6 ways the Internet will impact you by 2020

By raheem

The Pew Internet Life Project released a survey earlier this year in their “Future of the Internet 2″ series that asks influential leaders about how the Internet will change and impact us by 2020. A majority of these leaders agreed on the following six points:

1. The internet will become a low-cost global network that will connect and “flatten” the world.
2. Humans will still be in charge of technology. But a significant minority of 42% also believe that humans will start losing the ability to control some of the internet technology.
3. New addictions will develop as a result of technology advances on the internet such as virtual reality. However, this will also lead to increased productivity.
4. A culture of technology “refuseniks” will emerge who will choose to live off the network. Many will do so in benign ways but some will use violence and terror against technology-inspired change.
5. We will intentionally and unintentionally lose more privacy – gaining some benefits in the process even as we lose privacy.
6. English will be a universal language of global communications, but other languages will not be displaced. Some languages like Mandarin would grow in significance.

The most troubling of the above predictions is about our eventual inability to control technology. All trends are moving towards increasing computation capability. Combine this with an increasing number of connected devices and advances in the development of the intelligent web. It is not simply a matter of technological progress, it is also the law of large numbers. Quite conceivably amongst the millions of connected devices, running billions of lines of code, the first forms of artificial intelligence could take shape. The chilling possibility would be if such an artificial intelligence took shape accidentally instead of in a planned and controlled lab.

If there is any system today that remotely resembles our brain, which itself is a network of millions of interconnected, electricity pulsating cells, the internet is it. Perhaps the internet today resembles the brain of a mouse and all it knows is to search for cheap travel tickets and transfer information. But in 13 years, might it not know more?