A Prophecy from the Past — Bill Gates and The Road Ahead

A Prophecy from the Past — Bill Gates and The Road Ahead

More than twenty years ago, my understanding of the world was still confined to a small number of books. It would be several years later before I first encountered a 386 computer in a school computer class. And sometime after that, on a certain night, full of curiosity, I would sneak out of the dormitory with a friend and travel more than ten kilometers to an internet café, where I spent my first sleepless night in front of a dazzling array of web pages. Back then, I had no idea that the life I was living—and was about to live—on the information superhighway had already been so clearly foretold in Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead.

Over the past two decades, humanity’s life on the information superhighway has accelerated like a Fast & Furious movie. Bill Gates and his The Road Ahead keep getting mentioned again and again. Whenever a new technology appears, someone always pulls out the book, points to a certain page, and tells everyone that Gates had already successfully predicted it back in 1995. What we now call “technological innovation” is, in many cases, simply the realization of what was once prophecy. And indeed, even after several decades—especially decades of explosive growth in information technology—The Road Ahead remains astonishingly accurate and exciting in its descriptions and predictions of the information superhighway. Some of the forms and methods discussed in the book have already faded away today; others have become today’s hottest and most widely celebrated technologies; still others remain underdeveloped and await further exploration. This book about the future, written in the past, remains in both breadth and depth every bit as relevant and impressive as today’s popular books on technology.

In The Road Ahead, Bill Gates uses the phrase “information superhighway” to describe the rapidly approaching information age driven by networked connectivity. He predicts that “when you’re on a real highway, a wallet PC can connect you to the information highway and tell you where you are; its built-in generator can give directions and tell you there’s an exit ahead or that the next stretch of road is accident-prone.” Not only that, this pocket-sized computer could also help you check the weather, locate nearby restaurants, scenic spots, and more. He believed that “the wallet PC is the new Swiss Army knife,” offering “a small screen, a tiny phone, a secure way to conduct business transactions in digital money, and the ability to read or use information.” Without actually using the term “smartphone”—a word that did not yet exist at the time—Bill Gates accurately predicted, in nearly every respect, the features of the smartphone devices that almost everyone carries today. On the information superhighway, this has become the basic vehicle on which everyone depends.

With the arrival of computers and the age of the information superhighway, our ways of living and working were bound to change dramatically as well. In The Road Ahead, the most important data-processing tool mentioned is Microsoft’s own Excel. Its key strength lies in the fact that users can examine integrated information from countless perspectives through a central spreadsheet; with the help of computers, thousands of possibilities can be explored with nothing more than the click of a button. As a result, the traditional way of printing endless reports and binding them into volumes—an approach that was both inconvenient and inaccurate—would become a thing of the past. In this respect, regardless of how proficient we are with Excel (and the productivity gap here can indeed be enormous), all of us, to some degree, now use spreadsheets for automated data processing. But in other respects, perhaps we still have not gone as far as The Road Ahead predicted. Shared screens, television, and conference calls have not helped us overcome most forms of physical separation, though they have had positive effects in limited contexts. And we still have not truly achieved natural-language conversation with computers: whether it is Microsoft’s Cortana or Apple’s Siri, there is still a long way to go before they can become real work assistants. Gates himself wrote that “it will take decades to implement the substantial changes I’m describing.” But “a new generation will bring new perspectives. Our children will grow up accustomed to working with communications tools that transcend distance. For them, these tools will be as natural as the telephone and ballpoint pen are for us.”

This is why information-based education for the next generation is so crucial. Here, education has two meanings. The first is education in information technology for the next generation: just as learning to drive is vital on a highway, mastering the key technologies of the information age is equally important for the information superhighway. The second is that informatization itself offers more possibilities for education. Interactive and online learning can make education accessible to more people in more ways. It is hard to imagine that when these ideas were first proposed, we were still living in an era when computers were regarded by many parents as dangerous monsters. At the same time, while people like the brutal and dehumanizing Yang Yongxin inflicted cruel harm in the name of treating so-called internet addiction—and have still never faced the punishment they deserve—we were labeling children’s fascination with computers as “internet addiction,” even as Bill Gates wrote in The Road Ahead: “I’ve found that once kids get exposed to computers, they become fascinated. We need to create that opportunity for them.” Because “the younger you are, the more important it is for you to become adaptable to computers.” Many years later, I noticed that very few people still use the term “internet addiction,” because almost every adult has also become part of the information superhighway. In the future, when using information tools no longer requires us to lower our heads to look at our phones, even the term “phone zombies” will become a historical expression.

Many of the technologies mentioned in The Road Ahead still have not become fully mature even after more than twenty years. In 1995, Bill Gates designed an entire smart-home Internet of Things system for a newly built house, yet even today our efforts to connect everything still feel as though they are only just beginning. Back in 1995, Gates believed that all artificial intelligence technologies were being overestimated, because a computer had to simulate billions of possibilities in chess before it could win. But today, AI has defeated the world’s top players even in the once unimaginable domain of Go. Its impact may no longer be overestimated, but underestimated. VR technology still staggers forward as it always has, and most devices still feel bulky, even if they are much lighter than those of more than twenty years ago. On the other hand, the BBS (bulletin board system) technology frequently mentioned in the book has gradually declined into obsolescence. Reading about it inevitably stirs both emotion and nostalgia, because in the first few years after I stepped onto the information superhighway, BBS accompanied me through the most important years of my university life. And even today, compared with all kinds of instant communication tools, BBS still has irreplaceable strengths. Perhaps, at some stage in the future, BBS communities may return in another form.

Yet information technology, like a Swiss Army knife, is also like a blade: it has two sides. While it brings a more convenient way of life to everyone, it also produces negative effects that cannot be ignored. In The Road Ahead, Bill Gates mentions the growing number of cameras watching us everywhere, the pervasive urge to intrude upon personal privacy, and the enormous influence information can exert on society. Now that the information superhighway has truly arrived, those worries are becoming reality one by one. And many other consequences not even mentioned in the book have also come to pass. Information provides more equal opportunities on the one hand, yet on the other it is making inequality more visible and more pronounced. But no matter what, the information superhighway has already moved from the vision described in The Road Ahead into undeniable reality. In the foreseeable future, we will continue traveling down this road for a very long time. So even if the highway carries greater risks than before, the only way to move forward steadily is to keep learning and to drive carefully.

Near the end of the book, Gates writes: “My hope is that after reading this book you will share my sense of optimism. And that you will join me in considering this question: How should we shape the future?”

The future is already here.