this fella was an artist and a map maker and all with the union army and was captured as a p.o.w. and then transferred around to various parts of the south. .. some of the other buildings are

little harder to identify, but this is the sort of thing i am interested in, something that relates to savannah's history, and it carries me on to other things. one of my real challenges was keeping up with was books i have and which works of want. i get mixed up between the ones i haven't the ones i want. and so i have a computer inventory that i use, excel spreadsheet. what i do is a sign each book i number as it comes into the election buried is entirely arbitrary, but i can't pencil the number on the inside front door. this is book one dozen 676. my numbers go up to 10,000. that is how i know i have got that many volumes. then when one comes out of the collection i erase it from the inventory and reassigned a

number. >> see you have any budget to the favorites? >> my favorite is whenever i read currently. and i'd just finished up the biography of aaron burr that i mentioned earlier. american rascal. but it is just whenever i am really at the time. a session last night bill brices, a short history of almost everything. i am well into that one. so that is my favorite at the moment. next week there will be a new favorite.

>> jan, thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you for having us. >> i really enjoyed your book. it has been great fun to read. i must say quite informative. now, one thing i was fascinated about by the year 1948. clearly that was a mere year in terms of studying the states. the year that the chances are was invented.

came up with his information theory. he -- what was it about the year? >> that year is the starting point for my book. * the book in the middle. but it is a pivotal moment. that is rare that we have, we are able to pick one year and say this is the fulcrum of around which the whole modern moral has turned, what i believe that. and you have named the two things that apparently coincidentally came out of bell labs in the same year, the transistor and the information theory. sort of the central figure of my boat. because of this starting point.

because of this, in 1948 he published in the obscure a technical journal to papers during the summer called a mathematical theory of communication. then became the book, the mathematical theory of communication. among other things it was the first time anyone used the word bit as a unit of measure for the stuff, information. >> but what was it? you would go around reminding people or telling people that he was going to use this word in a scientific way, and he needed people to understand that while it was related to the ordinary everyday sense of the word, it was something different. he was going to make it something mathematical and quantitative. since 1948 is, i think, not exactly the start of what we now call the information age, but it

is the start of the time in which we began to realize that of human history had been in the information age. >> correct. how did you come up with the term? >> it was actually, as far as anyone can tell, invented by a statistician and john to keep who worked at princeton for many years. actually interviewed him once. he was a wonderful guy. there was a lot of discussion at the time about not yet invented mythical quantity. short for binary digit and is a nice little word that refers to something. well, we know what it is. on or off, yes or no, sure false. that connection already which lies at the heart of so much of

the computer area is also due to shannon wrote a master's thesis when he was barely 20 years old in which he was getting a degree in electrical engineering. and he wrote a thesis connecting the analysis of electrical circuits with george pools symbolic logic. i think that is hard to ideas that just seemed to a normal person so distant from one another, and having distant planes to five different planes of existence. most people were doing things to do with hardware. and resistance. and he was thinking of them in a completely abstract way where a circuit could be on or off. he made this connection that on or off could be this same as true or false. then you could link circuits

together and have a logic, if then. welcome all of this is second nature. computers have built-in on this. this equivalents between circuitry and logic, this is where it was invented. so this is the fundamental unit, by merope five binary digit. >> so, the transistor, we know all lot about william. he has been quite a notorious figure. we know much less about todd shannon. tell me, what was he like? >> he was something of a loner. he was shy. bell labs at that time had abcaeight industrial building on west street. the building is still there in downtown new york just on the edge of greenwich village. you know it. it is an artists' collective or

something like that. in the old pictures you can see the highline rope line running right through the lower stories of the building. >> i love that picture. >> anyway, right around the time just after the war most of bell labs' moved out to the suburbs of new jersey to murray hill. claude shannon who officially work for the met next apartments kind of stayed behind on his own in a cubbyhole. >> did he have a window? >> i don't even know that he had a window. i know he was walking with a young woman who walked across the streets during the war. it was the old nabisco building. they call it the cracker factory. the microwave research group. he had been really important and

useful work. because bell labs was a really unique institution where they believed in the value of pure research, because of these two things people left. his managers did not know exactly what he was working on, but he just was a lot to do was used during. unlike the transistor, the transistor, everybody knew it was going to be a big deal. when it was announced that same year put that a big press release. the bulky, hot vacuum tubes and enabled the miniaturization of

