Cable modems and satellite systems are promising, but are still expensive and not at all widely available. Consumers are still reluctant to change from familiar systems, such as the slow transition through the general population from DOS to Windows to Windows 95. Advances in semiconductor technology allow computers to take on more and more human characteristics, and our systems will ultimately be able to speak and listen to the user. Face and voice recognition will allow positive advancements, such as dictation versus typing and use of computers by the disabled. The dark side is that these capabilities can be used for surveillance.
Research projects are under way that allow digital cameras to recognize faces in a crowd.
Computers that recognize speech will increase the likelihood of wiretapping. There will be over 300 million Internet users by the year 2002, but even though everyone is in contact, the culture will be largely an anonymous one. Also, with up to 100 gigabytes of new information currently being added to the Web every month, users will be faced with an even greater flood of information much of it useless, commercially driven spam. Technologies such as differentiated channels are emerging to somehow organize the information. Tagged formats, searching, and access will become key.