Ukranian version (Зм?ст/Вступне слово/Придбати/Обговорити)

Engish version (Contents/Foreword/Buy ukranian version/Discuss)

When fifty years ago ENIAK computer, a model of 1947, would turn on, lights would darken in entire Pittsburgh; and the temperature in the room the computer was located would go up to 55 °C.

Such monsters of the past as ENIAK and synchrophasotron each were like a small house in size, consumed as much energy as a black hole of the same size; and as for their productivity, one could properly say 'a mountain has brought forth a mouse'. Today we think of them just like about pyramids, great monuments of history, that were meant to be just monuments and nothing more.

How far did we go for mere five decades! Even without taking in account 'acceleration' of history (because the same time slot that once barely contained just a single significant event now is packed with a number of events which could comprise one small era), the pace is still one of astronomic dimension.

Drawing from an American habit to convert anything abstract into 'tangible units', Don Tapscott neatly defined this phenomenon as following: 'Had motor technology developed as microprocessor technology, cars would run today at a speed of 20000 kilometers per hour, and they would cost two dollars!' [4, p.124].

How do you like E-Ukraine? Please let us know! Site Rating: -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 SearchEurope.com 10 = best, 1 = worst

But if an automobile enabled easier access to remote objects, information technology made something much more important for humankind - it brought knowledge closer to everyone. A car helps to distribute and promote goods. Information technology encourages creation of new knowledge, products, businesses. And, while an automobile multiplied energy consumption, increased manufacturing waste and needs for more rude materials, fuel and other kinds, as well as their processing, information technology gradually launch this entropy of resources backwards. Human civilization is becoming less hazardous for the Planet, and this allows Nature to revive and restore what man destroyed during past centuries. With every new generation of 'smart' technology intended to obtain greater results less energy, less time and less material are needed.

Introduction of telematic services (working from a distance) for road traffic control will immediately bring benefits to all drivers, local communities (especially in heavily congested areas) and businesses due to reduction in traffic, increased road safety, lower environmental costs, as well as energy and time saving [15].

And all these will be at the expense of the same principle used for information flow: directing impulses from the point A to point B by all the free ways, employing all the free nodes. By the way, according to statistics, with electronic network development, the growth rate of car production declines [25].

Generally, information networks are the most environmentally friendly human innovation. Not only allows Internet 'to dissolve' megalopolises and industrial centers with towns and neighbourhoods; it allows people to work from a distance, from anywhere. Moreover, business optimization allows reducing a number of personnel, engaged in non-creative occupations, those who would crowd in factories and shops. This is serious relief for local ecosystems, since it is known, that big crowds of people are extremely environment-unfriendly. One of the factors allowing to make it less harmful for the environment is e-commerce. Today there are nearly 100 million Internet users in the world. Most of them prefer to shop on-line. This significantly reduces pollution, since they do not use a car or a bus (reducing a number of trips) to go to the nearest store to get a can of beer; instead, they order it from the Internet. Worldwatch Institute experts have calculated, that it saves 90 (!) percent of cumulative fuel spending to deliver goods to consumers. Furthermore, in the nearest seven years, when mass flourishing of e-commerce is predicted, the reduction of store space at 420 million square meters is expected. This will save nearly 53 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. Today 21 power stations work to produce this quantity of electricity.

Statistics on paper consumption is no less striking. From 1950 its global consumption increased in six times. Paper manufacturing 'eats up' 4% of the entire energy produced in the world. Still 90% of paper would be used just once and would be destroyed immediately after being used; this makes up 405 of all the solid waste in the cities. Just by ordering to save all the information in electronic form and print it out only when necessary on each side of a paper-sheet, the Bank of America managed to reduce paper consumption for 25% and saved 500 thousand dollars per year. And this is just the beginning, because the 'necessity' to print documents out was caused by the lack of habit to process information from a monitor.

With further social adaptation to the new world the numbers will be even more striking. The effect will be multiplied significantly and will reach out to a global dimension when we all learn to work as team-players of planetary teams consisting of experts of different age, nationalities and professional expertise [25].

