Top Highlights

• This book describes an event that will happen someday soon: You will look into a computer screen and see reality.
• At this very instant, traffic on every street is moving or blocked, your local government is making brilliant decisions, public money is flowing out at a certain rate, the police are deployed in some pattern, there's a fire here and there, the schools are staffed and attended in some way or other, oil and cauliflower are selling for whatever in loc...
• So Mirror Worlds function in part as fire walls opposing the onslaught of chaos. But they aren't mere fire breaks. They are beer halls and grand piazzas, natural gathering places for infor- ination hunters and insight searchers. Most important, they are nai,crocosms intricate worlds come alive in small packages.
• Public policy will be forced to come to grips with the implications. So will every thinking person: A software revolution will change the way society's business is conducted, and it will change the intellectual landscape.
• But many programs today run continuously, in future most programs will, and this will become our basic way of thinking about programs: as factories, information refineries, operating day and night.