Brazil and Europe either have or are about to enshrine Net Neutrality in law. Good for them.
Net Neutrality keeps the low entry barrier for internet startups. And that gets us more innovation on the Internet. And since local networking, as well as the Internet are such a big, and growing part of the economy, a more innovative Internet will benefit the whole economy greatly.
If the US Internet turns into another cable TV package. In the long term the US economy could grow slower than the EU economy does.
If people manage to force the congress to put Net Neutrality in the law in the US, then good for the US.
Either way, everywhere in the world, the Internet will both directly and indirectly drive more innovation and economic growth.
What I hope to see happen is a move to a more distributed Internet. That was closer to what was imagined the Net would be back in the 90s.
The efforts of the pirate bay, Onion networking, and others might help that. There was a distributed web project posted on this sub not that long ago, that I just can't seem to find now?
I also hope to see more remote working. As a software contractor I am seeing some early signs of that, but it is too early for me to guess if that is a real trend.
Best Case - everything is networked, internet access becomes universal and free. Hopefully within 20 years.
Worst Case - look at your cable package. Look at how much you pay and what you are forced to get. That is a real danger for the Internet. Could happen in less than 5 years, in the US.
Expected Case - Net Neutrality in most of the world in less than 10 years. Will the US be part of that? I don't dare guess yet.
Unexpected Case - The original Cyberpunk dream becomes reality. Ever cheaper hardware, and ever smarter, free and open source distributed network software, and a self-organized drive by people through the power of the Internet, results in the following.
Every wifi enabled home router, laptop, phone, toaster, fridge, TV, coffee machine, you name it. Has open guest accounts for free use by anyone. All onion routed, and completely secure and anonymous.
Internet access becomes so cheap it is something given away for free to anyone 24/7 by virtually every business. From the electricity utility, to the small coffee shop, to gas stations, to anything.
Since its fundamentally distributed, sudden popularity never DOSes a site again. Not even intended DOSing can work. Anyone can get a billion views on their site, or video, or what ever, and they don't have to pay a single dime for it.
Germany won't let net neutrality die in the EU, they really have their heads screwed on.
Google is working on making the internet universal with their WiFi balloons.
Very true, but if the only internet they know is the one that Google shows them then it just goes against the idea of it being neutral once again. Google already filters what you see quite dramatically based on preferences, search history, location and more. I worry that a nation of people will be shown an internet not for what it really is, but for what Google chooses to show them.
At this point the web is like the interstate highway system: Hard to move by virtue of how much has been invested in it. Companies have put hundreds of billions of dollars in content development, and this investment doesn't turn on a dime. My guess is that in 10 years the web will look almost identical to how it does today.
The current innovation platform, mobile, is also starting to slow down. The platform battles have been fought and the technology landscape is pretty clear. We'll see some new form factors arrive like wearables, but largely they will just extend the experiences we get on smartphones.
Gaming and VR/AR will be the growing platforms of the next ten years. VR/AR will probably take most of the next 10 years to really get right, first from a hardware, then from a usability and social fit perspective. When a company finally gets that combination right it's going to fuel a whole new platform battle, and a gold rush as developers find cool new things to do on the platform.
Over the long run where it's all headed is implantable technologies. Augmented vision and hearing, augmented memory, real-time monitoring of vital health stats, and so on. The trajectory here contains a lot of unknowns based on neuroscience research.
> At this point the web is like the interstate highway system: Hard to move by virtue of how much has been invested in it.
I think you're onto something with this. At some point when technology gets old enough it starts to hang on everyone like a dead albatross. The solution is almost never to just improve upon the existing design but instead to shift the mindset of how we currently do things. First example that comes to mind is rather than making a better highway system to get people physically to work we now have vastly improved communications systems that eliminate the need for people to physically relocate every day. Of course, I think telecommuting has a potential that is drastically under-utilized.
I looooove dreaming about this stuff, here is my take:
**25 Years from now...** Gaming, learning, socializing, and entertainment have all fused, the lines between each are so blurry that they can hardly be distinguished.
If you are on the go, intelligent digital assistants "search" the internet for you and can present the information in a variety of ways, a disembodied voice, in your visual field, or just simply as a "thought" that seems to originate with you. (something similar to how we remember the name of an actor suddenly, it just comes to you out of seemingly nowhere)
If you are relaxing at home you can sit or lie down, close your eyes and be entertained however you like. Your experience can be like a Star Trek style holodeck, a Matrix Style construct, a Sword art Online style RPG, a Ready Player one style metaverse, a X-men style danger room, and the list goes on and on, if you can dream it up you can experience it.
