HTML.
There is a threshold of ease of use and a threshold of the speed. Once the threshold is overcome, the software or service will take off.
The most important aspect of the World-Wide Web is the ability to go to the source, thus eliminating the need for duplicate copy of a copy of a copy.
Royal Bank is investing on an Cheque Imaging Capture & Recognition system to scan the paper cheque and recognise it on OCR. What kind of backward-looking initiative is this? Debit card is already much better. The bank should be investing this much money into commerce on the Internet.
There is a myth that younger generation is not going to get as much as the older generation. In terms of money, that may be right, but not in terms of the amount of information for the same amount of money. For example, I would just go to the Encyclopedia area of eWorld instead of buying a paper bulk, obsolete before published, etc.
The development of civilisation is dictated by the economic... In other words, there is an evil planned obsolescence as well as profit-agenda for not adopting new technology but continue to manipulate consumers. It makes sense only to the manufacturers who have vested interest in not doing the right thing. They make money by selling quantity of items even though they have totally unnecessary duplicate power supplies and other circuitries. The component TV, which first showed up in late 1970's, did not take off even if it is clearly superior since it avoids duplication such as power supply everywhere. Eventually, someone will come along and just do it, such as Apple's Macintosh TV. I am afraid that communication would become the same, Internet, ISDN, ATM, POT, cellular, PCS/PCN.
X.400 address could have been accepted if there were a standard way of communicating the address. The Internet method of "someone@somewhere". The world could have been a better place if Western Union had won the patent battle with Alexander Graham Bell, so that the telegramme had evolved into personalised telex/teletype, otherwise known as E-mail, skipping the telephone and FAX altogether. The level of abstraction is higher in the former than the latter.
I have a strong feeling against "Canadian content rules" by the government. For example, I watch Star Trek partly because the captain is still a Canadian citizen. Rather than forcing Canadian content to be viewed, it should be celebrating the Canadian content even though the work is shown on U.S. channels by having the cable operator place a Maple Leaf on the screen, for example. There would be no problem with the country channel trade dispute this way. Today, a Canadian citizen can spend 100% U.S. or other ethnic contents on Television, Radio, newspaper, etc. still being a full participant in the society.
The "Site Map" on a website should not be necessary if the website is designed to be easily navigated.