Uniting skills of all professionals in a virtual working task-force and interoperability of these teams on a higher level will allow to assess and solve anthropogenic problems of environmental ecosystems. However, let us listen to what says Alan Key, one of the father-founders of a modern computer, who is an author of communication to computer not through a program-line, but rather through metaphoric images (today's windows, icons, buttons on the monitor). He invented a lot of other things, which shaped today's role and a look of a computer:So, Key says, that though new computer environment will indeed allow to work on the most complex issues, it is necessary to make sure the changes will be positive.

TV must become the last mass media means, thoughtlessly developed and launched to the world without a relevant warning of the Ministry of Health [26]. We should not become fanatic like it is with phobias as to electric smog, though.

In any case, electronic era will not turn back, and this era is an era of environment by definition. Marshall McLuhan, renowned 'communications philosopher' of the 20^th century described this as follows: 'Perhaps, the greatest imaginable revolution in information industry has taken place on 4 October 1957, when Sputnik created a new surrounding of the entire Planet. For the first time, the world of Nature was entirely placed into a container made by a human.

'In a moment when the Earth found itself inside this new artifact, the Nature has ended and Ecology was born. Ecological thinking has become inevitable once a planet rose to the piece of art' [27].

The Nature is what lives on its own surrounding humans, and takes to itself everything humans leave after their activity, that becomes busier all the time. Ecology is a medium, which is a part of a human per se and human activity; the medium includes both. In Information society, ecology is an integral part of any human activity.

Harmonization of society and its relations with Nature in the age of Network Intellect is a result of accessibility and 'planetaryzation' of knowledge, if one may call so a phenomenon, opposite to former private and national affiliation of knowledge; the phenomenon, characterizing all-planetary access, usage and multiplication of knowledge.

Technology provides all these in practice. Just twelve years ago information would be transferred at a rate of two pages per second.

In the new network the transfer rate equals two small-sized public libraries per second [16].

Informational independence of a person is increasing: now virtually any required information (provided it has been organized before) may be obtained from the Network without having to wait for the opportunity to consult with an expert.

Before the World Wide Web age, Intel employed more highly paid telephone consultants, than market specialist and product developers. Today, they are replaced by the company's reference site.

We have specifically pointed out, that independence from consulting services has to do with knowledge already existed in the Net. As for new knowledge creation, endless opportunities for co-operation are open here.

Are you working on solving a problem? Are you looking for an answer? Go out to the Network. Experts will help you; experts you did not even know they exist, or experts you could never contact not that long ago, even if you knew about them. Joel Bernbaum, despite his being a vice-president of Hewlett-Packard, has now convictions of a Digital Society; and today we share his thinking - ink really is for 'embalming information' [4, p.94]. Live communication, possibility to change, to correct information or to add to it - possibility, accessible to anyone, anywhere, regardless of where one lives - is the way of convergence of abilities of any personality, the result of which is synergy of intellects, creation of Noosphere as something greater than a mere sum of its components.

All these taken together creates such progressive potential of humankind, that we are even afraid to imagine in what the world and which people will live in yet another fifty years?: Because as a result of information converted from analog to digital, objects of virtual nature come to replace physical ones. Society 'metabolism' becomes different; kinds of institutions and relations become different; the nature of human activity is changing. Following is what waits for us in a new society (and that is far from being complete):

• Virtual foreigners. People, working in one country, but physically being in another; for example, 'virtual operators entering data', residing in India, but working in America. From the law point of view, virtual foreigners often work illegally.
• Virtual ballot box. Any information gadget (TV-set, telephone, computer, kiosk, etc) one can cast a vote from.
• Virtual advertising board. 'Message Maestro' with hypertext links to other ad boards. Having this you do not have to fix a paper with a drawing pin.
• Virtual parliament (or virtual hearings). Legislative hearings in asynchronous mode (not simultaneous), from different places.
• Virtual corporation (virtual enterprise, expanded enterprise). A group organized in the Net by firms, individuals and institutions for business purposes.
• Virtual state agency. A chain of government agencies with similar functions united by Net to provide services to citizenship through a single 'window'; for example, a virtual welfare agency.
• Virtual position. Individual work through the Net as a contractor. Do not confuse with unemployment!
• Virtual department store. A medium in the Net, where one can find required goods, like in a virtual shop or on virtual shoes' sales.
• Virtual market. Any Cyberspace site, where shopping is done.
• Virtual office. Workplace for travelling clerk. Can be located anywhere.
• Virtual reality. Oxymoron, that means virtual nature.
• Virtual settlement. A group of people having a wide range of common objective and subjective interests, regardless of their geographic whereabouts. The community may have its own social life, a main street, a central square, a God's fool.
• Virtual beer barrel. Places in the Net, where one can participate in unofficial, even playful socializing, just like at a real beer barrel. Another name is multi-user cellars.
• Virtual babysitter. A person or a program, which educates, entertains and takes care of a child on-line.
• Virtual puppy. The world seems to have already got over this (knock the wood). It used to have the name 'tamagotchy'.
• Virtual doctor. A program to test your health condition as well as a real doctor providing you with recommendations on the Net.
• Virtual museum. Digital Versailles, open 24 hours a day without overseers where you do not have to queue to enter and put on felt slippers.

