Cornell alumnus Jay Walker, founder and chairman of Priceline.com, spoke on campus last week about how the Internet is changing our lives and what form the future is likely to take.
Priceline markets travel and consumer information to users via the Internet and allows them to name their price for goods and services they purchase, an approach that prompted Forbes magazine to dub Walker the "new age Edison."
Addressing a packed house in Kennedy Hall's David L. Call Alumni Auditorium April 13, Walker, Class of 1977, compared the Internet revolution to the development of the cerebral cortex, which surrounds the human brain and distinguishes us from other living beings.
"We are in the midst of rewiring the cerebral cortex of our civilization," he declared. "What happens when you can hear the network in your head, and it is able to talk back, when it can't be turned off or monitored, when the idea of community and distance and privacy collapse?"
He called such changes "unstoppable" and predicted that society, as we know it, will be totally altered, for better and worse, by the information architecture around us, just as it was changed by the invention of the light bulb, the automobile, the telephone and broadcast media that are ubiquitous today.
"We will need to invent new models for the new information age to create a better life for all of us," Walker said.
"Priceline is a forerunner of a pricing structure that will only be one of many," he said. "Once the network moves, we all move with it."
However, he called the challenge of shaping the Internet to society's needs "a warm-up for how we'll handle the biological age right behind us. The ability to change human nature at the genome level may prove even more insidious than the threat of nuclear annihilation in the century just past," he warned.
Walker's talk was co-sponsored by the Johnson Graduate School of Management, as part of its Park Leadership Speaker series, and the Cornell Society of Engineers, as part of its eConference@Cornell. Click here to read about the conference.
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