Good morning everyone. My speech is about Death, Time, Truth, and the Known Universe. I will cover these topics in less than 15 minutes.

I must admit that I was a bit surprised to see Question 15 on this Spring Quarters’ Master's Exam, which begins something like this: You have been selected as a representative of students graduating from an accredited masters program this year and are scheduled to make a keynote speech and continues: a speech on the topic of "Identifying and Solving the Three Worst Problems of the Information Age."

I knew that someone had written this question just for me. God knows that I excel at identifying problems (regardless of whether they exist or not), and that I am not the kind of person that shies away from pointing them out, and suggesting a wide array of solutions. This just seems to be the way I operate.

However, I ended up writing on Internet Filtering, a topic which, luckily for you, I will not harrangue us on at this moment. Which leaves "The Three Worst Problems of the Information Age" still available as a topic for this speech.

Let me then briefly identify the Three Worst Problems of the Information Age:

I think that we can all take some comfort from knowing that these are in fact the 3 worst problems of any age, be it the Elizabethan, Industrial, Bronze, or our own. And it is perhaps illustrative that it’s not too far fetched to imagine some Egyptian Librarian standing before her colleagues telling them that these are the 3 big issues of her day; and it certainly doesn’t seem to be a stretch to imagine some Middle Ages monk standing before his fellow Brother-Librarians saying the exact same thing. Hunger, Cruelty, Death. Some 3000 years of recorded human culture and we’re not too much further along. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic about this, rather I’m interested creating an historical frame around the "3 worst problems of the information age."

Because Hunger, Cruelty and Death make "information overload" sound like a picnic. They make 10,000 hits on an Altavista search sound like an opportunity, and they make the consolidation of publishing businesses into the corporate-owned military-entertainment complex seem like a frivolous and paranoid fantasy.

What can we as information workers do about Hunger, Cruelty and Death? Not a whole heck of a lot, I’m afraid. What can we as people do about Hunger, Cruelty and Death? I would say -- Quite a bit. Once again, luckily for all of us, I will not now barrage you all with suggestions about how you can make the world a better place, nor bend your ear on how to be a socially conscious and responsible citizen. I do urge us, however, to always place our professional practice inside our larger and not occasionally problematic culture. That is to say, I urge us to have some perspective.

It’s still before 1a0a and I've said the word "Death" eight times now, for which I apologize. I wanted to get Death out of the way at the beginning of the speech, and I promise that it only makes one more haunting appearance in the text.

I'd like to discuss one of my new heroes. His name is Danny Hillis, and as a child he made a working computer out of tinkertoys, then in the early 1980s, he invented the massively parallel processing computer at the annoying age of 28. This was a computer that worked 1000 times faster than any other computer, and did so utilizing a system that had occurred to many other people but had been disregarded as impossible.

This, however, this is not why I admire him. In an article in Wired by Po Bronson entitled "the long now" (v.6, issue 5, May 1998, pages 116-123 and 167-174), we learn that Hillis is now employed by the Disney Corporation. This is a guy who, instead of having business cards printed up, he re-sequences DNA to encode it with his contact information, then hands out little vials of it instead of cards. So you know he's going to be working on something wayyyyy out there. And indeed he is. The Disney guys aren’t exactly sure what to do with him. He's inventing something called the Millenium Clock. His goal is to make a monumental clock that will start ticking on Jan 1, 2001 and run until the year 12,000. To design something that will operate 10,000 years in the future, Hillis determined that he could not use any of today's volatile and fragile technologies. So he turned to Bronze Age materials -- giant stone wheels, pendulums, metals and the sun -- and he is well on his way to achieving his goal.

The central problem that he's tackling is this: current thinking about technology is bound up in what he calls the "3 Year Limit." The premises of the 3 year limit problem are these: that 1) problems that take longer than 3 years to solve are thought of as "effectively unsolvable"; and 2) that people don't like to work on unsolvable projects. And so the problems remain (Hunger, Cruelty, Death). Hillis' project goes to an extreme length to point out the problems of short-term thinking, and in my mind, forces one to pull back to a new perspective. And there’s that word again.

I started this speech wanting to make some grand pronouncement about the future. Unfortunately, I seem to have painted myself into a corner. So far I've suggested that the future is irrelevant, or at best it is short-sighted to expend much energy thinking about it. Still, it doesn’t seem right to leave us all without some sort of authoritative vision of what our lives will be like. So here it comes:

A friend of mine in Kansas City is an astrologer. I asked him to do a chart for the whole class, thinking that this was an unusual request. He assured me that businesses ask for this type of service all the time. Our birth date was figured out to be the first day of Autumn Quarter 1996, so effectively this is the chart for the average us which -- when you mush us all together -- works out to be a 19 month old mixed-race hermaphrodite from Seattle with a Master's degree.

Here, then are the results.

He reports that Mercury, which deals with communications, books and most likely library science is in Virgo. Virgo is the head critic of the zodiac and gives us a very strong sense of organization and logic -- ideal for librarians is his guess. Virgo is entirely in the 9^th house -- the house of education and higher learning.

As far as wealth and money, Capricorn (the slow steady climber) rules the 2^nd house and Jupiter (expansion and good fortune) is located there. We should expect wealth through traditional means -- hard work -- as opposed to the lottery or gambling, and monetary success, a good deal of it, through structured organizations like corporations, the government, large universities. He says "I'm thinking 401Ks, stock options, and retirement plans will be key, Capricorn is slow to accumulate, but is successful when it comes to time, old age and the long term."

He notes that a conjunction of Neptune (which rules imagery) and Uranus (which rules anything electronic) might inspire many of us to manage electronic databases, catalogue graphic information, or develop on-line, computer based library systems. The Sag rising and Jupiter in the 2^nd house might also indicate work in the legal fields, or a strong sense of justice.

And now, the bad news: Our Moon is conjunct with Saturn in Aries opposite the Sun. Which means: The moon, one's emotional state, in Aries tends to lead to hot tempers, but Saturn probably keeps this in check (smoldering in a way) and in opposition to the Sun would lead to a lot of career frustrations, not getting the emotional satisfaction, or recognition, not being promoted fast enough. It’s always something.

I asked him about our Romantic lives. He suggested that Geminis would make good matches for us, and that we had exhibitionist tendencies that could get us in trouble with the law.

He concludes: "This is an excellent chart for a group of library science students, and indicates that their education will carry them far, especially in the long-term."

Is he smooth or what?

Do I believe all this? There was definitely a time where I would have laughed this off, as it doesn’t really fit into my rationalist worldview. I wonder now, though, if it doesn’t offer access to a perspective that I had ruled out. Don’t get me wrong I'm not about to start screening my boyfriends to see if they are Geminis. But nor am I running out to buy that videophone that’s been promised for so long. Who has access to The Truth? Who has access to The Future? Not me.

If there's one thing that I've learned in this program, it's that one person's life-changing valuable source is another person's propagandistic garbage. The crazy ideas of some turn out to change the world. The issue again is perspective.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak here.

Go forth, prosper, do the right thing, read a few good books, eat some good food, and live righteous lives.

Thank You.