The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

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The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change Page 53

by Al Gore

12 “a very complex organism that often follows its own urges”

  Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010).

  13 we are spending more and more time “alone together”

  Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Robert Kraut et al., “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?,” American Psychologist 53, no. 9 (September 1998): 1017–31; Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” Atlantic, May 2012.

  14 “Internet Use Disorder” in its appendix for the first time

  Tony Dokupil, “Is the Web Driving Us Mad?,” Daily Beast, July 8, 2012.

  15 estimated 500 million people

  Jane McGonigal, “Video Games: An Hour a Day Is Key to Success in Life,” Huffington Post, February 15, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgonigal/video-games_b_823208.html.

  16 as much time playing online games as they spend in classrooms

  Ibid.

  17 the average online social games player

  Mathew Ingram, “Average Social Gamer Is a 43-Year-Old Woman,” GigaOM, February 17, 2010, http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/.

  18 55 percent of those playing social games

  Ibid.

  19 generate 60 percent of the comments and post 70 percent of the pictures on Facebook

  Robert Lane Greene, “Facebook: Like?,” Intelligent Life, May/June 2012, http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/robert-lane-greene/facebook?page=full.

  20 to the amount of time we are spending online

  Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).

  21 control group not informed that the facts could be found online

  John Bohannon, “Searching for the Google Effect on People’s Memory,” Science, July 15, 2011.

  22 began to lose some of their innate sense of direction

  Alex Hutchinson, “Global Impositioning Systems,” Walrus, November 2009.

  23 studies indicate that it is a literal reallocation of mental energy

  Carr, The Shallows.

  24 “Never memorize what you can look up in books”

  Library of Congress, World Treasures of the Library of Congress, July 29, 2010, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/world/world-record.html.

  25 the disuse of neuron “trees” leads to their shrinkage

  Walter J. Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 37–43, 81–82; Society for Neuroscience, “Brain Plasticity and Alzheimer’s Disease,” 2010, http://web.archive.org/web/20101225174414/ http://sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=publications_rd_alzheimers.j.

  26 connecting our brains seamlessly to the enhanced capacity

  McLuhan, Understanding Media.

  27 “calling things to remembrance”

  Plato, Plato’s Phaedrus, translated by Reginald Hackforth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 157.

  28 TCP/IP protocol

  Kleinrock Internet History Center at UCLA, “The IMP Log: October 1969 to April 1970,” September 21, 2011, http://internethistory.ucla.edu/2011/09/imp-log-october-1969-to-april-1970.html; Jim Horne, “What Hath God Wrought,” New York Times, Wordplay blog, September 8, 2009, http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/wrought/; George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), pp. 2, 219.

  29 and the less one relies on memories stored in the brain itself

  Carr, The Shallows, pp. 191–97.

  30 life-forms on Earth is our capacity for complex and abstract thought

  Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 199.

  31 neocortex in roughly its modern form around 200,000 years ago

  R.I.M. Dunbar, “Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no. 4 (1993): 681–735.

  32 with a genetic mutation or whether it developed more gradually

  Constance Holden, “The Origin of Speech,” Science 303, no. 5662 (February 27, 2004): 1316–19.

  33 to communicate more intricate thoughts from one person to others

  John Noble Wilford, “Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers,” New York Times, April 6, 1999.

  34 hunter-gatherer period is associated with oral communication

  Nicholas Wade, “Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born,” New York Times, April 14, 2011.

  35 language is associated with the early stages of the Agricultural Revolution

  Wilford, “Who Began Writing?”

  36 Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, the Mediterranean, and Central America

  William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel, World History, 6th ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 43.

  37 the emergence of sophisticated concepts like democracy

  Carr, The Shallows, pp. 50–57.

  38 Their relative powerlessness was driven by their ignorance

  Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

  39 written in a language that for the most part only the monks could understand

  Burnett Hillman Streeter, The Chained Library: A Survey of Four Centuries in the Evolution of the English Library (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  40 eleven print editions of the account of his journey captivated Europe

  “The Diffusion of Columbus’s Letter through Europe, 1493–1497,” University of Southern Maine, Osher Map Library, http://usm.maine.edu/maps/web-document/1/5/sub-/5-the-diffusion-of-columbuss-letter-through-europe-1493-1497.

  41 bringing artifacts and knowledge

  Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (New York: William Morrow, 2004).

  42 including the exciting new derivatives product: indulgences

  Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Protestant Reformation, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. ix–xiii, 66–67.

  43 but thousands of copies distributed to the public were printed in German

  “How Luther Went Viral,” Economist, December 17, 2011.

  44 more than a quarter of them written by Luther himself

  Ibid.

  45 beginning a wave of literacy that began in Northern Europe and moved southward

  Tom Head, It’s Your World, So Change It: Using the Power of the Internet to Create Social Change (Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2010), p. 115.

