e-Excitement

The promise and problems of the information revolution

First-generation high tech: setting constant registers on Aiken's Mark I. HOWARD AIKEN: PORTRAIT OF A COMPUTER PIONEER, MIT PRESS

Information technologies clearly have us in their sway. Computers and communication tools confined to institutional use only a decade ago are now on sale at Wal-Mart and under discussion by parents and their first-graders at the breakfast table. Their uses range from the convenient--the ability to e-mail a class note or letter to this magazine--to the transformative: new modes of retailing, new databases and research tools, and entirely new kinds of work.

Continuing the series begun with "The Future of Health Care" in our March-April issue, Harvard Magazine asked a group of Harvard-affiliated analysts of and participants in the information revolution to put it in context and to speculate about its future. Their conversation ("The Wired Society," page 42) fairly crackles as they speculate about the potential for organizing businesses and serving consumers in new ways--a set of revolutionary changes they see as barely begun.

At the same time, they raise serious concerns about privacy, the evolving relationship between workers and their employers (how about stock options for key employees' families, for example?), and the potential for antisocial behavior launched from behind the Internet's veil. The emerging landscape and the language used to describe it can seem both exhilarating and chilling--for instance, when one panelist envisions replacing the routine information-sharing functions of many "human modems" with more efficient, technological systems.

As it happens, Harvard's involvement with these technologies dates from their founding, and extends to their most up-to-date application. Harry R. Lewis, dean of Harvard College and Gordon McKay professor of computer science, reviews two new books on computing pioneer Howard H. Aiken (page 25). In them, professor emeritus I. Bernard Cohen--himself dean of American historians of science--states the case for Aiken's fatherhood of modern computing, even though his celebrated Mark I and its mechanical successors proved an evolutionary dead end.

Contemporary computing on campus takes visible form in the Maxwell-Dworkin Building donated by Microsoft leaders William H. Gates III '77 and Steven A. Ballmer '77, now nearing completion on the site of the former Aiken Computation Laboratory. The less tangible but pervasive effects of the new technologies--as applied by the most avid young users--are described in Jennifer 8. Lee's "Undergraduate" column (page 78).

Finally, we find in Harvard's rich archives a cautionary lesson about investing in the information revolution. From the Business School's Kress Library, next door to the building where our panelists met, managing editor Christopher Reed has extracted images illustrating the impact of the South Sea Bubble--one of the great speculative frenzies of all time (page 36). It's a useful warning against becoming too wired about the advent of the wired society.

~ John S. Rosenberg

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