electrons almost immediately. transistor radios. and then combined with the technology of the integrated circuit it became the underpinning of our computer world. you know, now we have billions of transistors this surely in our pockets. i mean, i could pull my device have of my pocket, and i bet you could to. billions of transistors. shannon's theory which came out at the same time at first blush had nothing to do with that. he was thinking at least officially about telephone wiles. his theory of communication was of great use while he solved a

lot of these problems in an analog way, he simultaneously solve them in the digital way meeting not just sign waves where everything is continuous, but in terms of what we now call bits. that is where everything is broken up. and it is digital. in our world that makes it suitable for storage on all types of new devices. instead of just a final phonograph records we have compact discs which store many times more bits because their little microscopic in grades lazar on a substrate of silicon or some of of the material. by solving these problems, folks, in analog and digital terms shen made s a great leap

forward for a science that was just in the process of being born, which was computer science. >> so, at what point, you know the information theory and the transistor connect? if it was entirely by accident or circumstance, happenstance in 1948 when did, you know, they begin to intersect? >> well, the path began to converge very quickly. the 1950's, early 50's and then on into the 60's saw the birth of the digital computer. and right at the beginning humans and are greener. he came into the picture very quickly and was one of the people who early on recognized the power of these new machines. and if they became a popular sensation, you know, on the

cover of time magazine and life magazine in the early 50's. people started to talk about thinking machines. you know, there was a lot of buzz. this was long before there was any such thing. so crewed by modern standards. they were just glorified calculating machines. but people could suddenly see some of the possibilities, in part because of shannon sort, in part because the predecessors of shannon who are right about, as you know in some detail in the book. he was at the end of his career by the 1950's. close to is very tragic death. but he was thinking philosophically about whether these digital machines could ever think. if they could, how would we know? and of course a lot of people were terrified by that prospect.

a lot of people did not like the idea. shannon was one of those who for whatever reason was entirely comfortable with the idea. he did not mind. i think he, in turn, but essentially felt that humans are more or less machines anyway. a fairly materialistic view of what we are, and so it did not bother them to consider the possibility that someday there would be electronic machines that could think. again, this was so far from the world we live and where, you know, just this spring we saw on tv ibm's machine playing jeopardy. and it revised that whole line of conversation. finally, this genuine artificial intelligence. here is a task, solving these jeopardy questions. it smells like something that involves the higher capacities

of our brain. >> right. >> back in his time shannon was thinking about what the computers would ever play chess. uni but remember when that was considered a real threshold. >> no question. >> would machines adverbial to play chess as well as a human being to make everybody had realized that there are so many possible chess games that computers would not be ultisols by bert force and would not be a will to list all the possible moves. there were just too many. more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe. it requires something like that to play chess. well, that ship has now sailed. >> right. exactly. but what is it about history? key mentioned in the book that in 1950 time magazine has to my

belief, the thinking machine on its cover. then a guy you know, here we are , you know 61 years later. ibm watson place of reasonably good game of jeopardy. suddenly jeopardy is the crowning moment of human achievement. it seems that we are very eager to, you know, you know, the idea of power of thought to these machines. at the same time we are terrified by. why is that? >> one thing is happening is that we moved the bar. you know, something that humans use to be good at was remembering things. even calculating numbers. it seems crazy now. they used to require a lot of

intelligence to remember things and to compute. the first computers were humans. it was not really until the 20th century that there was such a thing as a decent mechanical calculating machine. well, now, because computers do these things so well we don't have to remember anything and we certainly don't have to calculate arithmetic. we have machines in our pockets for these purposes. psychologically i think what we do is downgrade the value of those skills. we think, well, calculating. that is not intelligent. >> that's not going to do it. >> you have a machine for that. >> right. >> we could relearn if we wanted to, i'm pretty sure. memory becomes a kind of brute force, so to speak. yes. we have been training memory,

and people go around competing to prove that they can do that, but it is a little bit of a parlor trick because in day-to-day life that skill is not required of us any more. we have so much help. before we had computers we had, you know, writing in notebooks. now computers help us remember absolutely everything. you're at a dinner party having an argument with a bunch of friends about who is the star of such and such a movie. it's only a matter of seconds before somebody is going to go to the keyboard and get the absolute truth answer according to go. >> right. >> and so what happens is the bar is moved, and many to look to other skills that only humans can do if, writing poetry, composing music. it used to be playing chess. not anymore.

