Last month a select group of 50 chief executives and policy makers met at a forum at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin. For the star of the show, Teltec Ireland had brought over BT's Head of Research, Professor Peter Cochrane.
He was armed with an Apple laptop, a prototype wrist computer and an electronic ring containing his personal details. Cochrane showed how the ring could let him walk out of a store carrying goods which have electronic price tags, avoiding the need to queue or to present a payment card. The ring details and the price tag details would be picked up by sensors and automatically debit his account.
Cochrane also talked about how traditional banks are at risk from supermarket banks, and traditional retailers are challenged by direct sellers (such as the online bookstore Amazon.com). But perhaps the most important part of his multimedia presentation was about how telecom networks will handle the vast amounts of data which the "information society" will require.
The data is increasingly chaotic and lumpy, and traditional rules of telecommunications and network design will no longer work. The trouble with human designers, though, is that they tend to build fixed solutions, ones which are often already out of date by the time they are implemented.
So BT's scientists have been working on biological models, such as "intelligent" networks which, well, redesign themselves. The 660 staff at BT Laboratories include several leading biologists and entomologists, taken on board to bring new thinking to network design. Tomorrow's networks will have to become ultraintelligent or self-learning. They will evolve by literally killing off old, inefficient algorithms.
These are some of the trends in computing and networking we are likely to see 20 minutes into the future, and in the afterglow of a multimedia presentation such as Professor Cochrane's you'd almost believe anything is possible. But back in the present, for plain ordinary users, the hardware and software is still more likely to be messy, awkward, expensive and unreliable. Many of the user interface features we now take for granted, from the mouse to the desktop metaphor, were developed and Xerox PARC's research centre. But we ought to have moved on since then. As Xerox PARC's director John Seely Brown told Business Week earlier this year, Windows-based interfaces are "like walking around with two toilet-paper tubes on your eyes. There's no sense of things moving smoothly from the periphery into your centre of vision."
As for software, the latest upgrade of the Internet Explorer browser comes in three versions, ranging from 13 to 25 megabytes. This is bloatware. Games software is probably the worst offender; while the games are becoming ever more realistic, faster and brilliant to play, they are memory-hogging to a staggering extent. Origin's new Wing Commander: Prophecy takes at least 150 megabytes of your hard drive, and the recommended installation eats up 450 megs.
A new approach by Genetix Software of Ottawa does away with the need for a separate operating system and builds up programs from little pieces of shared code, meaning the programs are dramatically shrunk. It has dubbed these common codes "genes". Another biological metaphor.
Biological models are also beginning to be applied to the problem of spam or unsolicited email. Spam is paralysing great chunks of the Net and is set to become one of the biggest Internet issues of '98.
To give an idea of the scale of the problem, Irish Internet service provider EUnet now regularly filters out over 1,100 spam sites. And that will make little difference to the "hit-and-run" spam merchants which now flit from site to site.
The popular Usenet search engine Deja News (www.dejanews.com) has begun to remove spam postings from its enormous 300-gigabyte archive of news stretching back to March 1995. It estimates that two-thirds of Usenet messages are spam. Now spammers are being hounded by anti-spamming vigilantes such as Netizens Against Gratuitous Spamming (www.nags.org), and earlier this month a US federal court ruled that junk emailer Over The Air must pay undisclosed damages and stop sending unsolicited email messages promoting porn sites to America Online members.
It's unlikely, though, that the threat of court cases will be an effective deterrent.
"There are so many spammers that trying to take them out one at a time in the courts is going to be hideously expensive," the chairman of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail says about the case.
Now the anti-spammers have turned to the biological model of the "arms race" between predator and prey (where each species continually evolves better measures and countermeasures in the battle for survival). The antispammers' latest weapon is a CGI script called wpoison (see http://e-scrub.com/wpoison/).
When a spammer's spider visits a Web site to trawl for email addresses, the script generates huge numbers of fake addresses. The spammer sucks up these bogus addresses and chokes on the bounces. This particular arms race is just bound to escalate. . .