BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Gates’ Look Ahead Holds Few Surprises : THE ROAD AHEAD <i> by Bill Gates</i> ; <i> Viking</i> ; $29.95, 286 pages, includes CD-ROM; also available on audiocassette from Penguin Highbridge Audio: $16.95

In his new book, “The Road Ahead,” Bill Gates promises to lay out his vision of the future.

That’s a tantalizing offer when it comes from the nation’s richest man and arguably the computer industry’s most powerful leader.

Unfortunately, Gates is not as visionary as we might expect.

With one eye on the back mirror, reviewing the history of the personal computer, and the other on the road immediately ahead, Gates offers little new insight into the “revolution” he says will be brought about by the emerging “information superhighway.”

The Microsoft chairman’s real strength hasn’t been innovation, but rather dauntless competitiveness combined with a canny ability to select and improve upon important technologies developed by others. Most recently, Gates failed to anticipate the explosive growth of the Internet. Yet, he has now mobilized his troops to attack the new market.

This book contains no window into Gates, the man. And there is nothing about the clever way in which he cloned himself in the culture of Microsoft to create a powerful, new kind of business organization.

Instead, we get an excellent review of the technology landscape. That’s the least we should expect, with co-authors Peter Rinearson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Nathan Myhrvold, a scientist at Microsoft, doing much of the writing.

“The Road Ahead” will guide you through the alphabet soup of acronyms like ISND and ATM that will soon become a part of our daily lives. It will tell you why sending e-mail to South Africa costs no more than sending e-mail to your next-door neighbor. (It’s because users are charged based on the size of their connection to the network, not the amount of data they send or the distance it travels.)

Gates is at his best when he describes the “I-way” as the pinnacle of capitalism, a massive, worldwide department store directly linking buyers and sellers. In the new world, he suggests, commerce will permeate everything.

Gates recognizes that the high cost of developing such services require that everybody use such a system. “The Information highway is a mass phenomenon,” he writes, “or it is nothing.”

The software maven is at his most vulnerable when he looks for ways technology will tackle enduring social problems.

“We are all created equal in the virtual world, and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world,” Gates writes. He argues that improved access to information will somehow overcome economic inequality.

In the gospel according to Gates, telecommuting will help save cities by drawing people away from them and removing pressure on their infrastructure.

Crime? Gates pictures a day when there will be video cameras next to every street lamp to record everything that takes place. People will be able to lead “documented lives,” he writes, so they have videotapes to prove they are innocent of something of which they are accused. Not everyone will find this comforting.

Some may be intrigued by the electronic wallet that carries your digital money, tells you where you are and suggests a Chinese restaurant close by. Others might like the idea of “agents” that will tell you when your favorite author has published a new book. The CD-ROM that accompanies “The Road Ahead” contains slick little video clips that illustrate these and other ideas.

But even this is hardly new. You’ve probably seen a lot of it in the AT&T; commercials Gates likes to poke fun at.

If you haven’t read one of the several biographies of Gates, you might find some of the personal tidbits he has included mildly amusing. Gates says he recognized the real power of computers, for example, when he wrote a scheduling program for his school that put him in a class with mostly girls.

At age 8, he started to read a set of encyclopedias, finally stopping when he reached the Ps. He talks of virtual dating in which he watches the same film as a girlfriend living in another city and discusses it afterward on the cell phone. There’s also discussion of his new 50,000-square-foot residence now under construction on the Lake Washington waterfront.

Visitors will receive an electronic badge so as they wander around Gates’ expansive residence, lights will go on, their favorite music will follow them and any incoming phone calls will be forwarded to the nearest phone. If you ask for Mozart horn concertos once, Gates says, the house might be playing that music the next time you visit.

Is this vision?

T.S. Eliot posed the question that might be better asked of the I-way when he wrote before the dawning of the computer age: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

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Gates Set to Speak

Bill Gates will discuss “The Road Ahead” at USC’s Bovard Auditorium on Tuesday at 8 p.m. Ticket information: (213) 740-2620.