The New Technology Application
On a more mundane level, third-generation mobile telephones, despite all the delays and the billions squandered on 3G licenses by telecom firms are still expected to offer consumers high-speed, always on mobile internet access, complete with video, in the next few years. Rapidly proliferating "wi-fi" networks already offer wireless access on a local basis. Tiny tracking chips called radio-frequency identification devices are being used as pet passports. Soon they will be small, powerful and cheap enough to be implanted into everything. Sensors of every kind, including video cameras, should also become much smaller and cheaper. Forrester Research, a technology consultancy, predicts that 14 billion such devices will be connected to the internet by 2005.
How rapidly such a new technology is introduced will depend on a number of factors the state of the economy, the supply of investment capital and the appetite of consumers for new products or services. Fortunes will be made and lost many times over. But whatever happens, the power of computing .and communications look set to continue to grow, and its price to fall, at a steady rate for the next few decades. That will make it possible, at least in rich countries, to record most human interactions, wherever and whenever they take place, and to store and analyze this ocean of data at low cost.
For the sake of argument, this survey will assume that we are heading towards a networked society of ubiquitous, mobile communication capable of constant monitoring. Whether this arrives in 20, 30 or 40 years does not really matter. The point is that the destination seems not merely possible, but probable, so it is not too soon to ask: What do we want this technology to do
The internet has already thrown up a host of legal and political conundrums, but, these are only a small foretaste of the dilemmas about privacy, security, intellectual property and the nature of government itself that will have to be faced over the coming decades. The debate has already begun. This survey will outline some of main issues and speculate on the way they are likely to go. The dilemmas created by the use of internet may be about all of the following aspects, except ______.