And something else: paintings are stolen and spoiled like in a real museum; just today it is called 'hackery'.

• Virtual chemical lab: a place where virtual cyanide is mixed with a virtual mother-in-law, and she dyes - though virtually as well.

The same goes with exercises with electrical current in a virtual physics lab, or with piranhas in a virtual biology lab [4, p.63].

But seriously speaking, information technology and virtualization of physical objects make a lot of useful things.

'Boeing - 777' became the first plane for creation which physical models and drawings were not used. Besides that, it was created by clients, engineers, providers, technicians and pilots together; they would make their amendments and suggestions at the same time, yet to implement them there was no need to change a screw.

The Port of Seattle introduced electronic data exchange to expedite a process of ships' port clearing. This made it possible to eliminate the waste of time both for cargo and for transport. 'Federal Express' courier service created corporate info-structure; a new formulation of its objectives, in particular, states: 'Every shipment is controlled reliably by electronic track systems in a real-time mode'. This means, that there is data every minute on every shipment's whereabouts. Even US Federal Postal Service has to turn to 'federal Express' from time to time, when urgent delivery is needed.

A few dozens of countries, in Europe in particular, introduced virtual tourist guides. Illustrating the beauty of historic sites and resorts, they quite successfully attract a great number of tourists.

And what is almost grasped by omnipresent technology antennas is medical service. According to Paul Salvers, executive of a Health Technology Management Consulting, a main means to reduce expenses for medical services for a long-run would be prophylactics with training and recommendations, as well as introduction of something like per capita tax, directed to reduce expenses.

It woks like this: a group of medical services experts makes a contract with regional administration or insurance companies with the guarantee to provide full medical services to people for a fixed payment from every person regardless of the extent to which the services are used. With such a scheme service providers are directly interested to develop preventive programs, educate citizens and employ other methods allowing to keep patient beyond the system or, at least, to interfere before their condition worsens.

In this case people will need an access to reference data bases, to doctors' recommendations, multimedia training, 'video to order' services. A patient becomes a participant of a highly productive health-producing team' [4, p.159].

The same modernization will extend to miscellaneous functions meant to carry out distance interactions whether in a business or in science and education. We are talking about 'intellectual agent' technology, who creates an effect of permanent presence in the Net; information robot, programmed by its master to collect and filter necessary information, to look for personnel and companies meeting given criteria, to conduct a certain stage of negotiations with intellectual agents of other participants of the Net, etc.

One of the most socially significant innovations, brought by the Net, is a telework. First the term 'teleaccess' or 'telecommuting' emerged. It was introduced by Jack Naills from the USA in 1976, to define a certain type of distance contractual work [29].

The term 'telework' was introduced by European Commission at the end of 1980s. Jack Naills comments on a difference between the two terms: 'Now I am a teleworker, not a telecommuter, because I work completely at home, and my home is a center of our company. When I was a telecommuter, I worked for other employers, whose office was on a distance' [30].

Telework is an ideal solution from the point of view of an 'ecology of a person'; it realizes the right of everyone to be oneself and protect one's own living, spiritual, intellectual space from unfavorable conditions. It allows to cope better with the task of putting together work, personal life and family. It creates better opportunities for job and employment - telework can potentially allow people in regions with high unemployment to get access to employment opportunities arising in any region in the world.

However, telework at home sometimes is not a solution at all. These are the cases, when someone does not have personal motivations strong enough and is not quite independent, so that when a person needs an external control. There are also cases, when young people start working for the first time, and they need to communicate with the team members to obtain a necessary experience quickly. And for some people, the necessity 'to come to work' is an important part of their lives, and 'a workplace' - an opportunity to make friends and master their social expertise and contacts [12].

