Welcome to Princeton. This may be your first Princeton lecture, but it's not a typical one. For one thing it's the only time you'll be in a class of size more than 1000! Also, lectures usually involve slides or vugraphs, or at least a blackboard. When Hal told me this lecture would be in this room and that no audio-visual aids would be possible, I realized the challenge: we've all been on vacation all summer, and now we have to deal in ideas, face-to-face. No slides. No movies. No organist. Not even any Internet access. Well, at least the experience ties in with the topic of this lecture, as you'll see. Many of you have probably not done much academic work since you opened that thick envelope from Fred Hargadon. Right? The purpose of this lecture is to set your minds in motion, because you'll need them in gear at full speed when classes start on Thursday. The topic that I've chosen for this purpose is the prospect of having all knowledge online, and its implications. To start, I need to test some basic assumptions that I've made in preparing this talk. how many of you have never used a computer? how many of you use electronic mail? how many of you have ever used the Internet? how many use it regularly? how many run companies that produce Web pages? OK. Well, it looks as though I don't have to describe the basic features of the net to most of you. I'm not going to assume much, anyway. You can find a link to a web page for this lecture on my home page. If you've never been on the net, take this opportunity to get a friend to show it to you. Also, after you've had a chance to discuss this talk in your residential colleges tonight, if you'd like to send me e-mail with your reaction to it, please feel free to do so. I'll collect the mail that I get and put it on the web page. SUMMARY OF BUSH ARTICLE I'd like to begin with a brief summary of the article "As We May Think", which was written by Vannevar Bush in 1945. The article was written at the end of World War II. Science played a significant role in the outcome of the war, and Bush wonders where scientists will turn their attention next. He begins by noting that there is a growing mountain of research, but that a single researcher cannot hope to keep up with it all. He sees reason for optimism, because cheap and fast machines that might help are on the horizon. He describes basic technologies that were available at the time, such as photography, fax technology, and microfilm, and he comes to the conclusion that it is reasonable to assume that the sum total of knowledge can fit in a space the size of a moving van. That same estimate is not far off today, even though our knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate: it seems that each time the sum total of knowledge doubles, we find ways to halve the space required to store information. Bush then goes on to describe mechanical devices that could help us manipulate information. He talks about fast calculators and digresses to note that that fast machines for arithmetic will free creative mathematicians from the drudgery of computation and enable them to help solve scientific problems. It's not surprising that Bush was unable to see all the applications of computers that are so familiar today. At the time, only 1 or 2 computers existed in research labs, and they were viewed as "automatic calculators." The general-purpose computer was still being invented, actually by John von Neumann, right here in Princeton. But Bush does see that we could use these fast calculators to quickly select any desired piece of information from that huge store of information packed in the moving van. He puts the two pieces together (the ability to store all accumulated knowledge and the ability to retrieve any piece of it quickly) to envision a device called the "Memex", which a person could use to store all manner of information and later access it by typing in a short code. More important, Bush describes something called "associative indexing," where pieces of information can be linked together, perhaps in a manner analogous to the way the human brain works. Each person would link information together in different ways. Even for a small amount of information, the number of possible connections is huge, so the connections individualize the mass of information, and give it a different organization and structure for each individual. Bush characterizes the connections as a way that people can remember information that they've accessed. With a Memex, a lawyer could link together cases related to one of interest, a doctor could link together relevant case histories, a chemist could draw on past knowledge when searching for a new compound, or a historian could draw new connections that enhance our understanding of the historical record. As the editor of the article aptly states, a Memex would build a new relationship between humans and our accumulated knowledge. It's quite a lofty goal. The most remarkable thing about this article is that it was written over 50 years ago! Before there were computers, or even TVs. Not even all that many telephones. Still, Bush was able to envision many of the conveniences that we enjoy today with personal computers and the Internet. And a Memex-like machine sometimes referred to as the "personal information appliance" continues to be the wave of the future in Silicon Valley. On a less positive note, I have to digress to apologize while noting the brutal gender bias in this article. In Bush's world, scientists and scholars are men and clerks and typists are women. Thankfully, that world is long gone. Bush was unable to foresee that half of the beneficiaries of his projected technology would be female; indeed he doesn't even acknowledge that many scientists of his own day, and especially many of the first computer programmers, were women. One wonders how a scientist of Bush's stature, for whom freedom of inquiry is of vital importance, could rationalize such an obvious bias. By the way, if any of you should encounter any bias at all here, be sure to question it, immediately. Any bias in a university is hypocrisy itself. Back to the Memex, where