THE 鈥渄igital revolution鈥� is creating a new culture of haves and have nots, warns Carlo de Benedetti, who chairs the European Union鈥檚 working group on the information superhighway and heads the Italian computer company Olivetti.
The working group sees a growing gulf between individuals who understand information technology and those who are frightened of computers or cannot afford to buy them. But it also believes that the technology will widen the gap between the world鈥檚 rich and poor, with rich countries educating people to be IT managers and poor countries training people to be badly paid keyboard operators. 鈥淭he digital revolution is an opportunity for the more advanced nations to consolidate their supremacy,鈥� warns de Benedetti.
Speaking in Paris last week at the fifth annual IT Seminar, organised by the International Data Corporation, de Benedetti painted a bleak picture of what the new divisions will mean. Information can easily be exported by wire. Swissair already stores all its airline data in India, the German electronics giant Siemens treats the Philippines as a local office and French courts process legal texts in the C么te d鈥橧voire.
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If this trend continues, only skilled managers will find IT work in Europe. De Benedetti warned that if Europe continued to export lowly paid IT jobs there could be a rise in unemployment. 鈥淚f immigrant workers from Eastern European and Third World countries continue to arrive in the EU, while work continues to emigrate via computer networks, what can be done about unemployment?鈥� asks de Benedetti.
David Moschella, senior research consultant with the International Data Corporation, foresees a technological fix which could give the less well-off a chance to buy into the information age. The computer of the future, he forecasts, will be an 鈥渋nformation appliance鈥�.
It will have just enough intelligence and power to download multimedia information from a telephone line or cable connection, along with whatever control software is needed to use it. So the appliance can be cheap and relatively 鈥渄umb鈥� and therefore simple to use because it will need to store very little of its own software.
Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle, also wants to deliver information by telephone, on demand, to a simple information appliance. 鈥淭he personal computer is a ridiculous device. It is much too complicated,鈥� says Ellison.
But the prospect of reducing today鈥檚 powerful computers to a simple information appliance was not universally welcomed or accepted. 鈥淚 disagree,鈥� says Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. 鈥淧eople want to do creative work, and that will not be possible on a dumb terminal. People want to use their own software.鈥