The Pew Internet & American Life Project asked technology stakeholders and critics to assess scenarios about the future social, political, and economic impact of the Internet, and they said the following:
- The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.
- The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
- Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
- Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
- The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who's connected, and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
- “Next-generation” engineering of the network to improve the current Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.
Read the full report The Future of the Internet III on the Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site.
Full results of the survey, including engaging quotes from hundreds of respondents and brief biographies on many of these people, can be found on the Pew Internet Project/Elon University Web site.
Visitors to the site are invited to express their own visions for the future of the internet by clicking here and clicking on the button "Share Your Prediction."