The future is very close: the Internet with a speed of 1 gigabit per second is already working, and it will change the world of computers, phones and household appliances beyond recognition. All prerequisites for this are ready

At the turn of the 2000s, while preparing to film his sci-fi neo-noir Minority Report, director Steven Spielberg gathered experts from various fields of knowledge and set them the task of imagining the world of 2054. Spielberg was depressed by the usual sci-fi environment of futuristic cities and starships, he wanted something new and more realistic. The resulting world was more important than the plot itself, but not so different from ours. People lived in the same houses, wore the same clothes, but transparent touch interfaces and 3D projections of targeted advertising reigned everywhere, and cars drove by themselves while their drivers talked via video conference.

There was no need to wait for 2054: ten years after the premiere, many revolutionary “features” are already ready. No, no one’s eyes have been transplanted in underground clinics, and the police don’t know how to predict murders—the plot turned out to be more fantastic than the world invented for it. But Google and Facebook are already battling each other for the targeted advertising market, and since the iPhone came out, touch interfaces have become the norm. Controls without any buttons at all, even virtual ones? Siri and Kinect are not yet as perfect as we would like, but on the whole they work. Transparent touch screens? Developers from Samsung have already shown a “smart window” that is recharged from the sun and looks like a large tablet built into the window opening. You can flip through Internet pages, looking through them at the street, or you can close the window with virtual blinds.

And in the summer, the Japanese company Fujitsu presented its prototype of an Android smartphone with a transparent double-sided touch screen - its size and resolution are still small (only 320x240 pixels with a 2.5-inch diagonal), but this is just the beginning.

Surely this is just the beginning: not so long ago, Sergey Brin said that Google cars, which do not need a driver, have already driven 500,000 test kilometers without accidents. Brin was wearing a prototype of augmented reality glasses at that moment. However, behind all these spectacular things, it is easy to miss what should set all the Minority Report machinery in motion - and this is also a Google project.

Google Fiber is a very radical gesture, although at first glance it looks quite simple. The search giant launched Internet speeds of 1 GB per second in the Kansas City metropolitan area. This summer, all the necessary infrastructure was created, and from mid-November subscribers were able to use the service. For $70 a month, city residents get 1 TB of Google Drive cloud storage for files and Internet that is 200 times faster than the US average. HDTV and 2TB storage cost an additional $50. To manage the service, the company gave away Nexus 7 tablets, although you could also get a Chromebook for an additional fee .

At first glance, this connection speed is excessive for the average user and cheap gigabit Internet is more suitable for young startups, some of which have already begun to move to Kansas City. But everything is not quite like that, and, acting as a provider, Google works primarily for its ecosystem , which, unlike its competitors, is in no way tied to hardware.

By significantly increasing the data transfer speed, the company is making not a quantitative, but above all a qualitative leap. The emergence of the Internet became a threat to physical media, the increase in speed doomed them to die (it’s quite funny to remember that in the mid-2000s there was a serious debate about which format was better - Blu-Ray or HD-DVD; after a couple of years, both became irrelevant) . A further increase in speed calls into question the need for digital distribution: why buy something and store it on an SSD drive if you can use streaming services? And if the speed is increased the way Google did, then the question becomes even more radical: why have a full-fledged computer if it is more convenient to store data in the cloud, use web services, and run the same games not on your own hardware, but on a server that is located on the other side of the world (the creators of the nearly bankrupt gaming service OnLive seem to have unsuccessfully anticipated their time).

This logic of cloud computing for ordinary users justifies the so far stripped-down Chromebooks and, at first glance, even suggests that future devices should resemble the Apple TV set-top box, which in its first version resembled a small computer, and later lost its hard drive, but acquired a mobile processor like the iPhone 4S and some flash memory for data caching. But this is not at all true, although it seems tempting to imagine smartphones, tablets and augmented reality glasses as something like an advanced Wii U gamepad . It is unlikely that ultra-fast Internet and cloud computing will cancel the progress of individual devices, but they can lead it along a different, parallel path.

If the power of a device ceases to be a critical factor, then it can be seriously reduced in price, as can be seen in the example of Chromebooks. Or you can change its usual form, for example, greatly reducing it (as happened with Apple TV), or integrating new functions where it was difficult to imagine them. And all this opens up possibilities.

Modern Apple or Microsoft clouds are half-hearted, they link separate devices, blur their functions, but do not unite them: your laptop is still a laptop in the end, and a smartphone is a smartphone. What if your electronic assistant with artificial intelligence will be everywhere - in the refrigerator, in the washing machine, on the TV, in the car, in the smartphone - and at the same time nowhere, on that same remote server? What if your entire home is smart and, while you are working, the cloud service itself will calculate how much food you have and how to use electricity and water more economically?

This doesn’t seem so surprising: Samsung, which, with the help of Google, had already captured the phone market, introduced this year a smart refrigerator that itself can surf the Internet (integration with Google services is just a stone’s throw away). The Korean technological monster is not at all embarrassed that the difference between electronics and household appliances will soon be erased - why should this bother us? After all, in 2054, Tom Cruise’s character didn’t think about the hardware built into the devices, but simply asked: “Upper light.” And the light came on.

How ultra-high-speed Internet will change the whole world