  46 the printing press was denounced as “the work of the Devil”

  Charles Coffin, The Story of Liberty (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879), p. 77.

  47 with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s Revolution of the Spheres

  William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (New York: Norton, 2006).

  48 At the beginning of January 1776

  “Jan 9, 1776: Thomas Paine Publishes Common Sense,” History.com, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/thomas-paine-publishes-common-sense.

  49 ignite the American War of Independence that July

  David McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 112.

  50 codified by Adam Smith in the same year

  Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1776).

  51 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was also published in the same year

  Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776).

  52 a counterpoint to the prevailing exhilaration about the future

  T. H. Breen, “Making History,” New York Times Book Review, May 7, 2000.

  53 quantum computing

  Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (New York: Doubleday, 2011), Ch
apter 1.

  54 digital data by companies and individuals

  McKinsey Global Institute, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, May 2011.

  55 grown by a factor of nine in just five years

  “The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos,” IDC, June 2011, http://idcdocserv.com/1142.

  56 telephone call grew shorter by almost half

  Tom Vanderbilt, “The Call of the Future,” Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2012.

  57 double between 2005 and 2010

  International Telecommunications Union, “The World in 2010: ICT Facts and Figures,” http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/material/FactsFigures2010.pdf.

  58 in 2012 reached 2.4 billion users globally

  Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, “2012 Internet Trends (Update),” December 3, 2012, http://kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends-update.

  59 as many mobile devices as there are people

  Cisco Systems, Inc., Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015, February 1, 2011, http://newsroom.cisco.com/ekits/Cisco_VNI_Global_Mobile_Data_Traffic_Forecast_2010_2015.pdf.

  60 Internet users is expected to increase 56-fold over the next five years

  Ibid.

  61 smartphones is projected to increase 47-fold over the same period

  Ibid.

  62 half of the mobile phone market in the United States

  Aaron Smith, Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Nearly Half of American Adults Are Smartphone Owners,” March 1, 2012, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-2012.aspx.

  63 More than 5 billion of the 7 billion

  International Telecommunications Union, “ICT Facts and Figures: The World in 2011.”

  64 1.1 billion active smartphone users worldwide

  Meeker and Wu, “2012 Internet Trends (Update).”

  65 3.2 billion people have their own devices

  “SIM Earth,” Economist, October 19, 2012, http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/10/global-mobile-usage.

  66 low-end smartphones that will soon be nearly ubiquitous

  Christina Bonnington, Wired Gadget Lab, “Global Smartphone Adoption Approaches 30 Percent,” November 28, 2011, http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/smartphones-feature-phones/; Juro Osawa and Paul Mozur, “The Battle for China’s Low-End Smartphone Market,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2012.

  67 Internet access as a new “human right” in a United Nations report

  David Kravets, “U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right,” Wired, June 3, 2011.

  68 computer or tablet to every child in the world who does not have one

  “Nicholas Negroponte and One Laptop Per Child,” Public Radio International, April 29, 2009, http://www.pri.org/stories/business/social-entrepreneurs/one-laptop-per-child.html.

  69 subsidized the connection of every school and library to the Internet

  Austan Goolsbee and Jonathan Guryan, “World Wide Wonder?,” Education Next 6, no. 1 (Winter 2006).

  70 immediately upon awakening—even before they get out of bed

  Kevin J. O’Brien, “Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth, and Gap Is Growing,” New York Times, January 5, 2012.

  71 simultaneously trying to operate their cars and trucks

  Matt Richtel, “U.S. Safety Board Urges Cellphone Ban for Drivers,” New York Times, December 13, 2011.

  72 before the distracted pilots finally disengaged from their computers

  Micheline Maynard and Matthew L. Wald, “Off-Course Pilots Cite Computer Distraction,” New York Times, October 27, 2009.

  73 “ ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect”

  Jason Gilbert, “FaceTime Facelift: The Plastic Surgery Procedure for iPhone Users Who Don’t Like How They Look on FaceTime,” Huffington Post, February 27, 2012.

  74 “Internet of Everything.”

  Dave Evans, “How the Internet of Everything Will Change the World … for the Better,” Cisco Blog, November 7, 2012, http://blogs.cisco.com/news/how-the-internet-of-everything-will-change-the-worldfor-the-better-infographic/.

  75 voluminous new quantities of data

  McKinsey Institute, “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” May 2011, http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation.

  76 without being processed by computers for patterns and meaning

  Al Gore, “The Digital Earth: Understanding Our Planet in the 21st Century,” speech at the California Science Center, January 31, 1998, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=6210&version=1&format=doc.

  77 actuators has been disposed of soon after it is collected

  Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,” McKinsey Quarterly, 2010.

  78 promote efficiency in industry and business

  McKinsey Institute, “Big data.”

  79 information collected during the seconds prior to and during

  “In-Car Camera Records Accidents,” BBC News, October 14, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/4341342.stm.