until this spring maybe it was answering those jeopardy questions. we can leave it open weather that problem is officially solved by the ibm machine. it is sad in a way because less and less is reserved to us because we are simply more and more relying on computers. the result of that is people look ahead and wonder whether anything will be left to do for us poor humans that all. >> at the same time it makes us much more powerful. it gives us the power to look up a fax within milliseconds, something that we were never able to do for. and that is, you know, that has been true with every sort of advancement. i was fascinated by, you know, very early in the book you stepped back from information

theories to look at much earlier forms of abstraction like written language. it seems that every time we develop a new symbol system, whether it is language or, you know, spoken language or written language, you know, which is obviously more advanced than that or mathematics that we move to a new level of abstraction. that seems to be ultimately what has finally happened with information. what, what, what does this, you know, obstruction give us? >> the connections you are making are exactly the reason that i think 1948 is such a turning point. we are able to look at all these things now and understand that there has been one story from the beginning.

all of these earlier technologies were technologies of information, just like the ones we have today. we know the computer is information technology. we can look back and say, well, the computer is the successor to various other types of devices. in one way it is a successor to the calculating machine, but in another way is a successor to the television and the sonograph maybe even to the book because we are using the computer to help us make use of all these different forms of information as we now call it. so then we look back and can say that the telegraph was an information technology. before that the printing press and before that the invention of writing itself was the creation of a technology of information. as you say, one thing that all of these have in common is new levels of abstraction.

the point about writing was to take something that was already a set of symbols, spoken language and encoded in a new form. it could be encoded in pictorial form as in the writing systems that were invented in asia. or it could be encoded a bit later in alphabetical form where the symbols don't refer directly to the words are the ideas or the images but refer to a smaller unit, a unit of sound. >> right. >> that is more abstract. a chinese character that represents the word cal is connected to the cal may be a little more directly than the

three letters of the alphabet that spell the word cal which don't refer to anything except sound. >> right. >> and in our world they aren't even sounds. and then another leap of abstraction begins as it does in all these technologies. the telegraph required coding. it is not an accident that samuel morris's name is attached to his code now. we talk about morse code. he may or may not have been the inventor of the telegraph. in bats, he wasn't really. he was the inventor of this code, and it was a brilliant idea. it solved the problem that people were trying to solve all over europe. how do you take language, either spoken or written, and convert it into a form suitable for transmission over electrical

wires? you can imagine a lot of ways of doing that. maybe it is hard now because we know the solution is so powerful. you know, opening and closing electress of circuits. but before that people involved, people came up with solutions involving measurements. they had clock faces. anneal would move. you could move a needle at one end of the wire and the needle would move it the other end of the wire, sort of like a leisure board. >> time surprised that didn't catch on. >> actually, there were telegraphed that works that way in england for a while. you concede that it is a little more. on the other hand, if you were just sitting down, if you heard these two systems described you might be forgiven for thinking anybody can use that thing with the needle. but you have to live learn an entire code.

are humans actually going to be able to learn morse code? it is difficult. yet we know that they did. thousands or tens of thousands of professional telegraph operators and, i think, right up until our era there were plenty of people who knew morse code. we know it is advanced skill. >> there might be a few people watching us jumping up and down. i don't. >> how long did it take? is it like learning to type? >> i never learned it, so i don't know. i take it you didn't either. >> is a skill that people internalized and became second nature. but you could listen to the clatter of telegraph sound over the wire and just here russ translate in your head.

people who are fluent in morse code were as good at understanding it as a person followed in a foreign language. we often know that people have a distinctive signatures. you know, you could recognize the voice of a particular telegraph operator. all of that has vanished. >> that is fascinating. the code can be so abstract and it can also be so personalized at the same time. i find it, you know, fascinating and, your whole discussion of code. you know, in particular the fact that both during world war ii were involved in codebreaking which is something you touched on in the book.

i am kinda particularly fascinated by that. of course codes, the process of encoding information is essentially taking a simple system and making it even more abstract and more complicated. what was the connection, do you think between that and, say, shannon's letter development of information for what he possibly did. >> i realized early on that this was going to be a threat that was going to run through the whole story. to our modern years it is a computer word. i mean, computer programmers. that is not a coincidence. at the same time when shannon was a kid growing up in northern michigan he was fascinated by

code. one of the books that he read and reread was a book of edgar allan poe's short story. edgar allan poe, and his term, was fascinated. there was a time in the middle of the 19th century in the u.s. when he was probably the nation's most famous cryptographer. he would come up with challenges for cyphering that are published in newspapers. again, in retrospect we can understand why there is this abstraction, conversion of information from one language to another. shannon himself did become a professional cryptographer during the war because he had to. it was one of his persona and -- assignments. he was assigned to the top-secret x system which was

