9 Ways the Internet Will Change Your Life in 2025, for Better and Worse
In honor of the 25th birthday of the
World Wide Web, the Pew Research Center recruits more than 2,000 experts try to
predict what the Web--and life--will look like some 10 years out.
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Twenty-five years ago today, Tim
Berners-Lee (now Sir Berners-Lee) wrote a paper
describing an information-management system that we would later know as the
World Wide Web. Berners-Lee released the code to make his system real on
Christmas Day, 1990.
The
rest, as they say, is history. To mark the Web’s 25th birthday, the Pew
Research Center
has been conducting a series of research projects to better understand impact
of the Web and to try to predict and prepare for its future. In collaboration
with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Project, Pew asked 2,558
handpicked experts--folks such as Hal Varian, danah boyd, Vint Cerf, and Marc
Rotenberg--to describe what the Web will look like, and how we’ll be
interacting with it, in 2025. Pew then grouped those answers into
"theses," some more positive than others.
1.
There will be added awareness of our world and our own behavior.
For this, we’ll have the Internet of
Things, artificial intelligence, and big data to thank. This awareness won’t be
limited to ourselves, though. We’ll have similar insights into other people as
well. As Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, writes: "We’ll have a picture of how someone has
spent their time, the depth of their commitment to their hobbies, causes,
friends, and family. This will change how we think about people, how we
establish trust, how we negotiate change, failure, and success."
2.
Information sharing will be so enmeshed in our daily lives that we mostly won’t
even notice it.
By 2025, the Internet will become
akin to electrical service or another utility. Says Joe Touch, director at the
University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute: "We
won’t think about 'going online' or 'looking on the Internet' for
something--we'll just be online, and just look."
3.
Wearable devices will transform health care delivery.
Wearable devices will give us not
just early detection of disease but early detection of the very risk for
disease. That will help us make lifestyle changes not only day-to-day but
hour-by-hour, "magnifying the effectiveness of an ever more understaffed
medical delivery system," says Aron Roberts, a software developer at the
University of California-Berkeley.
4.
Governments may lose control.
The Internet enables more people in
the developing world to become more aware of disparities in access to health
care, education, water, and human rights, and for everyone to become more aware
of the cost of manipulative governments. The result will be more peaceful
changes but also more public
uprisings such as the Arab Spring. "Nations" of those with shared
interests will become increasingly difficult for formal governments to
control--but we can expect them to try mightily, with new regulations and
increased monitoring.
5. The Internet will become (more)
fragmented.
In
a line that sounds right out of a 1980s science-fiction novel, David Brin, an
author and futurist, predicts: "There will be many Internets. Mesh
networks will self-form and we’ll deputize sub-selves to dwell in many
places." If you have a "work persona" on LinkedIn and use Facebook
mostly to communicate with your relatives, you already know what Brin is
talking about.
6.
Education will be available to all.
A singularly sunny prediction about
the effects of universal access to education is represented in the report by a
quote from Hal Varian, now Google’s chief economist. "The smartest person
in the world currently could well be stuck behind a plow in India or China.
Enabling that person--and the millions like him or her--will have a profound
impact on the development of the human race."
7.
Gaps between the haves and the have-nots may expand, leading to violence.
Oscar Gandy, an emeritus professor
at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, predicts "growing
inequality enabled and amplified by means of networked transactions that
benefit smaller and smaller segments of the global population." Social
media makes it easier for people to share their frustrations; it also makes it
easier for people to challenge the status quo--not necessarily peaceably.
8.
The bad guys will have new tools to make life miserable for everyone else.
Privacy and confidentiality will
become things of the past (see below). As the world becomes less safe,
terrorism and cyber-terrorism may become daily occurrences. Dirty tricks
over social media may become more influential in political campaigns. As
one antispam expert commented: "Abusers evolve and scale far more than
regular Internet users."
9.
Say good-bye to privacy.
By 2025, only the relatively
well-educated and affluent will have the ability to maintain their privacy.
Whether they will choose to do so remains to be seen.
The report closes on a positive
note, sharing a reminder voiced by many of the experts who were consulted: The
best way to predict the future is to invent it. Robert Cannon, an Internet law
and policy expert, writes: "The good news is that the technology that
promises to turn our world on its head is also the technology with which we can
build our new world. If offers an unbridled ability to collaborate, share, and
interact.... It is a very good time to start inventing the future."
BY Kimberly Weisul http://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/birthday-future-of-the-internet.html?cid=em01020week11a
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