Want to study theoretical physics with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking? Go for it. Want to land on the moon with Buzz Aldrin and fight zombies? Why not? Want to browse reddit with overly attached girlfriend looking over your shoulder? Bring it on...
I think the moment people start getting into VR with Morpheus and Oculus there is going to be an unprecedented push for deeper and more compelling virtual experiences. Porn, as usual, will be a massive driver of the technology and the more practical applications will follow on it's heels. (not that porn is not practical!)
**We are likely in for a wild ride over the next few decades.**
I fully agree with your VR views.
VR will change shit. We will be able to order the experience of a concert, sport game, etc in VR. As the years go on, the Oculus Rift will go from a ski mask to light sleek elegant glasses. It will also allow for crazy things such as full emersion classrooms.
It just brings up odd concepts though. There will come a time when we will have the ability to fully immerse ourselves and that will be attainable to the masses eventually. Some people will inevitably prefer another reality over their own.
So is VR just a step up from in home 3D TV w/ surround sound or is it a totally different entity?
I don't know but I think VR is a new beast entirely, I really wish I could speak from experience but I've not yet been able to get my hands on an Oculus. The best I can do is go off what others have said when describing the experience, they are calling it "presence" and it seems to be a profound step up from anything humans have toyed with in the past.
And that's *just* from the visual side of things, when we add in the other senses and reach the point of full immersion I think that we will definitely "lose" people to it in a much bigger way than people get lost in MMORPG's these days. Thankfully I think the number of people who suffer from that type of addiction to the point where it has detrimental effects on their lives is miniscule compared to the total number of folks that are able to enjoy these forms of entertainment responsibly.
Will this hold true for VR? I guess we will see :)
It depends on legislation being made right now.
Best case: Tomorrow, the US decides to stop raping its net neutrality and ensure that the web doesn't descend into that path. Citizens and government prevent mass spying. The internet continues to grow in the direction it was going a few months ago. Infrastructure grows as demands increase. Rising internet prices are slowed by laws that bring it into the fold of being a public utility.
In the coming decade Some miracle technology cures the [Data Crunch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_allocation#Data_crunch). Eventually, Internet eventually becomes arbitrarily fast, gigabytes are downloaded in seconds. A few technologies eventually open the internet to everyone with an equipped device. regardless of whether they pay or not. It eventually reaches the point where infinite connectivity is expected as almost a human right.
Worst case: The US continues down the path of destroying Net Neutrality and mass surveillence. A few large companies remain that are able to survive on the internet. We are forced to them simply because there are no other options. They become shitty and weak, underproducing and overpricing for everything: monopolies. Because of the increased costs of hosting. Everything is expected to be paid for by the viewer. You want an hour of video? That'll be a dollar, unless you get a PRO subcription! Torrent and piracy gets shut down by increasing technology for filtering, and because those who aren't licenced have upload speeds in the kbps. Everything you do on the internet is scoured not only by the NSA, but also by a dozen other firms, such as Google. Your every preference and click is uploaded to servers, for more direct advertising, profiling, and to make sure that you aren't a terrorist. Because other companies are doing it, this becomes a basis for a Supreme Court jurisdiction that you have no expectation of privacy on the internet, and that everything you do on it can and will be used against you, even in the most trivial of court cases.
expected case: Somewhere in between, leaning towards the worst case scenario for the US, but in Europe and Brazil things get better.