Indeed employment of the most perfect technology and the most beneficial innovations are often limited by physical or psychological characteristics of an average person.

Perhaps, physicist Jay Keyworth, a Chairman of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and a Hewlett Packard director and a chairman of many other corporations and foundations is not completely right, when talking about '30-30' rule. It means that we humans can take in information at only about 30 megahertz through our eyes or even slower at less than 30 kilohertz through our ears. But even if implanted chips had delivered information directly into the brain, the rate of such intake would be very limited anyway because of physiological abilities of our today's brain without genetic correction. And compliance with our physical abilities is the ultimate requirement that will shape the communications infrastructure of cyberspace. [18].

But technology of tomorrow would allow for information to break through into our heads by all possible ways: through smell, touch and directly into the brain. It turns out, that the prognosis made by Marshall McLuhan in his 'Guttenberg Galaxy' about nearly complete atrophy of all other channels of sensing except visual, has proved to be wrong. Back in 1962, he thought that a human being would transform, in essence, into one big eye, whose other sensory contact abilities and communications respectively (tactile, a sense of smell and taste) would be reduced to a minimum [31]. However, information technology of tomorrow, which is already being tested today, is very close to the way an individual naturally interacts with the environment.

This will, of course, require greater capacities of tools, implementing new technological achievements. The European Commission Directorate, responsible for IT and information society issues, DGXIII, makes a comment, that in three years a power of your today's PC will be contained in a mobile phone or a watch.

The Directorate experts suppose, that such intensive development trend will last until 2010, until physical limits of silicon miniaturization will be reached. And what is ahead? Ahead is yet another radical technological change. 'Artifacts of sand civilization' will be thrown to garbage bins or go to a museum; they will be replaced with organic or polymeric 'Jelly Beans' instead, with a wave or subatomic technology, with something else from today's ongoing research, or even with implementation of a completely new idea. Whatever direction of modern research, today's agenda is the development of technology of the present stage. This includes current I3 (Intelligent Information Interface) initiative. Its aim is to make interaction an effortless task for the broad population of non-specialist users.

It is a response (very much like the intellectual agent) to the rapidly growing amounts of information being made available in our Information society, for which access and management is still difficult and time consuming. The initiative centers around research to create intelligent information interfaces that can be used naturally and intuitively, comprising diverse functions, flexibly spanning across different devices, applications and media.

Present-day technology includes as well OMI -- Open Microprocessor Initiative. The reason for the development of the Open Microprocessor Initiative (OMI) was the need for simpler architectures, the need for easy upgrading and the wish to avoid redesign through portability [33]. Here belongs ATM - technology of Asynchronous Transmission Mode; it enables flexible integration of all the information means [15].

Designers of these technologies plan to direct their further efforts to developing intellectual (computer and telecommunication) peripheral devices. The latter, being multifunctional, should at the same time remain user-friendly.

Intellectual microsystems development will include a complex of measures intended to miniaturize the systems. It concerns, in particular, miniaturization based on sensor and actuator nano-technology with active use of micro-converters. Their work is based on application of electrical mechanical, optical, chemical, biological, magnetic or other features of materials, integrated into a single chip or into a multichip hybrid. Devices and circuits will be upgraded using new effects such as quantum, photon and bioelectronic effects, that had not been applied before.

It is integration, low energy consumption and miniaturization, which are the main directons for Information society technology development, both for peripheral devices and terminals, as well as for software and hardware module of information processing and storage. Development of methodology for large data array storage -- terabyte technology - is an urgent necessity for all fields, where microcircuit technology is employed [34].

However, besides the lack of technology solutions, Europe faced the lack of legal and regulation documents as well as problems related to implementation principles agreed upon in the past. In the course of seeking solution for these problems, the EU Directive on electronic signatures was adopted in November 1999. It shall be implemented within 18 months.

This decision is one of the components of the Information Society foundation, because it implies that a flexible, technology neutral all-European framework for e-signatures will soon be in place. It will ensure the legal recognition, mutual recognition and free movement of e-signatures and certificates [35].

But if e- signatures for Ukraine have not yet become significant players of economic developments, then issues of standards, harmonized with international norms and compliant with domestic parameters, call for immediate solution. Standardization problem is a long-time obstacle on the way of development, implementation, production and marketing of high-technology domestic products.