Bush did hit the nail on the head. He admits that "technical difficulties of all sorts" would need to be resolved in order to actually build the Memex machine, and he mentions other early machine designs that didn't pan out. There's no way he could have foreseen the invention of the transistor the integrated circuit the digital computer itself the microprocessor. All of these things have provided the basis for the modern realization of his vision. For a time, Bush's article was mostly forgotten in the light of all of these amazing breakthroughs, but the article saw new light when computer scientists in the 70s found Bush's vision inspirational as they took on the construction of a Memex-like machine. Their research was completely revolutionary, and led to the development of the basic computer system architecture that we use today. DESCRIPTION OF XEROX PARC I've been fortunate enough to work for a short time with some of the people that brought this particular revolution about, and I'd like to describe the research atmosphere where it started, at Xerox PARC, in the late 1970s, just before you were born. I've got a personal frame of reference on a lot of this historical material---I've got two sons in the class, out in the audience somewhere! I was at Xerox PARC just before they were born, so I know this happened just before you were born! PARC is an abbreviation for "Palo Alto Research Center". It was located up in the hills, west of Palo Alto. This institution was laid back and very Californian: People wandered around in T-shirts and sandals, drinking herbal tea or fresh ground coffee. They kept erratic hours, except for regular meetings that were held in a large room filled with bean-bag chairs. People would settle in and toss around ideas. Much of this is commonplace today, but at the time it was near heresy and the antithesis of the nine-to-five, starched-white-shirt mentality found at IBM, where all "serious" computer work was being done. There were plenty of computers around at the time, but they were big, blue IBM machines, which cost millions of dollars and were accessible by relatively few people in big, rich institutions. At Xerox PARC, as in a university, the most important activity was the critical evaluation of new ideas. The collective general goal was to find ways to make computers more effective personal tools (the same goal espoused by Bush). The researchers there were very productive: within a period of about 5 years, a small group of them came up with the following new inventions: the Alto (a personal computer with much of the functionality of today's machines). a WYSIWYG editor (which has evolved to be Microsoft Word) a Local area network for connecting the Altos (the Ethernet, still widely used today: one of the inventors was a recent Princeton grad.) the laser printer (which has transformed the printing industry) a method for transferring large files between computers (FTP, which is still used today) object-oriented programming (the basic idea behind Java) All of these things were invented over 20 years ago at Xerox PARC. I visited there as a university professor and lived with this computing environment in 1978 and again in 1979. The environment was so different from that commonly envisioned that I had a great deal of difficulty even describing it to my students and colleagues back in the East. How wasteful it seemed to devote a whole computer to presenting information to just one person, at a time when many universities were devoting a significant fraction of their resources to buy one computer to be shared by everyone! But the Memex had come to life. As a research effort adding to our basic knowledge, Xerox PARC was a complete success: the basic features of the Alto environment are now found in millions of computers. Not many of those computers are made by Xerox, but that's another story, told in an entertaining book called "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" You can check the lecture web page for a reference. By the way, I should note another thing that Bush certainly never envisioned. That's one of the most widespread uses of personal computers today. What do you think it is? Right. Computer games. By the way, they had some great games at Xerox PARC. Before the Alto, computers were horrendously expensive and decidedly impersonal. Visionaries worried about all-powerful, all-controlling computers robbing us of our humanity. But, by 1984, we had the friendly Macintosh and we had cute commercials on TV that used Charlie Chaplin to sell IBM PCs. This change was truly a revolution. Since it happened when you were in diapers, it's fair to say that your generation hasn't experienced anything but personal computing, but you need to be aware that computing was vastly different when the old fogeys in your lives (like parents and professors) were in college, and that computing was inaccessible to most of them. And it still is. We like to say that the most important thing that we do in a university is to teach people how to learn, but learning in the face of a major paradigm shift such as the use of computing tests that idea in the extreme. I'm taking for granted here the other ongoing research and development in Silicon Valley and elsewhere that has given us faster and more powerful computers each year. Apply the progress that's been made to any other industry, and you can appreciate its impact: How would you like to have a car that goes 1 million times faster than the one your grandfather had in 1950? Or perhaps we should imagine a plane that is not only 1 million times faster than the one Lindbergh flew, but also can hold 1 million passengers! And which, by the way, only costs $1000. The startling advances in computer performance of course played a big role in the personal computer revolution (and will continue to be important in future revolutions) but the great ideas at PARC were important, too. So, you missed the personal computer revolution and can go ahead and take Bush's Memex for granted. What's next? Well, if you're been paying attention, you're witnessing the next big revolution, the advent of the World Wide Web