On October 29, 1969, a message was sent from a rather nondescript room at UCLA in Southern California to a Stanford Research Institute computer console in Menlo Park, California. It read simply “Lo,” though it was supposed to say “Login.” The system crashed before completing the task. This was the world’s first message sent via an interconnected computer network known as ARPANET. On this unassuming fall day, the modern internet as we now know it was conceived.
In the five decades since, the internet has transformed human existence. From how we wage war to how we make each other laugh, it's unfathomable how much the internet has shaped life in that short amount of time.
But what will the future of the internet look like in 50 years? How will we solve the challenges that we are currently facing around privacy and data protection? Should we be hopeful—or fearful—for our changing digital world?
We asked these questions to a variety of experts, researchers, scientists, engineers, and futurists. The answers we got back were fascinating, clarifying, and somewhat scary.
In 2019, the Pew Research Center released its own data about the future of digital life after canvassing 530 experts. Lee Rainie, director of internet and tech research at Pew, was one of the co-authors of the study. He says that the answers were eye-opening in terms of how our digital presence will come to further define our existence. “[In their responses], they talked about what the definition of a human being, literally, will be once this technology is available for our bodies and brains.”
According to our experts, that will come sooner rather than later. Within only the next quarter century, the way we search or use the internet will be considered “archaically clunky,” writes Judith Donath, who is a researcher for the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and author of the 2014 book The Social Machine. Rather, our digital presence will not be separate from the physical world, but ingrained in it.
“Gone will be keyboards, the mouse, and screens,” continues Donath.
Toby Negrin, Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Product Officer, compared the internet to electricity as it becomes an “omnipresent utility, something we expect to always be available and around us... intertwined in our daily lives.”
The world in front of us will be a mix of reality and the virtual and, at times, it will be impossible to decipher which one is which. Mike Liebhold—a senior researcher at the Institute of the Future and at Apple's Advanced Technology Lab in the 1980s—writes that, in the near future, everyone will wear augmented reality glasses and use them to interact with their environment. “Information will be displayed, floating in the air ... the web will appear in the real world, not just on glass screens.” READ MORE...