  80 airplanes and most security cameras in buildings

  Kevin Bonsor, “How Black Boxes Work,” HowStuffWorks, http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/black-box3.htm.

  81 twice the amount of information presently generated

  Tony Hoffman, “IBM Preps Hyper-Fast Computing System for World’s Largest Radiotelescope,” PC Magazine, April 2, 2012.

  82 billions of messages posted each day on social networks

  Chui, Löffler, and Roberts, “The Internet of Things”; McKinsey Institute, “Big Data.”

  83 Twitter Earthquake Detector

  Tim Lohman, “Twitter to Detect Earthquakes, Tsunamis,” Computer World, June 1, 2011.

  84 the Global Pulse program Ban Ki-moon launched

  Steve Lohr, “The Internet Gets Physical,” New York Times, December 17, 2011.

  85 predict social unrest in countries and regions of particular interest

  John Markoff, “Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky,’ ” New York Times, October 10, 2011.

  86 predict how well Hollywood—and Bollywood—movies will perform

  Ibid.

  87 dominant content on the Internet is printed words

  Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” December 2009, http://hmi.ucsd.edu/pdf/HMI_2009_ConsumerReport_Dec9_2009.pdf.

  88 massive crowds of election protesters in Moscow

  Alissa de Carbonnel, “Social Media Makes Anti-Putin Protests ‘Snowball,’ ” Reuters, December 7, 2011.

  89 spotlighting the excesses of elites

  Thomas Friedman, “This Is Just the Start,” New York Times, March 1, 2011.

  90 used by rebels in Misrata to guide their mortars

  Tom Coghlan, “Google and a Notebook: The Weapons Helping to Beat Gaddafi in Libya,” Times (London), June 16, 2011.

  91 across the border to collaborators in the diaspora living in Thailand

  Mridul Chowdhury, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, “The Role of the Internet in Burma’s Saffron Revolution,” September 2008, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Chowdhury_Role_of_the_Internet_in_Burmas_Saffron_Revolution.pdf_0.pdf.

  92 completely blacking out the Internet inside the country’s borders

  Ibid.

  93 Aung San Suu Kyi, from her long house arrest

  Tim Johnson, “Aung San Suu Kyi Freed,” Financial Times, November 13, 2010.

  94 destined to take control of the government

  Dean Nelson, “Aung San Suu Kyi ‘Wins Landslide Landmark Election’ as Burma Rejoices,” Telegraph, April 1, 2012.

  95 protest against the fraudulent presidential election

  Bruce Etling, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey, “Political Change in the Digi
tal Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing,” SAIS Review 30, no. 2 (2010).

  96 controlling Internet use by the protesters

  Ibid.

  97 the tragic death of Neda Agha-Soltan

  Ibid.

  98 protest movement were almost completely shut down

  Ibid.

  99 the government simply blacked it out

  Ibid.

  100 stifle any effective resistance to the dictatorship’s authority

  Will Heaven, “Iran and Twitter: The Fatal Folly of the Online Revolutionaries,” Telegraph, December 29, 2009; Christopher Williams, “Iran Cracks Down on Web Dissident Technology,” Telegraph, March 18, 2011.

  101 Iran and the retro-Stalinist dictatorship of Belarus

  Larry Diamond, “Liberation Technology,” Journal of Democracy 21, no. 3 (July 2010).

  102 turn the Internet within China into a national intranet

  Ibid.

  103 was censored and made unavailable to the people of China

  Josh Chin, “Netizens React: Premier’s Interview Censored,” China Real Time Report blog, Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2010.

  104 open values of the world’s largest search engine, Google

  Clive Thompson, “Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem),” New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2006.

  105 “in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle”

  Tim Carmody, “Google Co-Founder: China, Apple, Facebook Threaten the ‘Open Web,’ ” Wired, April 16, 2012.

  106 “It’s hopeless to try to control the Internet”

  Ian Katz, “Web Freedom Faces Greatest Threat Ever, Warns Google’s Sergey Brin,” Guardian, April 15, 2012.

  107 more than 500 million people, 40 percent of its total population

  Matt Silverman, “China: The World’s Largest Online Population,” Mashable, April 10, 2012; Jon Russell, “Internet Usage in China Surges 11%,” USA Today, July 19, 2012.

  108 to take to the Internet themselves in order to respond to public controversies

  Lye Liang Fook and Yang Yi, EAI Background Brief No. 467, “The Chinese Leadership and the Internet,” July 27, 2009, http://www.eai.nus.edu.sg/BB467.pdf.

  109 Dmitri Medvedev also felt the pressure to engage personally on the Internet

  “Medvedev Believes Internet Best Guarantee Against Totalitarianism,” Itar-Tass News Agency, July 30, 2012, http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c154/484098.html.

 

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