and the online global village. This revolution was anticipated as early as the 1960s by another visionary, Ted Nelson, and has brought us past what was imagined by Vannevar Bush. We now have extensive access to an enormous amount of information, without even having to load it in to our own Memex, and we can communicate it to others instantly. Knowledge is being put online at a dizzying rate, and we are fast approaching the day (if it's not already here) where you can be certain to find what you need on the web. For example, I'll bet that it'll take you only a few seconds to find your way to Nelson's original work, even without a link. Try it. Future prospects are bright, indeed. This revolution will soon culminate in an ability to freely access anything that we know, from anywhere. Your 10-year old brother or sister won't be able to relate to life before the Web, any more than you can relate to life before the PC. Now, what will the next revolution be like? SUMMARY OF NOAM ARTICLE To set the stage for answering this question, I'd like to consider the second article that I asked you to look at: "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University" by Eli Noam. Again, let me begin by summarizing. Noam's thesis is that universities have traditionally served three functions: to create and evaluate knowledge to preserve and protect information to transmit information to others No argument with that. He goes on to say that free global access to online knowledge will lead to changes that weaken the institution of the university as we know it today. He says that, in ancient times, scholars gathered around information, that institutions like universities have been collecting information for the purpose of attracting the best scholars, and that even though this system has been stable for over 2500 years, it's now on the verge of breaking down. Why? First, he says, if scholars can access information and communicate over the net, they don't have to congregate at universities. Second, he says, there is no longer any need to store information in a university library. Third, he says, modern high-tech tools will enable alternatives to traditional teaching. Therefore, Noam says, it will be cost-effective for commercial companies to take over "mainstream undergraduate and professional education" so that universities in the future will be stuck with the leftovers: small fields of study that are not lucrative for commercial providers. He wonders if the impact of electronics on the university will be like that of printing on the medieval cathedral, ending its central role in information transfer. As you can tell from the title of this talk, I quite disagree with Noam. One of the things that you might discuss when you meet this evening is the extent to which you agree with him. It's an appropriate time for you to be thinking about the issues he raises, because it leads you to think about the value of the enterprise upon which you are about to embark. ODLYZKO RESPONSE One response to Noam's point of view has been presented by Andrew Odlyzko at AT&T Research, in an article entitled "Electronics and the Future of Education" (I got this article off the net: Odlyzko is a firm believer in electronic publishing, and circulates his writing on the net. You can find a link to it on the lecture home page.) Odlyzko predicts that universities will flourish, not decline, and points out that, basically, the process of teaching is independent of technology. I'll read a quote from his article: "My prediction of growth in education is not based on denying the value of modern technology. PCs and the Internet are much more useful than earlier technological innovations such as radio or movies (which some enthusiasts had expected to revolutionize education, just as today computers are predicted to do). Personally I am skeptical of the extreme claims for modern technology. I suspect that Sumerian scribes of 5,000 years ago might feel at home in today's classrooms, because education is primarily a process of getting students to absorb new ideas and ways of thinking, and it requires extensive social interaction. Replacing clay tablets first by paper notebooks and now by PCs can help, but not much. However, that opinion is not a crucial part of my argument. Let us accept all the claims of advocates of modern technology. Suppose that future 3-dimensional holographic projections and high bandwidth networks could make distance learning so effective that live lectures could be phased out. Even then, I expect teachers would still be employed to provide interactive instruction. Their ranks would grow, not shrink, even though they would not be presenting lectures, and even though computers would be used more extensively and effectively than now for interactive instruction. Technology can replace some teachers in their present roles. Hence if all we cared about was to produce what the current system does, we could indeed operate with fewer people. However, we are unlikely to do that. New demands will arise to take up the slack. There has always been desire for more personal attention from teachers than could be met. Further, as the need for training increases, those demands will be rising. Education is not a matter of getting to where the Joneses were 10 years ago. It is more a matter of trying to get to where the Joneses are likely to be 10 years from now." Odlyzko goes on to point out that pinning down precisely what we want to achieve in education is an elusive goal. Again, I'll quote Odlyzko: "If education were a simple matter of teaching the three Rs, the future might be different. However, we do not even have a clear idea of what education is supposed to accomplish. As an example, what are parents who send their child to Harvard paying for? Is it the excellence of the Harvard faculty? My kids and I are at Princeton, not Harvard, so I'm not quite sure what he's talking about here! Are parents paying for the stimulating atmosphere of living and studying with other students with top credentials? A chance to mature away from home? Access to the libraries and museums at Harvard? The Boston social