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15 predictions about the Internet in 2025
Pew Research Center experts celebrated the 25th anniversary of the web with a report on the future of the Internet
Author: Olga Efimova
On March 11, Professor Jeanne Anderson and Lee Raney prepared a report on the topic “Digital Life in 2025.” This report is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Burners-Lee, a British scientist, inventor of URI, URL, HTTP and HTML.
Experts predict that the Internet will soon become like electricity: less visible, but more immersed in everyday human life. TJournal provides an excerpt from the most important part of this report.
Tim Burners-Lee
On March 12, 1989, Berners-Lee released an article on information management, architecture, and the concept of the Web. At Christmas in 1990, he had already presented the world with the code for his system - a web network that connected computer owners and provided access to their files.
To mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the web, Pew Research Center experts discussed the future of the Internet, from cybersecurity to simple human clicks.
Four general trends in Internet development
1. Global, immersive, seamless immersion into the network through gadgets, cameras, smart sensors, applications and databases that will connect the user with everything and everyone.
2. Augmented reality - portable technologies that are literally built into a person, as in Matt Damon’s Elysium.
3. Traditional business models that emerged in the 20th century will undergo modifications: first of all, we are talking about finance (bitcoins are not explicitly mentioned, but we are talking about them too), entertainment, media and education.
4. Changes in programming languages, databases, analyzers related to the processing of information of individual people and spheres of society in general.
Matt Damon's character from the film "Elysium" about the future of Earth in 2154
15 theses about the digital world of the future
1. The transmission of information will become so simple and familiar that it will cease to be noticeable. The Internet will be as integral a part of our daily lives as electricity.
2. The spread of the Internet will increase the number of people connected with each other (despite the fact that they are scattered across different continents) and reduce ignorance about life in certain countries.
3. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and large amounts of data will make people more aware of the world around them and their own behavior.
Judith Donat from Harvard University: “We will have an idea of how we spent our time, how we relate to certain hobbies, friends, family. This will change the way we treat people, relationships and much more.”
4. Augmented reality and wearable devices will help track daily life, health status and change the way you look at many familiar activities: job interviews, games and dating.
5. The Internet will help you better navigate the political situation, as well as express your political position in a softer form - that is, without beatings, burning tires and blood.
Nicole Ellison of the University of Michigan: “As more of the world's population comes online, the more people become aware of global disparities in access to health care, water, education, and human rights.”
6. The spread of “Ubernet” (global Internet) will reduce the importance of territorial boundaries. As a result, new “nations” may emerge, where people unite over interests and exist outside the boundaries of current nation-states.
David Hughes, involved in digital telecommunications since 1972: “All 7+ billion on this planet will sooner or later be connected to each other via Uber(not Inter)net. This could lead to a decrease in the control of states over the lives of citizens. When every person interacts with every other person on the planet, government control over geographic boundaries may begin to diminish.”
7. The Internet will turn into “The internet”.
David Brin, futurist: “There will be many Internets. The network within the network will take on an independent form, it will have texture, representing more space.”
Sean Mead (Interbrand): “There will be several new interconnected networks on the Internet. Some will verify identity access, and some will provide their services confidentially.”
Jan Peter (Internet activist): “The Internet will experience fragmentation. Global interaction between people will still continue, but through a series of separate channels governed by a series of protocols."
8. Internet users will be able to get more opportunities with lower costs for teachers and classroom maintenance.
Hal Varian, chief economist at Google: “The biggest impact on the world will be from universal access to human knowledge. The smartest man in the world may now be in the fields with a plow in India or China. But the involvement of this man and millions of others will make a huge difference in the development of humanity. Cheap mobile devices will be available all over the world, as will teaching aids from Khan Academy (a non-profit educational organization whose archive contains over 3,600 free micro-lectures on mathematics, history, medicine, physics, finance, chemistry, biology and many other subjects ). All this will have a huge impact on people’s education and their awareness of the world around them.”
9. The dangerous division between the haves and have-nots may widen, leading to outright violence.
According to Oscar Gandy, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in the future there will be a widening gap between people who have the opportunity to acquire better and wider access to products and information, and people who cannot afford it. Social media will only serve to open up negative sentiments, as well as provide instructions on how to resist injustice.
10. Crimes and offenders will also develop in their scope, because human nature does not change.
Cyber terrorism will become commonplace, says Lewelyn Kriel, CEO and editor-in-chief of TopEditor. Online diseases, digital criminal networks and entire organized crime groups will appear.
11. Governments will become more effective in using the Internet for political and social control.
Professor Paul Babbitt of Southern Arkansas University said that by installing certain restrictive filters, states would gain more control, and the companies developing these filters would get rich. The citizens themselves will be more than happy to receive a regulated, but more structured environment.
12. It will be more difficult to maintain their confidentiality and privacy because users will make compromises, sometimes reluctantly, in order to gain access to some important information.
13. Digital diplomacy will emerge, which will be important, for example, in information about state secrets.
14. Most people do not notice the global changes in modern communication networks, which will be destructive in the future. More and more people are losing their knack for real life. The Internet offers more social connections than humans are capable of maintaining.
15. The future of the Internet will be greatly influenced by its calculations.
Some scientists suggest rehearsing, calculating possible indicators and economic aspects of the future Internet. This will allow the changes to take place with less damage to the economy.
Gurus say
Vinton Cerf, Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, notes that the number of information sharing franchises on the Internet will increase. Business models will adapt to the economics of digital transmission and storage, and Internet voting can be used if authentication methods are truly reliable. In addition, massive open online courses (MOOCs) will become an important source of revenue.
GigaOM researcher Stowe Boyd notes: devices are the first thing we come across in the morning and the last thing we see before going to bed. We are already in a post-normal era with other rules, the rules of the web, which have not yet been completely defined, but will be defined, and they can be understood many times faster than in the industrial era. Stowe Boyd also asks an important philosophical question: “What are people for?” in the context of the existence of robots and artificial intelligence.
President EPIC Mark Rothenberg recalled the words of Thomas Edison, the meaning of which is that a person must control what he has his hand in. Rotenberg believes in a more open future Internet, less centralized control, more freedom, although he believes that US economic and political forces are moving in the opposite direction. Rotenberg's main question is: will Internet 2025 be a network of freedom and opportunity or an infrastructure for social control?
Fred Baker of Cisco Systems noted: "Security and privacy issues will be solved, but threats will not be completely eradicated, because there is always a percentage of people who want to harm someone."
According to University of Minnesota professor Andrew Chen, the Internet is dangerous because it easily spreads bad things. It is a powerful tool because it allows people to unite and is a seductive place because it provides many interesting things to a person, protecting him from the harsh reality.
Fenwick & West LLP policy analyst Andrew Bridges wrote: “The Internet will contribute to a fundamental threat to government control - the threat to freedom of speech, association and assembly due to government control; “There will be global changes regarding the main constitutional provisions aimed at protecting our physical (and not only) security, placing at the forefront new principles on issues of structure and politics, economics, and society, making the victim, that is, the user.”
The author of “Welcome to the Future Cloud - 2025 in 100 Predictions” and Dutch futurist Marcel Bullinga believes that the future will be cheap, and the main thing will not be ownership, but accessibility. That people will have problems concentrating and understanding reality and its opposite. People will want "trendhouses" - houses we don't own but subscribe to, Spotify houses, Ikea houses.
Internet Society New York President David Solomonov: “I think internet currency and 3D printing (open source of both, distributed over the web) will be controversial areas for governments and large businesses. enterprises on which mutual agreement with users can be reached through trust, but not coercion.”
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