these are a few ideas I've been working on intermittently for some time on the possibility of an "information assembly line" of the future. Alvin Toffler was one of the first futurists to predict the "third wave" or information economy. we are very steadily moving our way into this new shift, with numerous signs attesting to it, and reactionary forces ("Buchananism", see recent Wired) arising as well. however, we are only at the tip of the iceberg. even state-of-the-art information economies like Silicon Valley I would not consider full implementations of the idea. what would it really mean to have an entire economy that is related to information? (caveat: I certainly am not saying that we will no longer have physical goods, this is a misunderstanding of Toffler's thesis, and anyone who wants more info on this point should consult his writing). Moore's law comes to my mind, the trend that computer capability has been doubling approximately every 18 months ever since chips were first invented. what could this power have on a future information economy (henceforth abbreviated IE)? I tend to think that the future IE will make the current world wide web look like child's play, although it will be built on top of it. we are far from implementing the full capabilities of information technology in our economy. == first, I think the use of microcurrency is going to play a very major role in the future IE. it will allow people to easily own mini-businesses in much the same way the web has allowed everyone to own printing presses. I've written elsewhere on cybercurrency, but I also tend to think it will have the effect of creating new monetary standards. whereas in our current economy, wealth is typically tied to major world economies, particularly the US through dollars, I've said how I think stocks will come to be thought of as a kind of currency, and that any company that sells stock is essentially circulating its own currency. I think the short term effect of cybercurrency is going to be a grafting on top of existing government cash schemes, but that much to their chagrin they are going to eventually realize it tends to make their own regulatory and supervisory role obsolete-- or at least displace it. == now imagine taking the cybercurrency concept and applying it to an information economy. what you will tend to see is that cash transfers will increasingly be automated. cash will be like the blood flow of society. you will see companies automating their payment processes so all the man-labor associated with handling the paperwork will tend to evaporate. you will of course still have verification systems that prevent payment when payment is unjustified, but the massive frameworks and bureacracies inside companies today that are used to deal with cash flows will tend to be automated and diminished in size. == the idea that strikes me most about an information economy is that you're going to see systems that are similar to the concept of the assembly line for the industrial economy. I believe we will literally see information assembly lines in the future. what kind of form would they take? we already have "information assembly lines" in companies today but they are abstract concepts of flow of work that are not fully automated. parts of the assembly line involve people moving around documents, sending letters, having conversations, etc. I tend to think that much of this will be increasingly encoded in cyberspace. a company will see its role as an information processing component. let's say this sample company gets a work order. the primary means of transfer will be through cyberspace. today cyberspace is seen as an adjunct to paperwork-- the paperwork is primary, but you can put the paperwork in cyberspace file cabinets, send it via cyberspace, etc. I believe this will exactly flip in the future, so that the paperwork is seen as an adjunct to cyberspace. the documents will be freely transportable in cyberspace, and one can always track their location, just like one can always see where some object is on an assembly line. the work order will be thought of as primarily a document existing in cyberspace, with it taking various forms in different places on the assembly line based on actions of the information workers, who process it and tie it with other documents, etc. == what does today's cyberspace lack to pull off this vision? after a bit of thought I think one word to describe it might be "continuity" or "persistence". there are so many obstacles in cyberspace to transporting documents. it requires too much manual effort on the part of each person to translate documents into particular formats, send them via email, etc. what we need is the cyberspatial equivalent of continuity: people anywhere can look at the same object and see the same thing, and that thing can be moved around in cyberspace without ever losing its identity. the problem is that today the concept of a "document" in "cyberspace" is merely a concept. I can't point to some "place" in cyberspace when I want someone to grab a document from me. I can't say, "here it is". I have to go through an artificial series of steps to encode the document, such as emailing it, ftping it, uuencoding it, or whatever. what I am getting at is that we need a kind of virtual reality to pull off the information assembly line to its utmost potential. I believe we literally need to create a visual metaphor for the information assembly line that transcends the concepts of email, different computers, etc. I should be able to "pick up" and "move" a document in cyberspace as easily as I move a piece of paper in the real world. the whole system of different servers, different software packages, different protocols, all this should be *invisible* to