The big bang

The big bang
By Graeme Philipson

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/06/1120329497679.html

July 9, 2005

Ten years ago there were 6655 bank branches in Australia. Today there are just 4888. Over the same time the number of bank tellers has declined by half, according to the Reserve Bank.

There are no figures on visits to banks, but most likely they have fallen by an even greater margin. Today every PC is a bank branch, and we are all tellers.

Online banking is just one way technology, and in particular the internet, is changing our lives. Consider what the world was like in 1995, just a decade ago.

In that year, Microsoft released Windows 95, the first version that worked as advertised. Labor was in power in Canberra, and out of power in Britain. O.J. Simpson's trial in the US redefined the meaning of justice.

Best picture Oscar was won by Mel Gibson's Braveheart. Carlton won the AFL premiership (maybe it really was a long time ago), and the Bulldogs stormed into the rugby league premiership from sixth spot.

In 1995 Amazon was a small firm struggling to survive and email was a novelty. Digital cameras and iPods didn't exist. Analog mobile phones were clunky, expensive and unreliable. PDA still stood for "public display of affection". The Java programming language was announced that year, as was the first Sony PlayStation.

Since then a whole range of new technologies and services have come into being that have totally changed our behaviour and habits, at work and at play. We are surrounded by electronic digital devices. We buy our cars, do our banking and read our news online. Newspaper circulations and cinema attendances are declining. Most dating services, job ads, and encyclopedias are now online.

We can send and receive SMS messages from fixed phones, watch TV on our computers, and surf the net and take pictures with our mobile phones. Wireless communication is widespread, for voice and for data, and the day of seamless integration of wired and wireless networks is almost upon us. The internet, only a baby 10 years ago, has matured. We rely on it and we trust it.

The key has been the movement of information from analog to digital. Analog signals represent information as waves. All analog signals are different, and storage or retransmission means an inevitable loss of quality. With digital, all information is expressed as zeros and ones, which means we use the same technology for storing and transmitting all media and all computer-based information. TV, CDs (and now MP3 players), DVDs and telephony all employ a string of binary digits, called bits. Digital signals can be stored, copied and retransmitted an infinite number of times with no loss of quality and at virtually zero marginal cost.

The internet has been around since 1969, when the United States Defence Department started connecting its research computers to each other. But initial growth was slow and in the early '90s still largely restricted to government and academic users. It was hard to use, text based, had poor search capabilities and required arcane commands to navigate it.

But in the late '80s Englishman Tim Berners-Lee worked out a way to make the internet easy to use, by introducing a new naming convention and the concept of hypertext. He called it the World Wide Web. Suddenly, it became possible to search the internet, and people began to build web pages for other people to look at.

Then in 1993 the US Congress changed the law to allow the internet to be used for commercial purposes. That year also saw the introduction of Mosaic, the first easy-to-use web browser. At about the same time, PCs became commonplace in business and the home, and data communications improved to the point where dial-up internet connections were good enough to handle simple graphics - as found on web pages - as well as text.

This classic combination of technological advances caused what many people call an inflection point - when all the conditions are right for a major new advance. Nobody really predicted the explosive growth of the internet. As late as 1994, even Bill Gates called it a transitionary technology "that doesn't even have a billing system" (Gates is into billing systems). But the inflection point hit hard in the mid '90s, leading to a frenzied tech boom and some of the biggest changes we have ever seen in the effects of technology on society.

Falling prices and vastly improved ease of use switched the focus of technology from corporations to the individual, and to the home. The biggest changes have been in personal communication - the internet, the mobile phone and pay TV.

In April this year, research company Connection Research Services released the results of a major survey into the digital usage habits of Australian households. CRS interviewed more than 1000 households, and found that 65 per cent were connected to the internet. More than one-third of these were on broadband, with the proportion predicted to grow to half over the next two years. Ten years ago less than 10 per cent of homes were on the internet. All connections were dial-up - the concept of broadband didn't even exist.