that telephone system. a hot line connecting president roosevelt and winston churchill. and shannon did not invent the methodology that was used to encode the system. at the one hand it was very clever and on the other hand incredibly clumsy. it involves phonograph records with random noise on them. identical phonograph records. opposite sides of the atlantic. so the random noise was being added by one phonograph record over here while roosevelt would talk. then it would be subtracted from the signal in london said that churchill could listen and then back and forth. there was a theoretical problem of how secure this was. that problem was assigned. they wanted him to figure out whether this to be broken in the

course of doing that he wrote an entire elaborate mathematical theory of cryptography which was immediately classified as top secret. that published for years until after his mathematical theory of communication. we can see now. we can compare the two things. they have a lot in common. in both cases shannon was thinking about converting information from one form to another in the case have cryptography from a public forum to a private hidden secret forum for concealment. but for communication it was the same thing. converted to a different form, not for the purpose of concealment, but for the purpose of efficiently sending it over communications channel. yet the problem was very similar. >> all about communication. >> that's right.

>> so there was a moment during the war, simultaneously a secret cryptographer in england travel to the united states by whenever but was available weaving in and out and visited bell labs for a few months. he would have lunch with shannon. neither one of them was a lot to talk, their secret project. so turing was cracking the german enigma code, which was incredibly important. >> tell us about the enigma code. fascinating story. >> it is, and it is another story that was not known until well after the war because it was classified as secret. the germans had some elaborate codes that required machines, giant -- they looked like big typewriters with a lot of wires.

in a stroke of luck some polish soldiers captured one of the german enigma machines, and that in itself was not enough to make it possible to crack the code that was a starting point. the big project was under way in england. alan taurine was one of several mathematicians' involved in the code breaking project, and he was the one who really did the most to solve the coach once and then continue solving it, construct machinery using electrical circuitry and vacuum tubes and a lot of mechanical gears to crack the code in real time. every day the germans would change the code and the brits with cracked the code again. it was incredibly important. i mean, it is arguable that this

secret technological project did more to win the war for the allies and the manhattan project did in creating the atomic bomb. i believe the answer to that -- and i don't believe it is arguable. i believe it is true. >> and yet they had to -- you know, the english did not give away that they need to much. so to avoid that problem. >> they had to be very careful with how they use the information. that's right. these were decisions that churchill was making all the time. they were readily paranoid about letting the germans know. if the germans had known and i think the germans certainly suspected there wasn't all that

much that they could do about it you know, they had their u-boat's. still, the fact that i am not a military historian ballots. he conducted textbooks and see many decisive battles that hands-on knowledge set the commanders have that we didn't know at the time, that is the public to know. >> so you were talking about touring and shannon at bell labs, 1943. >> yes. 1943 and 44, 04 the war ended. you just wish -- well, i could have been a fly on the wall. i also wish they could have talked about the work there were really doing because their interests that so much in common. apparently they didn't.

on the other hand they did start to speculate about the future of thinking machines is both of them were thinking of what computers long before there were such things. touring in particular had invented a purely abstract mathematical machine that we now call the turing machine or a particular the universal turing machine which is the computer that represents all other computers. his machine existed only in his head because the transistor had not been invented yet. and so he imagined a paper tape and a kind of read-write head, a little device that would march up and down across the state planting symbols more than reading the symbols back off the tape. and we could think of it now has something like the head of a tape recorder.

technology had not been invented yet either. really, you had to imagine all of this stuff that he did not have. the one thing he had was typewriters. typewriters could plant a letter on to a piece of paper. well, imagine that the piece of paper is not to dimensional, but one-dimensional. the machine goes back and forth. anyway, he invented a computer that using just these items, just the tape and the reading and writing in some mechanism of storage that state of the machine, he could do anything that any other computer could do. any problem that could be solved by this machine via modern

computer. >> was this imaginary machine digital? had he gotten to the idea of what we now call bits? >> digital by definition because the symbols. there was nothing analog about it. it was not by very. it remained for the next generation of mathematicians to work out whether you could make machines with just two singles, zero and one. it turns out that you can. >> so, working more less side by side. to have any sense of whether they knew or suspected what these other was working on? >> i can only guess. i can say i think they must have suspected. i think we know that the common interests were apparent because there were talking about thinking machines.

