poly: Emerging Technology

Perry, are you sure that the cost structure of LCDs allows further halving
of prices for 3 or 5 more years?
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When I think of emerging technology, I try to imagine qualitative changes -
services that didn't exist. Of course, dramatic changes in cost structures and
access speeds lead to restructuring of the industry and people's lifestyles, but
here qualitative changes come as a secondary effect of the technological
development. This, of course, is both valuable and interesting, but out of
engineering curiosity it seems more fun to look at technologies that are
themselves dramatic and qualitatively different.

On Internet, I expect such changes to come from semantic standards for
information representation and exchanges, and new services that will spring
out on the foundation of the "content-aware" Web. I attempted to give a
short review of possible developments here in my article on "Semantic Web" -
you can find it at <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/articles/SemanticWeb.html>
I also expect these developments to give a good push to AI, as they will
create a foundation of coded knowledge (processing of knowledge seems
an easier task than its acquisition from unstructured sources) and will turn
many AI applications into hot profitable fields - just as it happened with data
mining recently.

 I personally took quite a financial hit by leaving my job and joining Minsky's
group to do research into these areas; I do hope some of them will be
profitable soon - though frankly, I enjoy my free research position too
much to leave it for the commercial world with all its restrictions.

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Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
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Received on Sat Jan 3 07:49:08 1998