This is why standardization is defined as a voluntary process; it is the companies and countries themselves, who are interested in it. And we are sure, that Ukrainian companies and organizations, including state-owned, have to be in the center of activity of the European standardization process, in order for them to fully enjoy benefits of information and telecommunication technology markets.

In a digital economy, the value is created through the opportunities available in the potential for relationship (for example, mobile telephones open business opportunities of much higher value, than the price of initial choice). Open systems offer more than the closed ones, because the greater the number of users in a user community becomes, the greater becomes the value of the product. This is also the reason for an extreme importance of standards in e-economy.

Indeed, the companies, whose production does not comply with standards or at least with specifications agreed upon, and does not comply with interoperability requirements as a result, can not work together with other manufacturers' products, -- these companies will not survive. Your business either co-operates with the others (B2B scheme, or business-to-business transactions) or it does not - and in this case you lose not only your partners, but also clients. As Erkki Liikanen, member of the European Commission and Bangemann Group participant, puts it: 'The issue really is: 'B2B or not 2B' [36].

It is important to make sure to prevent possible confusion as a result of a great number of standardization groups emerging in European market; not to mention waste of resources involved in duplicating efforts.

Generally, one may notice a significant liberalization of European standardization processes. It is for purely commercial reasons that the role of formal standardization in the Information and Telecommunications Technology sector has declined, at least where standard are required in the nearest time.

Preference is given to de-facto standards, which are the results of co-operation between companies. It is officially recognized opinion, that formal standards should be directed to those areas that need a broad consensus, where the market determines it as necessary. For example, where specifications should form a long-term activity, or in case they have extended to the level of international standards. Standardization should never constitute a formal impediment to the introduction to the market of new products or new technologies. It should leave sufficient room for competition of different manufacturers' products [33]. An example of extra-ordinary successful standardization is Euro-ISDN operational standard. The standard, presented in 1994, immediately make it possible for the author of the standard, Germany, and for Europe, to take a leading position in the world market of telecommunications and related services. Euro-ISDN is based on general standards, which have been developed since the end of 1993. Integrated Services Digital Network is a computerized transmission network, capable to transmit text, data and voice at a rate 64 Kb/s (comparing to 4,8 Kb/s normal rate for telephone network). Introduction of Euro-ISDN and 26 operators in 20 countries available just in one year after the standard came in effect made free information exchange a reality in Europe. Ukraine is also moving toward unification of its own standards with the European ones.

We have a lot to make. Among other things, it is necessary to simplify a procedure for standardization; develop adapted testing schemes; encourage manufacturers themselves and interested non-government organizations to create auxiliary standardization structures in order to develop the de-facto standards; to win an advantageous position in international representative bodies: Let us hope, it will not take too long for the list to shorten.

Of the issues we have outlined, the one is clear - the Information Society and information technology, a means for its creation, - are the things, which require a great number of changes. Everything that in one way or in the other is involved in the process of informatization has to change. These are economy, legal field, ways of interaction between a manufacturer, a consumer and government structures, society's attitude to innovation and many other areas of human activity.

There is just one consolation: we are confident of those who pave the way into the Digital Age. We are confident of people creating precedents for laws, standards, businesses and enterprises, new forms of education, art and communication. We are talking about driving force of Information Society - about the intelligentsia, software and technical specialists, professionals, skilled users.

Because a software developer, as a rule, represents a special socio-economic type, characterized by perfect discipline, responsibility, clearness of purpose, eagerness. And - according to Edsger Dakestry, a mathematician and a physicist, Turing prize laureate and the one possessing many other awards and titles,- a programmer is characterized by 'programmer's humbleness and modesty, aspiration for the new, rejection of consumerist attitude to life, possession of special expertise of work and management'.

This is a real hero of our time. As Charles Bachman, DBMS (Data Base Management System) developer and another Turing prize laureate, expressed it, 'A programmer is a navigator, an architect, communicator, model creator, expert and manager' [7]. We are absolutely positive, that these characteristics directly pertain to those who are called 'a strategic human resource potential of the state'.

And, dear reader, you know what? This is what you are called! You are a 'survival reserve' of the country, and it is time to get out and get involved in building 21^st century - building the Information Society.