>> sure. >> he said something to a friend about how shannon, shannon, he said wants to feed not just did its our brain, are mechanical brain, he wants to be music. there were both eaten his own way ford looking visionary man. they must have communicated that to each other even though they then went their separate ways. he returned to england to and shannon continued to work in new york. >> to the ever meet again are communicate? >> i don't think so. >> why not? >> his story is very sad. he should have been a national hero. instead he was a homosexual. in england in the 1950's that was illegal. >> he was arrested. he was entrapped in a sordid british police sting encounter.

i mean, the way he was treated with this barbaric to think about now. the psychological theory of the day of the 1950's involved an idea that homosexuality was something that should be treated. in particular with the injection of estrogen, the female sex hormone was chased his body and threw her in a state of depression. was humiliating. i mean, you can imagine. he killed himself. >> one of the things, to get back to the idea of abstraction, you mentioned that in order to make the word information work in the way that he wanted to shannon had to essentially, if i'm not mistaken, robbed it of its richness. you make the point which i was kind of fascinated by. newton had to do the same thing.

what is it about, you know, stripping something of its meaning in making it more and more abstract, paradoxically making it more powerful at the same time. >> in the case of newton, know about newton because i wrote a short biography about ten years ago. i remember going through his early notebooks and looking at, most of which are way over my head. i don't have the math to understand what he was doing technically. i can understand the problem that he faced to watch him struggling with the meanings of words. this is when he was in his 20's. he is working out of a farmhouse in the english countryside. so cambridge university, which he was attending was shut down.

he was trying to create the laws of motion as we now understand them and solve problems that led to his appreciation of gravity. and he was writing things down for which there were no words. he was -- for example, mass, an object has wait, but people knew that some things were heavier than other things. mass is not exactly the same as wait. mass is very tied up with gravity. need needed a concept that was separate. he needed to feed into mathematical equations that involve force. a force is another word. again, typically we know a little bit about applying force to a stationary object or to a moving object pinkston newton. but, you could see him struggling to come up with the

words both in latin and english because he was using both languages. finally he just picked words that existed in the language like force. force was a military thing. he would say, okay, this is going to be a mathematical term, and i am defining it in this medical way. cut for it three centuries. claude shannon was doing the exact same thing. he had in his head, not just shannon, but other californians, the idea that they were dealing with something real. they were dealing with it and send it up and down. and it wasn't exactly words, and it wasn't exactly characters. now, a typewriter uses characters. ascribe rightwards. when you talk into a telephone you are speaking in words, but

what exactly is going up and down the telephone wires? shannon knew that it was electricity, but it wasn't really satisfactory to say we are dealing with electricity. there was something else, not electricity, not words, not characters. >> what was it? >> well, we know the answer. the answer was not obvious. shannon was not the first person to start using the word information. information was not the only word the shannon used. sometimes people would talk about intelligence. there is an early letter where he writes to one of his teachers trying to work on a general mathematical formulation of ideas having to do with the transmission of intelligence. well, long word. but the point is they needed something. they needed the work. for better or worse they chose the word information and shannon

announce that he would measure it in terms of bits and that made a quantifiable and mensural thing that scientists could work with. >> so, what is one of the sort of a splendid ironies i have sensed in your book, the idea that here we are, you know, these very frankly white, messy creatures. we have a very analog existence. yet we use these types of abstractions to, you know, enable us to, you know, look up the name of a movie star to do anything we want to. and, you know, i am kind of fascinated by that. i am also, you know, i sense that the limits -- and this is

another thing you talk about. there are limits to what this can do for us. you know, you mentioned, you mentioned curdle. you know, where does that leave us, do you think? >> well, there are a lot of ironies here, and we are all either conscious or semiconscious of them. one of them has to do with this question of meaning. shannon a specially removed meaning from his concept of information. he will go around saying it meaning is irrelevant. when he talked about information he was talking about a string of bits, symbols. and that could translate into something that was sensible were useful or it could be sheer nonsense. welcome to our world. here we are. one thing we've know is that

information is everywhere. we have all of it that we could possibly want. maybe we are always hungry for more, but we know that there is lots of it there. we feel almost omniscient. we can get back in data. those things a cheap. in this world paradoxically knowledge does not feel clear-cut or comfortably in our possession. you know, we are in a world where there are millions of voices t. s. eliot kind of prophetically said where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? where is the knowledge we have lost an information. he said that in the 1930's.

i do a little bit of a double take. but isn't that the question we are all asking now? >> right. right. on the one hand we are almost omniscient, and on the other hand we feel that we don't know anything. >> you know, i felt like reading this book, obviously some years ago you wrote a book called chaos. chaos was essentially reviewing the order behind seeing randomness. this book to me seems in no way to be about revealing the randomness or the imperfection or the incompleteness behind what we think of as the tools that we used to define our reality. is that the way you thought of it? >> low, there are definitely connections.

