What difference does the Information Revolution make in your life

A friend of mine recently sent me an email complaining about the effects, or lack thereof, of the Information Revolution on her life. She has television with lots of channels that are increasingly filled with banal and meretricious content, and she reads less while watching more. Her cell phone makes it possible for people to interrupt her even when she is away from her land line. Her computer and Internet service are a continuing source of problems. So where are the benefits?



How about in her work? She works in a book store, and there are benefits there; it is easier to find books in the huge stock using the computers, customers can find books that they want that are not in stock, and the computers facilitate stock taking and reordering. However, Amazon.com and other online booksellers are cutting into the bookstore business, and people are now more able to buy used books online rather than new books in the shop. Bookstores are going out of business. Those benefits seem mixed.

One benefit that is real, but hard to understand is that the general economic level in society is better. The information revolution has increased average productivity of the workforce for at least a decade, leading to a slightly higher average standard of living.

Of course, lots of the prices she pays for goods and services are lower than they would be without the Information Revolution. Those cheap Chinese imports are available in part because it is now possible to communicate across the Pacific quickly and cheaply enough to restock from the Asia. Moreover, the Information Revolution has helped bring down the cost of transporting goods and making global commerce affordable. So too are people in India able to work to cut costs for many Internet mediated services to industry, which help cut costs to the consumer.

My friend travels a lot, and benefits from a the computerized reservation system, one of the first major global applications of computers and telecommunications. She no doubt uses a credit card in her travels, again taking advantage of a global system possible only due to computers and telecommunications. The planes on which she travels benefited from simulations of their aerodynamic characteristics, and were built using computer aided design and manufacturing, as well as applications of ICT in inventory control, scheduling, and every other aspect of the aircraft company. She flies safely due to the ICT intensive air traffic control system and the application of supercomputers to atmospheric modeling that helps predict conditions that are avoided by the planes. And of course the air transportation system is opaque to her, and she can not see the impacts of the Information Revolution within it.

Indeed, very few of us are aware of the ICT intensive aspects of information processing and analysis that underly our manufacturing and service industries. Indeed, even ICT professionals may only be aware of a narrow range of applications within their own area of professional expertise. Yet the Information Revolution has deeply affected all the productive sectors of our economy, making possible new goods and services, making others safer and/or more efficient, and improving their quality.

Perhaps the most advanced applications of the Information Revolution have been military. Think of the Israeli's defeating the combined forces of several Arab nations using U.S. supplied military equipment, or the ease with which the U.S. twice defeated the Iraqi's in spite of the larger numbers of Iraqi forces. The technological sophistication of the U.S. military, largely the result of ICT applications, makes the nation safer. It also creates the threat that our leaders will not be wise enough to use that power well and appropriately.

The Information Revolution has profoundly affected our lives, often in ways that we don't fully perceive. Indeed, no one fully understands the complexity of the Global Information Infrastructure that has been built over the last century. It is an enormously powerful technological tool, capable of yielding great benefits, but also demanding great wisdom to limit its misuse. Lets hope we are up to the challenges it presents.