scene? The chance for their child to network with future movers and shakers? The opportunity to boast to their coworkers and neighbors of their prowess in raising children? Probably a combination of all. Education is supposed to prepare an individual for life, but we do not have a clear model of how it does that. With rapid change, we do not even know what life to prepare for. Therefore replacing some elements of the current educational experience by technology is unlikely to diminish the human element provided by teachers." Odylzko is right. Professors don't think much about the process of transmitting knowledge: the methods that they use evolve over the years. We don't know much about how people learn; it just seems to happen when we all try our best. Professors don't give the same lectures year after year: they have to react to new developments in the field and update their material each time they present it. Most professors do this, as a matter of course. Most professors also frequently build new courses, synthesizing new material to be taught, with no other goal than to transfer as much knowledge as possible to students. And, most important, students and professors seek interaction with each other, during lectures and otherwise. When I teach, I want you to learn. If Noam's "alternative providers" come up with better new ideas for teaching the material I'm teaching, I'm more than happy to use them. If someone else comes up with a great new book, I'm more than happy to have you read it. I'm afraid that the need to turn a profit doesn't allow the "alternative providers" these luxuries (and never has). As Odlyzko points out (again I quote): "We have historical experience with one effective example of distance learning, namely that of textbooks, which are available to all schools equally. Their spread has coincided with the great growth in teacher ranks in the last century, and also with increasing differentiation among institutions. Will the effects be different even if live lectures are replaced by recorded ones?" Those commercial providers haven't taken over textbook production. Professors at universities write textbooks, and professors at universities will be the people creating content for any future technologies that prove to be more effective than textbooks. The only hope for commercial success lies in cooperating with professors, not competing with them. I think that, as ever, students will go to teachers who want them to learn, not to companies who want to make a buck, The bottom line is that society finds the traditional functions of universities (to advance knowledge, and to pass what we know on to future generations) to be of great value, and the people in the universities (students and faculty) account for virtually all of that value, because of their commitment to learning. Increases in the amount of knowledge make the need for universities more critical: there's more information to deal with. It is interesting to note in the articles I've mentioned that both Bush and Noam (though spaced by 50 years) talk of exponential growth, our inability to absorb all knowledge, and the inevitability of specialization. This situation doesn't change as time marches on. At a university, we try to absorb the facts that we need to stimulate our creativity and have an impact on the future. Should we be pessimistic because we can absorb only a small slice of what's known or optimistic because we have so much to choose from? I think that one of the primary reasons that we're at the university is to interact with each other! We have shared ideals, intellectual curiosity, mutual respect, and high expectations. We're here to learn---more precisely, to prepare for a lifetime of learning. To do this, we need to think about knowledge being online, because one thing is clear: online is where we'll need to go to learn in the future, no matter what field of study we're interested in. But this situation doesn't change the idea that universities are the concrete realization of the idea of a community of scholars. At a microscopic level, the role of the university certainly will change. Noam is probably right that a physical library will become less important and may even vanish entirely. Oblyzko has written about that, too. Check his web page (not the library) for his latest paper on that topic. The idea of a decreased library budget is certainly controversial at institutions with big libraries, like Princeton: maybe you'd like to discuss it when you meet in the colleges tonight. I think that the disappearance of the library would just mean that more resources can be devoted to other things. And, as President Shapiro can tell you, there is definitely no shortage of ideas in a university on how to use resources. As ever, ideas on allocating resources will be tested, developed, and the best of them will be used to improve the university. It's not just the cost of the physical library that's going to drop, the cost of computing itself is also likely to drop. Twenty-five years ago, a university would spend millions on a single computer that was accessible to relatively few students and faculty (most students used slide rules and typewriters). Twenty-five years from now, students will buy new information appliances as back-to-school supplies. The idea of a decreased computing budget is also controversial at institutions with big investments in computing, like Princeton: you can discuss that, as well, tonight. I think that the cost of the computer and the cost of the library are not likely to be as important in the future as they are now. I also think that we need more problems like this, because, remember, I'm just talking about the cost. People will have more access to information and people will be using computers more than ever---we just won't be spending so much on these things. And a university is a huge and complex institution, we'll be spending future dollars on things that seem as important as today's libraries and computers. This situation doesn't represent and change in our basic mission. ONLINE KNOWLEDGE: WHAT'S NEXT Let's go ahead and assume that all human knowledge