me in the same way it is invisible on the current WWW. imagine that one actually created a total virtual reality information assembly line. what kind of form would it take? you would see different things that can be done to documents as "tools" that can be applied to them. you would see their locations as simple visual metaphors that ignore the concepts that segregate information. for example, you might see a single file cabinet that represents every record in an entire company, regardless of its location anywhere in that company. tough to pull off? of course, but this is what we are headed towards, in my opinion. === I've written multiple times about Negroponte's ingenious concept of "bits vs. atoms". in the above spirit, I think we need a slight additional paradigm shift on the concept of bits, something I call a "flit". the concept of a bit is too abstract for me. for a virtual reality and an assembly line, I would prefer to say that information has two additional components other than a binary true/false value: a *location*, and a *time* that it is at a location. in this way information better matches our reality that we deal with every day. I would say the "flit" concept is a pivotal missing link in creating an information assembly line. I would say that an information assembly line document is actually composed of "flits" instead of bits. each "flit" can have a different location at different times in cyberspace. it is a sort of "fleeting bit", a bit that can move around to different places. this requires a somewhat radical shift in current technological thinking. currently we see data as stationary stuff that sits in some place, and people come along and run programs that churn up the bits and spit out new bits. but the new bits are not nicely tied to the old bits except through our own memories. == instead I would say that the key concept of information is to say that it has a content and a state at some time. a document composed of a bunch of "flits" can be broken up into its component "flits", and the "flits" can be sent in different directions and recombined into different documents. but because they are "flits", I can *trace* their destinations over time. what does this mean? it is the concept of debugging applied to information technology. imagine that I once had a document, and I want to know what happened to it. because it is made of "flits", I could say, "where did the flits that comprise this document go?" I would get an answer about their entire history-- what programs the moved through, how they were recombined, where they now reside. I could trace backwards too. "where did this flit come from?" -- the system would trace the origination of the flits. what the flit concept does is introduce a *context* to a bit. a bit has no "context". where did a bit come from? the situation with information is that it always has a *context* and is tied with other information. (so in addition, I might like to suggest that "flits" can be "tied together" with each other). when today's software spits out some document, there is nothing necessarily tying that document with the original input except the memory of the humans. I would suggest that the information assembly lines of the future will replace this concept. nothing will be left to the imagination. things that are part of people's memory today will be made explicit in the systems of tomorrow. the abstract concepts we have of systems being "tied" together will look very embryonic and impoverished compared to these new techniques. "flits" would have an identity irrespective of companies. one could track them moving through different companies if necessary. (the "flits" might therefore also have security aspects associated with them.) the point is that the data must not be disconnected, it must be seen as continuous, and I think a flit-like concept is key to accomplishing this. == notice today how much our systems diverge from the flit concept. we are always losing bits, and not tying them together. whenever a system goes down, all those bits evaporate. this would not be acceptable in a flit universe-- it would be like an object suddenly blinking out of existence. obviously we don't consider that an acceptable behavior of objects in our current reality, why should we allow it in cyberspace? cyberspace has a long ways to go. today's cyberspace is barely sufficient for what is required. in a flit universe, I would like to see flits "pile up" in a queue when a machine breaks, like what happens in a real assembly line. the assembly line metaphor is really crucial here. imagine that on some assembly line, all your objects suddenly disappear when a machine anywhere on the assembly line breaks. you have to then run other machines to "bring back" the flits. a ridiculous concept. instead, I'd like to see flits pile up when some machine goes down on the assembly line. once you get the machine running, it automatically starts back going through the flits. a lot of this implies "transaction tracking" by conventional standards. I would suggest that "transaction tracking" and integrity assurance are only the barest rudiments of what is required to pull off an information assembly line. the belief that these are now considered incredibly cutting-edge and state-of-the-art technologies is a good indication of how far we have to go. == I mentioned Moore's law above because I think it takes care of all objections that "so and so that you are proposing would take too much time". imagine that we have virtually unlimited computational capabilities-- what could we then do with this kind of power? tracking "flits" would be an excellent use for all this power, imho. in future essays I may explore further the properties of flits and give more examples.