It's not the internet, stupid! It's technology.

Around us we see the Internet mentioned as the next Great Thing and that this is what we are going to basing our wonderful future on; that the internet will generate vast wealth and we will all be rich beyond our wildest dreams, because the Internet will make it happen. Nutz!

The Internet is being extolled as a means of projecting communications to every corner of the globe. It will probably achieve this wonder. Of what value this will be, will be determined not by the Internet itself, but by the technology we put on the nodes at the end of these communications channels.

I am still not sure that the future of the web is necessarily a means to shop on line, even for companies. I have a feeling that the communications factor will still remain the number 1 feature that the internet provides. This feature will enable us to do all manner of things with the Internet, not necessarily on it.

The technology that provides the input to the internet, and that sucks up that information, will become of the foremost importance. Our short term fascination with the ability to put up web sites will diminish as we see the internet playing only an arbitrage bit part in the great technology break out that will follow.

Semiconductors will play a greater and greater role in the future as engineers come up with more devices that merely make use of the internet as a avenue to pass information from device A to device B, in an efficient manner. This is at odds with the current hype which sees the Internet as an end in itself.

Communications of any sort are only a means by which we pass data, the internet has been a great mechanism for the fostering of ideas but has not itself engendered us with ideas. The ideas come out of the heads and hearts of the people, and things, that are communicating. Web sites, be they to disperse ideas like this one (cranky ideas though they may be) or sites to sell widgets, are not generators of information - the information has come from some external source - the viewer, or the presenter - therefore the internet is a zero in terms of creating new information. We can analyze sales numbers on a web site, but in general it is only an alternate to existing channels of information distribution - it has not created new desire.

We will need an ever stronger internet, communications in the form of raw data will mushroom, but the internet will play no more of a role than to move this data from one place to another. The real developments are yet in hand, the real developments will come in the form of the devices we create that help mushroom this data feed.

Chips with Everything.

Over the last 50 years we have seen a steady (!) growth in the number of computing devices around us. I believe this is about to explode. That computers, as all pundits are predicting, will be coming out of every orifice. I contend though that we will etch transistors en-masse onto grains of sand, creating an environment for a totally different form of computation. This will not be of the form we understand today, where discreet computers tell us what is occurring in their immediate space, more of the form in which the very fabric of the civilization we live in will be computing. Make a building from simple computers and you can make it fantastically weak, because it can tell you where and when it is failing, so you can immediately alter the loads on it, or provide more load bearing structure. Our vehicles could crawl over a floor of computers each one being able to tell the vehicle which was is the most efficient direction to get to its destination, all the while the vehicle is telling us how it is feeling, how there seems to be growing uncertainty about the way ahead.

In such compute intensive environments where the internet is at the most base levels, the act of communication is inseparable from the act of doing, the internet though is not the means to do, only the means to pass the necessary data for other computers to make micro decisions, and ourselves to make macro decisions.

This will not happen overnight. We have to get over our fascination for discreet powerful computers, the future may be made more of moderately fast, but very low powered grains of computing, 2 and 4 bit chips maybe. Not all the computers we will need will need to be 32-bit, or 64-bit, or 1024- bit for that matter. Cheap computing will appear at the low end of the bit count, because the chips are simple and easy to fabricate in vast numbers. New fabrication techniques (say an organic, or enzymal method of depositing and etching tracks) may produce chips on tiny grains of silica almost as if the things were a pollutant on the crystal sides. Failure rates could be high, but the material would still contain vast numbers of working devices. Refining would weed out many of the failing grains. The cost of a bag of chips might be some function of compute purity, rather than of MHz or bit count. Such a material could then be used in many manufacturing processes. Even when the the material has to be cured in other manufacturing processes - say to make a carbon fibre/kevlar/micro silica computer based component, the computer grains only become active once the curing of the materials has been completed, maybe because the bonding agent used to cure the carbon-fibre is used as the insulator for the outer most level of the chips.

While the internet is a cool toy today, its use in the future will alter into it being more like electricity is recognized today, that being, it's just there! The development of devices and instruments that feed into the internet will be the great coming revolution.