is online, and that anyone can access any of it with a few keywords and a few doubleclicks. That's what Vannevar Bush imagined, and, really, we're not at all far from that goal. Now, let's go back to the question of what happens next. Many people assume that what happens next is completely determined by Microsoft, Intel, and the other giant companies of the day. We read the headlines every day: Bill Gates has billions, Apple is dead, Wintel machines will dominate the world, and so on and so forth. But this is precisely what we felt about IBM in the 1970s. Few could imagine a world different than the one that they built, but now we do have a different world. And now we're back in the same situation. Again, few can imagine a radically different world, but there are plenty of researchers out there with little stake on the present who are working on their visions of the future. One of them will catch fire. The big companies make progress and will be quick to jump in and try to capitalize on new ideas (like IBM with the PC), but the next revolution will come from some completely unexpected corner of the world. This view is perhaps naive and simplistic, but it's hard to deny. For one thing, with universal access to computing, there are many more people out there with the power to create revolutionary new ideas than ever before. The next revolution may not have much to do with online knowledge. However, we're talking about managing the sum total of humankind's knowledge and passing it on to future generations, so, it's probably safe to assume that there's value in working on the problem. Certainly, at a university, it cannot be avoided, no matter what your field of interest. Even with immediate access to all knowledge online, we are still left with a number of problems. As all Web users know, there's an enormous amount of information out there: we need to be able to evaluate and filter a lot of it to get at some particular information of interest. Every Web user has had the experience of having millions of hits on a simple keyword search. I'll return to this problem soon: For the moment, let's concentrate on big chunks of knowledge, like books. Even if we have immediate access to a book that we know that we want, we still have to "read" it, and presumably "understand" it. The time required to do that is a fundmental bottleneck. Another fundamental bottleneck comes up, when we create something new, and have to add it to the online record. I would like to claim that both of these tasks are intrinsic to the traditional function of a university and are not much affected by technology. Let me elaborate. GETTING INFORMATION INTO THE BRAIN I didn't mention one of the ideas described by Bush at the end of his article, one that I think lies at the crux of the matter. As an example of one of the "technical details" that might enable construction of the Memex, Bush wonders if someday we might be able to transfer information from the Memex directly to the brain with electrical signals. After all, the connection between the eye and the brain is like a huge cable: couldn't we someday connect a computer to that cable? Even nowadays, not many people would consider this possibility to be realistic, but let's consider it for a moment anyway. Suppose that we could absorb the information in a book by plugging in to a terminal instead of reading it. Would the transfer happen instantly, or would you have to be hooked up for about as long as it takes to read the book? After all, when we read, we are establishing all those connections in the brain that comprise thought. That cable is not likely to get inside the brain, and it's not at all clear how much faster things could happen. Even if we were to postulate that double-clicking on a link to a book results in the contents of that book instantly being transferred to the user's brain, there are certainly a finite number of books that can fit in anyone's brain this way--would we have any control over which ones we "forget"? Not likely. More important, we still haven't gotten to "understanding" what we read. There are not many books worth reading that any of us fully understand. And understand something depends on interacting with everything we know. We may even need to communicate with others that we know (or even a professor) to understand the book. The process of "absorbing material from the record" is interaction between our brains and the environment that has developed over generations. It involves learning to read and learning to understand what we read, and it involves THINKING. "Learning to understand what we read": isn't that what education is, after all? It is amusing to think of this process of transferring knowledge from the online record to a person's brain in technical terms, as a bottleneck, but I don't think that the bottleneck is going to be eliminated by technical means, but rather by experienced people continually synthesizing and evaluating the information and finding ways to transmit it to others. That's called "teaching"! It's what we do at a university. It's not going to be done by a machine. GETTING INFORMATION OUT OF THE BRAIN How about the process of adding new information to the online record? We not only acquire and sift through old information, we also develop new ideas. Once a person develops a new idea, how do we get that into the online record? This, also, is a serious bottleneck. Bush talks about attaching a camera to every scientist, having the person mumble while doing research, and recording every word. I'm afraid that I'm not much interested in this approach, any more than I am interested in contemporary proposals to capture every keystroke typed in the world, or to save every file created on the web. I'd rather have that scientist (or a colleague) spend a significant fraction of time thinking about effectively communicating the important ideas to others, and then doing so. And that's what people do, nowadays, primarily in journal articles and books. We now have "electronic journals", and some ideas never find the printed page at all. The evolution from paper to electronic journals is also a fascinating