The CRS study also found that more than 80 per cent of Australian homes have at least one mobile phone, and most own more than one. Most homes have DVDs and a digital camera. They also have multiple TVs, and 80 per cent have at least one computer. Home theatres, driven by the plummeting cost of new TV technologies, are now found in nearly 20 per cent of all homes, often in rooms dedicated to the purpose.

For a glimpse at the future, look at South Korea. Nearly 80 per cent of South Korean homes have broadband connections - and South Korean broadband is truly broad. Most connections are at 2 megabits per second (2Mbps) or higher (a typical residential broadband connection in Australia is 512kbps). The South Korean Government expects that 70 per cent of internet connections will exceed 20Mbps by the end of 2006 and that most will be at 100Mbps by the end of the decade.

At these speeds, and with this level of penetration, the internet pervades South Korean society to an extent unknown in the rest of the world. But with success come problems. In South Korea, cyber crime is out of control, and a quarter of all teenagers are classed as internet addicts, many with behavioural problems.

New cultural tools have appeared, such as "avatars", digital characters used to identify yourself online. There exists in Korea a digital world, of the kind predicted in Tad Williams's sci-fi trilogy Otherland, which is as real to its inhabitants as the corporeal world. Gangs of cyberyouths roam the net, stealing cybergoods from unfortunate avatars and disrupting things.

There are other challenges. What is the future of intellectual property when music, films and software can be transmitted around the world in an instant and copied an infinite number of times? How can we make the virtual world as secure as the real world? Can we even distinguish real life from cyberlife?

In 2005, we already have the sub-$1000 notebook, the terabyte (1024 gigabytes) of storage on our video recorder, and the video camera in our phone. Ten years from now, everything we have now will be cheaper, smaller and easier to use, and a lot more mobile. The phone network, pay and free-to-air TV networks, and the net itself will all merge into a larger network, which some are calling the Supernet.

True broadband internet will let us reliably make telephone calls (VoIP) and watch TV (TVoIP) on the net. It's all digital, which means it's all about bandwidth. Forget ADSL - even the much-vaunted ADSL2 is not truly high-speed broadband in comparison. Broadband is best achieved with a fibre optic network, which will reach most Australian homes by 2015. Within homes, a combination of structured multipurpose cabling and wireless will keep us connected - everywhere, all the time.

A lot has happened in 10 years. But the information millennium has barely begun. The technological changes we are witnessing are just the beginning - anybody under 30 today will see changes on this planet our grandparents could not even dream of.

Over the next generation we will see the interconnection of all devices at bandwidths incomprehensible today. We will see the marriage of carbon and silicon, the merging of computers and organic life. Fancy a terabyte of data at the base of your brain?

How humankind adapts to these changes will determine the fate of our species. The past 10 years are not even a dress rehearsal. A good rule of thumb is - if you can imagine it, it will happen. The only question is: when?

Five essentials

Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the web, says he's looking forward to the day when his daughter finds a rolled-up 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel colour screen in her cereal packet, with a magnetic back so it sticks to the fridge. That will happen and probably sooner than we think.

Today we rely on technology to stay in touch and to do everyday things in an entirely different way from how we did them just a decade ago. Consider the following technologies and how they have affected your life.

Mobile phones. Truly the communications phenomenon of the decade. There are now nearly as many mobile phones as people in Australia. How did we ever stay in touch before? Text messaging is even changing the grammatical structure of the language.

Digital cameras. Film is all but dead. Our photo albums are in our computers - or our mobile phones. But will we be able to show our grandkids? Electronic images are more fleeting than those on paper.

Email. If you don't have an email address in the information millennium, you are a non-person. Email and instant messaging is how the world stays in touch. It's also the preferred vehicle for viruses, spam and flaming (organised electronic abuse).

Pay TV. OK, not a necessity, but it didn't exist in Australia 10 years ago, and it's where the world is headed. But pay TV as we know it today is a transitionary technology - 10 years from now, it will be delivered via the internet.

Online banking and shopping. The banks aren't closing branches just to save money. The whole nature of banking has changed, thanks to the internet. The net is a giant shopping mall, where you can buy and sell anything. Amazon and eBay have truly changed the world of commerce.