there are some technical connections that i know you are aware of between the science of chaos and information theory. in fact i first heard of information theory when i was first working on the chaos but from some of the scientists that i was getting to know. there were using this thing called information theory created by this kind. it to understand the behavior of this bill systems and behavior of the dynamics of a dripping faucet. affirmation theory. i thought, well, that is something. i mean, how does that make any sense? is an information something that is totally abstract? the connection is to do what is random. the interweaving of order and disorder, an affirmation involve

the way of measuring its order in a physical system which is with the cam scientists were trying to do. exactly analogous way3ous way

caught trying to find the parts of it that make sense and are meaningful. >> said t. s. eliot ." >> right. >> so this book, all the way back to the work that you did for chaos? >> well, for any of it. i remember this was the year before amazon. sensing a way for the book, the mathematical theory of communication which has never been out of print, i don't think. it is a university press book.

i had to get it by mail order, but it was possible to get. some of it is very technical. some of it was just way over my head. mathematics. luckily it had a nice introduction. then rockefeller university who had written about shannon, scientific american. shannon himself was riding in no way that any of us could read to some extent. if you're willing to skip the equations every so often he says something that makes a little bell go off in your head. the bill that goes off says,, here is the modern world being born. this is really thinking that leads to the way every computer scientist thinks today. not just computer scientists, but all of us to use these

machines. the knowledge is filtered down tests. when we understand the recorded music on your laptop or ipod is an away the same species of things as the words that are recorded in the book or a message that is being sent via twitter, all of these things are related to one another. that is due to this book. so, yeah, i carried it around for a while. i wrote these of the books. finally to my guesstimate feels as though this is the book was always trying to write. >> fascinating. so the idea of, you know, the information age which is typically referred to as considered the eighth set we live in.

you know, the idea that our reality is defined by information and networks. sort of, sort of binary forms of communication. you know, in the same way that gave his stocks the clockwork universe or 100 years or more after that, you know, you have the age of power in defining him and his perception of reality. now we have this sense that information and networks applied to the brain, applying that as a metaphor to the brain. that is what it's all about. the thing that is true? do you think that in 20 years are so we will come up with some

other perhaps entirely different metaphor for the world? >> i actually think this is it. this is how the world is. the world is made of information kinda dangerous. i am not saying we have a arrived as that theory of everything fantastic discoveries. we only know that because fantastic discoveries have always. scientists will revise the way they look at the world and discovered that a lot of the things that we took for granted here in the world 2011 were stupid. we only know that because that is how it has always been. that is the only kind of prediction i am willing to make about the future. i say it's going to be let the

past. but i really do believe that information is what our world is made of. when i started working on the but there was no such thing as twitter and no such thing as facebook. these things are trenchant. they may or may not come and go. what is not transients is that thing we call the internet. we may not continue to call it the internet. maybe there is a slightly broader thing that you can call cyberspace or maybe there is a thing that we don't need to name. we can just say that we humans are connected to one another by means of ever faster and ever more far reaching channels of affirmation. that is not pulling to change. i refuse to believe that there is going to be a future.

i mean, barring some horrible apocalypse in which people decide, well, i don't want to ever talk to anybody again. not that that is an appealing. i don't want to sound as though i am saying, we are heading for some type of cyber utopia where we will want to be connected from morning until night. i do think already we want to go back some of the time. we want to get to the beach in turn off ourself ounce. we need to find a balance. you cannot be connected around the clock and still engaged in the activity that we have called fraud. i'm not saying that. what we learned about information cannot be on land.

>> so, you mentioned cyberspace. you know, obviously whether it is the concept of cyberspace or, you know, science fiction of the matrix you know, riders, science fiction writers, you know, who are revered by people, you know, this is not a utopia that they are presenting. it is quite the opposite. they're presenting the role that the future is a very scary place. what you think? >> what, you are right. you know, to give credit where it is due the science-fiction writer who invented the word cyberspace was william gibson.

now, even now that we are living , it is not all apple pie. it is not of strawberries and cream. personally i tend to be a little bit optimistic. i think there are genuine dangers about this world to do with privacy. dangers to do with loss of attention. changes to do with the fragmentation as human communities and with over control. right now cyberspace is a surprisingly free kind of place in most of the world's. for whatever accidental reason the internet's, as it was created in the united states, started as a very democratic place where everybody