IBM's mission to spice up corporate search and become a "Google for the enterprise" continues in earnest.

By the end of the year, Big Blue intends to release an update to its corporate information-management tools, which are designed to bring order to potentially thousands of data sources in a company's network.

Code-named Serrano, the product will use technologies including artificial intelligence and data mining to derive more meaning from corporate documents. It will also have a revamped search engine and front-end tool designed to make hunting for company information as straightforward as searching the Web, according to IBM.

Transhumanism—the practice of enhancing people through technology—sounds like science fiction. But when it arrives (and it will), it will create unique problems for CIOs.

This fall, the editors of a leading public policy magazine, Foreign Policy, asked eight prominent intellectuals to identify the single idea they felt was currently posing the greatest threat to humanity. Most of the suggestions were merely old demons: various economic myths, the idea that you can fight "a war on evil," Americaphobia and so on. Only Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, came up with a new candidate: transhumanism.

Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced individual enhancement. While it includes physical modifications (diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles), most of the interest in the technology focuses on the integration of brains and computers—especially brains and networks. Sample transhumanist apps could include cell phone implants (which would allow virtual telepathy), memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex accelerators, collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and a very long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and out of host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that, theoretically, would have no definitive nor necessary end. That is, immortality, of a sort.

While some of these abilities are clearly quite far off, others are already attracting researchers (see "Brain Gain"), and none are known (at the moment at least) to be impossible to achieve. Fukuyama obviously felt the technology was close enough at hand to write a book about it, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, the thrust of which is that society should give the whole idea a miss. His main concern was that transhumanism would place an impossible burden on the idea of equal rights, since it would multiply the number of ways of being human well past our powers of tolerance. (If we have all this trouble with something simple like skin color, just wait until some people have wings, augmented memory and reflex accelerators.)

ONE year ago, Nicholas Carr was just another 40-something junior editor at the Harvard Business Review—interested in information technology (IT), sometimes contributing as a writer, but otherwise as unknown to the outside world as such editors tend to be. Then, last May, he published a simple, jargon-free, eight-page article in the HBR, called “IT doesn't matter”. “I figured I'd ruffle a few feathers for a week or two,” he recalls.

What happened instead remains puzzling to this day, not least to Mr Carr himself. The entire trillion-dollar IT industry, it seemed, took offence and started to attack Mr Carr's argument. Chief information officers (CIOs), the people in charge of computer systems at large companies, heard the noise and told their secretaries to dig out the article and put it on their desks. Analysts chimed in. Rebuttals were rebutted. Suddenly, Mr Carr was the hottest number for anyone organising a techie conference. Within months, he was expanding the original article into a book, “Does IT matter?”, which is coming off the presses this month. Already its detractors and supporters are lining up for round two of the controversy.

Part of Mr Carr's trick, it seems, is simply choosing great titles. “IT doesn't matter” is viscerally threatening to people such as Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, a maker of fancy and expensive computers. Like other tech bosses, Mr McNealy basked in gee-whiz celebrity status during the dotcom bubble but has been spending the past three years defending Sun's relevance to suddenly sceptical customers and investors. A confident showman, he challenged Mr Carr to a debate, on stage and on webcast. It was a debacle. “Sun does matter,” Mr McNealy seemed to be arguing, or even “I still matter.” Even Mr Carr's critics in the audience wondered whether Mr McNealy had actually bothered to read the article.

And this is the other explanation for Mr Carr's great impact. His argument is simple, powerful and yet also subtle. He is not, in fact, denying that IT has the potential to transform entire societies and economies. On the contrary, his argument is based on the assumption that IT resembles the steam engine, the railway, the electricity grid, the telegraph, the telephone, the highway system and other technologies that proved revolutionary in the past. For commerce as a whole, Mr Carr is insistent, IT matters very much indeed.

The popular view is that expanded use of the Internet by consumers is the chief cause of growing crime figures. But James Van Dyke, a research analyst for Javelin Strategy, told TechNewsWorld that using the Internet for banking and paying bills actually reduces the threat of identity theft and banking fraud.

James Van Dyke had a hunch last year that the commonly held belief that the Internet was causing an increase in identity theft and credit card fraud was not valid. Extensive research he conducted debunks many of the myths about the correlation between online activity and ID theft.
Contrary to popular opinion, Van Dyke, a research analyst for Javelin Strategy and Research, found that using the Internet for bill paying and banking can reduce risk by up to 18 percent and potentially save consumers up to 60 hours of personal time and US$1,100 in the cost of paper checks and postage.