Imagine a future in which passengers on a subway stare into screens for a few minutes - and earn as much money in that time as their respective skills and stations allow.
New projects like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and LiveOps are making the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace. Zittrain discusses a future in which human computing is ubiquitous and nearly any mental act can be bought and sold.
Bio
Amanda Congdon
Amanda Congdon was the co-producer and host of a weekly vidcast for ABC. She has an independent videoblog, Starring Amanda Congdon. She is also co-president of Oxmour Entertainment along with Mario Librandi and was the host of Amanda Across America before it concluded.
However, she is probably best known for hosting the daily news show Rocketboom, which she hosted and produced until 23 June 2006.
Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and a faculty co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School. He is the author, most recently, of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It; and co-editor of the book Access Denied.
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982–83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (seechat). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
His point about the turks is off base. Exploitation of labor is in most every industry offline and online. It is not a result of the internet, but it is nice to hear it brought up so people will be aware of the human rights issue.
When you say that you want to stop the future of the internet I think you mean you want to stop the relinquishment of personal control over your personal computer.
You used an example of grandma losing control on the computer but, frankly, I don't think full control of a computer can ever be achieved unless you fully understand it which is in the realm of UNIX people, geeks and hackers.
A desktop computer which is the wizard of computing is not necessary for game maching, for example, or a refrigerator. A refrigerator does not have to run a random .exe file. It only has to run stabalize_temperature.exe so your fear of someone rogue taking grandma's refrigerator is paranoia.
The future of the internet is controlled computing by limiting computing to a specific task as the Amazon Kindle is an example. The Kindle uses the internet but the internet cannot use the Kindle.
What can use a consumer is the power at the other end of the internet. That relationship between you and someone else has been the raison d'etre of man's existence. If Amazon is going to abuse its end of its relationship with you then you have to fight back like man has against all opressors in history: WAR.
Phenomenal discussion! I'm not in any hurry to become a bull being led around by a nose ring.
The danger that all this cheap IT poses to individual liberty appears not to be small. I hope individuals can control it, but that does seem at all apparent.
Eternal vigilance, indeed, is the price of liberty. I'll wager that it'll help to be a little (or maybe a lot) over-the-top in defending it, too.
member. 