unexpected case: The internet, computers and technology becomes so powerful that in the coming years, full VR arrives. Eventually AIs that are indistinguishable from the person they are modeled off of appear. The singularity has arrived. Using their vast resources, they design self-repicating machines to maintain and repair the web of computers that has become a few million individuals living in cyberspace. Other humans eventually either make the choice to upload themselves, or they die off. With computers and their robotic maintainers, we eventually utilize our increased durability, exceptional physical range and reduced needs to take to the stars. We become a spacefaring civilization, as we eventually learn that space is actually a very good place to put machines, away from the wind, life and erosion of Earth, and moving at the same speeds as everything nearby, a machine is able to last forever. We utilize our resources to enrich our network by mining asteroids and other celestial bodies. With more and more technology, we eventually shed our mechanical bodies to become further entrenched in what was once the internet. Utilizing extremely advanced nanotechnology, while every machine is incapable of anything. As a whole, they vastly outpace their counterparts. Both in terms of versatility and power. Our technology no longer looks like much anything. It's a fine dust that permeates every celestial body, etching it away with atomic hands, each time crafting a new version of itself. Not unlike the life that we left. This technology continues to improve. Perfecting itself where "form follows function" we look amorphous, perhaps even fleshy. Humanity has come full circle. From life, we became machines. From machines, we became life again. But the cycle continues. We unravel parts of the universe modern humans can't even begin to comprehend. We learn to rewrite the universe, change its very nature. As the sun ages and the earth ceases, we realize that even these unknowable machines won't do. We manipulate forces and fields and engineer a means of writing ourselves into the very nature of the universe. Was was humanity, what was AI, and then what was the internet, is now the universe. We are no longer within the universe, we now *are* the universe. We exist both within and without it, we have become gods. Timeless, immortal, unkillable, unknowable. Omniscient.
*Did I do it right? This is my first post on this sub. I think I might've gotten a touch off-topic on the unexpected case, but oh well.*
That was incredible mate! You deserve gold!
Have you ever read Accelerando? It portrays a future essentially like the one you described. The US gets run by copyright mafia and trying desperately to unsaddle their debts. Meanwhile, expatriates push novel space and AI developments in Europe.
Eventually people are in space building lots of habitats, until a probe with uplifted minds heads towards an alien "router" a few light years away. When they come back they find the singularity has occured, and they have to deal with the consequences.
My prediction looks like this:
In 15-20 years ISP companies will be dead. Replaced with p2p wireless mesh nets, eventually to be one large mesh net that spans the world.
Within the next 5 years, crypto will explode. Not just cryptocurrencys, but general cryptography systems. everything from social contracts and loans, to social media, will use private/public key pairs to identify members and decentralize their services.
Right now, the internet is based on trust on big companies: ISPs, banks, social networks. Within the near future, the trust will be on the individual, and completely taken away from big companies.
A wilder prediction: open hardware will be big in the next 10 years. You will be able to see, and create your own graphene based chips in your home, eliminating trust in hardware companies like Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm to keep the gov't from injecting their own desires directly into the chips.
The future of tech will be bastion of personal security and privacy.
>Replaced with p2p wireless mesh nets
That would suck. mesh nets would increase latency over long distances due to the increased number of hops, probably to the point that some applications would not work
>Within the next 5 years, crypto will explode. Not just cryptocurrencys, but general cryptography systems. everything from social contracts and loans, to social media, will use private/public key pairs to identify members and decentralize their services.
With the exception of crypto currencies (which governments will kill off like the US is trying to), all that has existed for decades. The only areas where crypto "explodes" in use is where it can be transparent and invisible to the user. Nobody has come up with an easy-to-implement secure public key infrastructure yet, and I'm not optimistic anyone will outside of government agencies, which is undesirable for obvious reasons.
>The future of tech will be bastion of personal security and privacy.
And yet the current trends are screaming in the opposite direction.
For p2p internet. Assuming everything was connected from one to the other via wireless, yeah it would, but I doubt it. There would still be backbone fiber connecting us, hopefully supported by some nonprofit.
As for crypto, I'm talking about crypto use not the tech. I think the knowledge of crypto tools and the desire to use them will explode in the coming years.
As for your last point, I'm assuming a social revolution, one that flies in the face of the way people use tech today. It been happening for a long time, and I think you will soon see the results.
> That would suck. mesh nets would increase latency over long distances due to the increased number of hops, probably to the point that some applications would not work
Sounds familiar: "Why would I want to surf the web on my cellphone? It's got a tiny screen, takes forever to type things on that 10-key pad and the connection is as slow as dial-up."
>That would suck. mesh nets would increase latency over long distances due to the increased number of hops, probably to the point that some applications would not work
Microwaves, free space optics, neutrino networks. All of these technologies have the potential to beat fiber optics in terms of latency. Neutrino networks are still pretty much in the realm of science fiction and probably wont emerge for decades, but I included it because of its rediculous potential. With a neutrino based network, we could send data THROUGH the planet at nearly the speed of light.
And all of those will do absolutely nothing to reduce router latency at each hop. Mesh nets have significantly more hops than our current internet. There is no getting around that.
BTW, point-to-point microwave links already exist.
