Part 3. The iWorld and the Unintended Consequences

Part 3. The iWorld and the Unintended Consequences

We worked in the i-world almost from the beginning. We worked with most major manufacturers and software developers who wanted to change the world in the 1985 – 2005 timeframe. And we figured out three things:


1. The world was going to change because Intel could make chips that computed faster and faster every year and no one could even guess how many generations of faster chips they could make. Lots. There would be lots of faster, faster, faster chips. Apple would get chips that did graphics faster and faster. It would be a race that both could win.


2. Over a short period of time the volume of voice traffic on networks would be replaced by the volume of data traffic on networks and it would happen faster than people thought.

3. Once people could hold the network in their hand, the world would REALLY change!


Steve Jobs, and Nokia, Motorola, and AT&T, Intel, IBM, Cisco, Netscape, AOL, Adobe, Yahoo,
Google and all those other guys gave us the network in our hands. And Jobs made it truly fascinating and beautiful to get music and art and access. We absolutely loved instant graphics printing. Graphics that really looked like you wanted them to look.

We were actually supposed to be able to have a paperless society. That is really, really funny, don’t you think? Don’t you have a shredder by your desk? Oh, well.

Thanks to all those guys, you can get the Bible in your hand in so many languages now that it
boggles the mind! But just getting the Bible in your hand does not make you a Christian, and that’s a fact.

Knowing something (and we now can know a lot about many things very quickly) does not replace doing something and many folks are misunderstanding that fact – ultimately one must synthesize information to truly learn. Just knowing and seeing is a fragment of reality.

Plenty of folks in other countries ripped off the intellectual property, stole the ideas, and reproduced them on the cheap. Jobs spawned a revolution in lots of places he never visited. So now the world has changed. Our airwaves are unclogging because our television is all data. We have broadband for that. We can get more information faster than ever before in history.

G I G O.

But the change, no matter how seductive, is not necessarily for the better! We have dependency
where we used to have freedom!

Think about this: Maybe one person in history ever got their identity stolen by using their library card and sitting in the library reading some reference material!

We have to guard the world in a way we have never done in history. Our personal identities are at
stake! Hackers of every description want our information. Hackers from other countries want to invade the United States at the byte level, and they actually have done it by hacking into some amazingly vulnerable precious stuff!

Just consider for a moment what happens if one’s government turns off the Internet, as they did in Iran recently. What happens when the net dies? Bad things happen.

You do know that the bank does not actually have very much actual money and that if the ATMs go down, or the credit card reader does not work, that you will not, repeat not, be able to get your money out of the bank or buy your gas at the pump.

You do know that not everything you read on the web is true, in fact, so much of it is not true that
people are making a good living sorting it out.

Do you know that there are people out there who have no actual friends at all --- just avatars?

They have exchanged the real, tangible world for the digital imitation. Too much of a good thing is really too much. Too much data in little bitty bites makes people think in little bitty bites.

While they can open a lot of files and go back and forth through them, their processing produces less comprehension. People are stuck in the land of instant read. Maybe being stuck is going to trigger a really torturous shift in personal relationships and comprehension, and an idolatrous "I" focus in the i-world.

More in Part 4: The “I” World