hich you will soon see in being able to
find Chinese and French documents on the Web even though you type in
English-only queries), and there is some rather rapid development of systems
that answer simple questions automatically (rather like the popular web system
AskJeeves, but this time done by computers, not humans). These systems refer to
a large collection of text to find "factiods" (not opinions or causes or chains
of events) in response to questions such as "what is the capital of Uganda?" or
"how old is President Clinton?" or "who invented the xerox process?", and they
do so rather better than I had expected.

= What do you think about e-books?

E-books, to me, are a non-starter. More even that seeing a concert live or a
film at a cinema, I like the physical experience holding a book in my lap and
enjoying its smell and feel and heft. Concerts on TV, films on TV, and e-books
lose some of the experience; and with books particularly it is a loss I do not
want to accept. After all, it's much easier and cheaper to get a book in my own
purview than a concert or cinema. So I wish the e-book makers well, but I am
happy with paper. And I don't think I will end up in the minority anytime soon
-- I am much less afraid of books vanishing than I once was of cinemas
vanishing.

= What is your definition of cyberspace?

I define cyberspace as the totality of information that we can access via the
Internet and computer systems in general. It is not, of course, a space, and it
has interesting differences with libraries. For example, soon my fridge, my car,
and I myself will be "known" to cyberspace, and anyone with the appropriate
access permission (and interest) will be able to find out what exactly I have in
my fridge and how fast my car is going (and how long before it needs new shock
absorbers) and what I am looking at now. In fact, I expect that advertisements
will change their language and perhaps even pictures and layout to suit my
knowledge and tastes as I walk by, simply by recognizing that "here comes
someone who speaks primarily English and lives in Los Angeles and makes $X per
year". All this behaviour will be made possible by the dynamically updatable
nature of cyberspace (in contrast to a library), and the fact that computer
chips are still shrinking in size and in price. So just as today I walk around
in "socialspace" -- a web of social norms, expectation, and laws -- tomorrow I
will be walking around in an addi