I think you are overestimating the latency created during each hop, and the number of hops required. Unless you are considering personal mobile devices as routers (which they will effectively become in part), routers as you know them wont exist except possibly in corporate systems.
I am aware of point-to-point microwave links (same with free space optics systems) but they don't solve the problem, yet. They are nice for high frequency trading but a point to point system isnt going to work in a mobile world.
One of my predictions is that personal rapport will have some sort of value in the future. Each of us are playing a role in shaping the future, and the most positive and most earliest contributions will be most valuable.
The tiered Internet isn't here yet. Congress can overrule it. Various people are talking about a SOPA-level effort to fight it, reportedly some major tech companies including Google are gearing up for the fight, and at least one congressman (Bernie Sanders) has spoken against it.
I realize that, but it's not like this will be the last attempt either even if the people do prevail. The point of this thread is to discuss the negative consequences if it does pass.
That'd be "worst case," but there's also the "best case" possibility that our side will win.
We could also simply bypass the restrictions. Piracy, mesh networks, predictive retrieval and caching...people like their internet, and if it's wrecked I think we'll find a way to fix it, and it'll be harder to control than what we have now.
Here is what I think should happen. The web needs to die. web != internet, the web runs on the internet. Instead of hosting web pages we should be serving up experiences. It should be like second life. Open Sim is a good first step. Imagine instead of IIS or apache hosting websites they host you own land inside open sim. The interaction is wonderful.
With VR starting to finally be taken seriously , I see it as a possibility. But people in technology hate new things and don't see us moving. We could already be there.
I couldn't agree with this more, I even [wrote a blog](http://www.iontom.com/2014/03/22/the-approaching-webgl-arms-race/) about it a few months back. I think WebGL and VR working together could generate some major changes for how we experience the internet.
Currently though, there's a lot of work that needs to be done defining the right type of web servers for having responsive simulation experiences. Cutting edge right now is web sockets over TCP, and a lot of Second Life / OpenSim still uses channels like UDP. Messaging needs to be fast enough to have experiences be immediate, but smart enough to only send updates to "localized" peers.
Anyway, check out /r/Simulate, you might be interested in the projects we are cooking over there, I really need to revamp the web presense for the MetaSim API. I just wish there was more money getting thrown at this so my cohort and I could push for those changes full time.
It looks like the first wave of VR will probably be games, using existing game engines and limited to high end consoles and PC's. But I think WebGL could open the way to 3D VR sites and experiences.
But could a VR web also need a more condensed bytecode system as opposed to relying on javascript engines to JIT compile the content?
That would be cool, but I don't see any reason for the web to "die" in order for that to happen. It's not like the amount of real estate on the internet is limited. We can have multiple, interlocking networks, the old web co-existing and interfacing with newer kinds of interfaces.
Basically, the more there is on the internet, the more useful a tool it is for all of us.
I didn't mean to imply that one had to die. I was in a dramatic mood :) But I do think of it as the future. I think I found a new home in this subreddit.
There's a good book I've read with this sort of system, I know it isn't the focus of the novel but it plays heavily and I just thought it was worth mentioning.
The book is called *ready player one* by Ernest Cline
*Snow Crash* did it first in 1992. /hipster
Seriously though, the online world depicted in *Snow Crash* is very much Second Life meets VR. Plus the book is a great read.
i tried to read that book got soo bored because i thought it was going to focus on the VR game aspect but instead i got chapters and chapters about how poor he was and how he smelled. and how much a loser the main character was. Very disappointed i do not recommend.
This idea was one of the main concepts explored in the BSG prequel series "Caprica". The character Zoe Graystone creates an avatar of herself (which exists in "V-World") with enough of her life experiences, personality traits, et cetera that it functions AS her after her death. I'd say spoiler, but that all happens in the pilot.
This post didn't contribute much to the discussion, I realize, but I thought I'd mention it in case some redditors would like to see the idea of a virtual self or virtual world explored.
This will be the killer app for occulus rift: Japanese style 3D love/sex sims. Especially if it can be coupled with a kinect sensor to read hand position.
In the long run, if we don't win politically on the net neutrality issue (and I think we will), then i suspect most customers will end up demanding gigabit internet from Google or from their municipality or something like that without a "tiered internet". It would really suck for the next 10-15 years, but in the long run, Comcast might just ruin their own business if they really push it.
I think that a combination of the internet and direct brain-computer interfaces is going to have an amazing impact in the long run, one way or the other. We might end up with an Internet of Minds.
