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CNN Sunday Morning

What Does the Future Hold for the Web?

Aired August 12, 2001 - 09:39   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN ANCHOR: Well, love it or hate it, the personal computer turns 20 today. A lot of the explosive growth in the computer industry can be attributed to the Internet. The question now is, where do we go from here? Internet experts George Strawn and Ted Hanss have some ideas, and I want to thank both of you for joining us.

Ted, did I pronounce your last name right?

TED HANSS, INTERNET2: That's right.

BUCKLEY: OK. Good. I'm going to go to you first, anyway. You're with Internet2 and you are recreating the partnership, as we are told, between academia and the corporate world and industry, government, that fostered today's Internet. What are we going to see with the Internet in the future?

HANSS: Well, we have a lot of experiments underway in the science of higher education and our partnership with government and corporation that allows us to give an idea, almost like a time machine, of what the Internet might be five or ten years from now.

A lot of work is using digital video to be able to provide very high quality interaction with people and resources around the world.

BUCKLEY: Well, wow us. What can we expect? What's the vision? What is it going to be like for those of us in our personal lives with the Internet?

HANSS: Right. I think that the potential here is that we can use, basically -- everybody, just like they became their own electronic publisher with laser printers and the World Wide Web, we can become our own, basically, broadcast organizations from our homes, to communicate with our friends, to share with teachers and students around the world, to be able to go -- to view across the world what's going on on the top of mountains and under the oceans.

And using this technology in a way that's really interactive, so it's really changing the experience; where distance is no longer a barrier for any kind of access to people and resources.

BUCKLEY: Dr. Strawn, sounds pretty interesting. What do you think of that? GEORGE STRAWN, NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION: Well, I agree with everything Ted has said and would simply add that it's very, very hard for us to predict really what will happen when the technology that we're dealing with becomes 1000-times faster and 1000-times cheaper. And it will become 1000-times cheaper over the next decade or two, and then creative entrepreneurs put that to use in ways that are very hard for us to think outside of the box, knowing what today's costs are.

BUCKLEY: Earlier we were talking to someone from IBM about grid technology. Can you give us a sense of what that means and how grid computing will effect the individual PC user?

STRAWN: Yes. If you look inside a personal computer, you find a number of little chips and circuit boards that are connected together by wires. Those wires, collectively, are sometimes called the back plane of a computer. And a grid can be thought of as a national computer, where the network, the Internet, let's say, becomes the back plane for the whole computer.

So, all of the personal computers on the Internet, as well as the super computers and other resources, are tied together in one mammoth national computer that has unbeloved power and capabilities to solve problems that we couldn't even think of addressing before.

BUCKLEY: Well, Ted, I'm already able to get on the Internet and find out all kinds of stuff and there are already issues about things like privacy. Doesn't that increase the need to look at those kinds of areas?

HANSS: There certainly are a lot of policy issues that we need to explore. As George says, we only have an inkling of what the potential is, and just like the technology innovations will continue to move along, there certainly are policy issues, whether it's privacy or how we get into the intellectual property rights sharing, that need to be examined.

BUCKLEY: All right, let's go to one of the e-mails from one of our viewers.

This is from Dale Friesen. He asks, "How many years out is the widespread practical usage of quantum encryption for commercial transactions"? Both of you or whoever wants to take that one.

STRAWN: Quantum encryption is a very exciting possibility for tackling some of these security and privacy matters that you were just referring to. Trying to predict when something becomes useful is a tough business. My own view is it's probably at least a decade out.

BUCKLEY: One other issue that I wanted to ask both of you about is everyone keeps talking to me and everybody else about, well, eventually your computer or your television will be the one place where you get information. You get your television, your radio, but it hasn't happened yet. When is that going to happen?

STRAWN: Well, I think the technologies are merging from a theoretical sense, but at the same time, we have more devices, not fewer devices. I know have a Palm Pilot, so-called wireless Internet computer that I carry with me, as well as several portables, as well as several desktops and the like, and I think over the next decade we're going to see every individual having tens, and then maybe hundreds, of devices that we will call Internet appliances or whatever.

I guess the point is, there'll be a system. They'll be tied together and they'll be able to talk to each other. So, in that sense, there'll be convergence, but there'll also be this tremendous fracturing or explosion of the number of devices that we have that can talk to each other.

BUCKLEY: Ted, do you have a better sense of when that's going to happen? Is just a week away, a year away, ten years?

HANSS: I think over the next three to four years there will be, see a real maturation of the wireless marketplace, in terms of being able to take all these myriad devices that George mentioned and allow you to use anyone of them wherever you are to access whatever information resources you want to get to.

And I think we see that now, on campuses, and the question is, it may take three of our years before it is available in the consumer marketplace.

BUCKLEY: Ted, I've got an e-mail that I'd like you to take a look at and see if you can address.

Here is something from Robby. He says, "Documents proliferate our daily lives. AS the Internet evolves, can we expect to see an increase in the number of documents being printed, or will we see a reduction of documents being printed as more and more information is exchanged within computers and stored electronically" -- Ted.

HANSS: Well, I think we'll certainly see a continuation of printed documents. And I don't see books going away, even though we'll see more and more e-books. I think people will continue to use printing, but I think what will be interesting is that more people will have animations and video as part of their publications and will be able to really want to view those on-line as opposed to, you know, simply now being able to print those.

BUCKLEY: Well, everyone wants to be ahead of the curve on something like this, and get in on the bottom-line of the next development in the Internet. Speak to entrepreneurs. What should they be looking at? What are the areas that will be profitable, that they might make some money in?

HANSS: Well, I think the area of security is still one that is very critical. That is, the ability to make sure that our resources are safe from the kind attacks we've been talking about in the news the last few weeks, and as networks reach farther and farther into every environment in our work at home, I think that's an opportunity for developing more secure environments.

BUCKLEY: All right. Well, Ted Hanss from Internet2, I want to thank you very much for joining us. And we want to thank Dr. George Strawn, who is the director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. I want to thank both of you for joining us.

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