issue to consider (see Odlyzko's home page for information on that issue, too) but is largely irrelevant to the present discussion, since we can print out a web page or scan in a paper or a book. Let's assume that part to be "free". I've published several books in recent years, and have made extensive use of technology, but there's no question in my mind that the most time-consuming part of the process is the creative process, ending with the process of forming those words, sentences, and paragraphs in my mind. Bush didn't propose having a wire OUT of people's brains, but I actually think we've done a pretty good job with this side of the equation. All by myself, I was able to create hundreds of pages of technical material earlier this year. I typed in that last word in mid-August, and many of you (and others all around the country) will be reading the final product in mid-September. The process is almost too efficient. Still, it took years to write the whole book, just as it took years to write a good book before the advent of technology. Again, the bottleneck is all in the human creativity. Technology can make some inroads, and maybe can help us make a better product, but the process of setting down a piece of knowledge in a way that people can understand is a time-consuming one, and is unlikely to ever be "automated". In research, the ratio of the time taken for creative effort to the time taken to write it up is much higher. For a researcher, that's one definition of a "breakthrough": to work on a problem for a very long time and eventually develop an elegant solution that can be explained to others in a very short time is a rare experience to which we all aspire. To be sure, we don't need technology to have good ideas. However, technology increases the potential impact of anyone's ideas and puts others' ideas within reach. Thus, it will be impossible to resist access to online knowledge in the future. To the contrary, most scholars are now embracing the new technology. And then there is the issue of all those connections. As people learn to communicate through the web, the information exchanged is quickly becoming much more complex than what we have on the printed page. A link to a web page opens up a whole structure of interconnected knowledge. Maybe we are beginning to develop a new and more efficient way of exchanging information, after all. SKILL IN INTERACTING WITH COMPUTERS IS REQUIRED There's so much information available, how can we cope with it? I'd be far out on a limb if I said that the ability to interact with a machine is as important for a thinking person as the ability to, say, read, but each time I make that statement, I feel less far out on that limb. With knowledge online, we can access information, but the exponential increase of the amount of knowledge makes the function of evaluating information as important than accessing it. Not only does some information become obsolete, but scholars constantly struggle to differentiate what is new from what is known. For this task, technology really can help. But I've just argued that machines can't speed up our ability to understand books. We can't expect machines by themselves to understand the information out there, and we can't expect scholars by themselves to cope with exponential growth. But scholars can use the new technology to extend our knowledge in ways not yet imagined, in the same way that reading and writing allowed people to extend knowledge far beyond what was allowed by oral transmission. So, what's the next revolution? I think that it might involve high-level interaction the information on the web. Scholars with experience and sophisticated skills using powerful open-ended tools. In web search engines and the like, we have some indication of what tools for doing this might be like, but I think that what we see today may be just primitive hints of what we might expect in the future. I think the trend towards computing applications that do everything for you is misguided. Some people expect to have tools that will "automatically" garner information, build connections and do other tasks---I prefer to believe the opposite, that new tools will emerge that will depend upon our resourcefulness and creativity and that will enable us to build upon our accumulated knowledge (and to pass it on) in completely new ways. The development of computing applications to interact with information on the web can coincide with increased development of human skills, computation-based, learned over a lifetime, like reading and writing. Maybe those computer games are actually serving a pretty good purpose, after all! Your children will use computers and interact with the web to a far greater extent than you ever did: And, don't forget, knowledge will be online by the time that they need it. Your kids will be working with that knowledge in much more sophisticated ways than we can now. In a generation or less, the new revolution will come, as we graduate teachers conversant with interacting with online knowledge and your children grow up with a world where such access in the norm, enabling them to get the most out of their creativity. I prefer to think about the development of the personal computer and the Internet (along with the product of some PARC-like research, in the near future) as being the spark that can inspire each individual to learn to harness the intrinsic power of computation, in the same way that the printing press was the spark that inspired each individual to learn to read and write. And those individuals with intellectual curiosity and a commitment to a lifetime of learning will still wind up in universities, where future prospects are therefore, indeed, incandescent. Most certainly, to paraphrase that Atlantic magazine editor's statement of over 50 years ago, we are developing "a new relationship between thinking humans and the sum of our knowledge". You have opportunities no one has ever had before. Providing such opportunities is what we strive to do at great universities like Princeton. Make the most of them. I wish you all well. Thank you. Copyright (c) 1997, Robert Sedgewick