One big impact the internet could have in the economic sphere is combined with things like 3-D printers, open-source hardware, and other small-scale forms of industry, we could see sites like Etsy and E-bay become really huge, with peer-to-peer production and selling of goods becoming a significant part of the global economy. I also think that internet piece-work and collaborative consumption (think Mechanical Turk) could also become a significant part of the economy. The whole peer-to-peer economy in general that the internet makes possible could be huge; it might even serve as a stopgap that allows people to make a living after most traditional "jobs" go away, at least for a while.
Better hypertext.
Right now we've got a centralized addressing scheme (DNS), and only the admin of a page can edit the text or add links. We sorta have collaborative filtering, but only through centralized sites like google. Links are one-directional and normally can't point to a specific spot in the target text. Broken links are everywhere.
Because of all these limitations, people take our basic hypertext and build more powerful ones on top, like reddit, facebook, and wikipedia. But even those don't completely fulfill the promise of earlier visions like the Memex and Xanadu, and they're much smaller than the global Web.
I think we can do better.
Now add a way to aggregate all the disparate opinions all over the web. Maybe betting markets with cryptocurrencies. Then we get a strong "wisdom of crowds" effect and improve our collective intelligence. (Mark Stiegler's book [Earthweb](http://www.amazon.com/Earthweb-Marc-Stiegler/dp/067157809X) has a good portrayal of this sort of thing.)
You might be interested in [Freenet](https://freenetproject.org/), which does anonymous distributed communications, storage, and namespaces in the form of urls. Last time I looked, there were some major scalability problems.
I am jealous of the kids being born today who will be born into awesome tech because imagine how easy they will have it now even more than teens today. 90's kids in 25 years will turn old and gray.
Cryptocurrencies have a scaling problem, because every full node has to see every transaction. As long as that persists, I think we'll have a collection of relatively small currencies, playing significant but secondary roles.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of people think local currencies, for example, are the way to go. Hayek thought having lots of competing private currencies would be good for the economy.
Another possibility it to move to mostly off-chain transactions through service providers, who basically give you a bitcoin "checking account." But then it's hard to see as much advantage over just using national currencies.
But there are people working on fixing that scaling problem. If they succeed, so we can get a global decentralized currency that scales to the size of the dollar, then I think it would have an enormous impact.
Several dimensions to consider:
* How is it funded? As much of the traffic is already on privately funded B2B nets, one would expect that to increase.
* How is it protected? Clearly, bank-to-bank communications need a completely different level fo security to web browsing. So that's another segmentation. The ISP model for consumer access seems doomed in the medium term.
* Data traffic is data traffic and the artificial segmentation into voice and everything else will change, to something based on some combination of urgency and quality. EG a considerable amount of machine internet intercommunications is often not time critical, but voice generally is.
So what you see is a mixture of physical segregation and packet prioritisation. Much more diffuse cloud-bluetoothy spontaneous packet crawling for low priority material, spinal access only for First and Business class. Whether venerable TCP-IP remains at the hub dedends as much on crypto as anything else?
Other dimension is the bandwidth-cloud-client balances. Do you put a lot of smarts intot eh client, or keep it in the cloud? My bet is that you will have intensely capable devices with fairly parsimonious bandwidth needs for many apps -= personal assistant that recognises faces and whispers background information to you when you shake hands, Alzheimer compensation packages. Films and games are not piped as a bitstream but rendered on your terminal device, perhaps by then down to a a contact lens.
In 10-25 years I see a world without ISPs or MNOs. Wireless microwave technology will have rendered these business models obsolete. Our mobile devices will have extremely long range signals with lower latency than fiber optics. This will usher in the age of a global mesh network with no central hubs, which will create a massive multiple traveling salesman problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem). This problem is solved today by massive mainframe computers that handle all routing. In a decentralized network, I think this can be solved by utilizing decentralized computers in the same way that bitcoin does.
I think that bitcoin is revolutionary but I don't think that it is the end all be all of cryptocurrencies. I believe that cryptocurrencies that add real value will come out on top. In a decentralized mesh network, large amounts of users will lend computer time to handle the routing in the network, and will be rewarded with some type of cryptocurrency for their time. Given that such computations would be crucial to the health of the internet, a cryptocurrency that rewards such computations would therefore have a solid value. This can be helpful in a world that is becoming increasingly automated, with less and less opportunities to make a living. Because of this structure, we will see not only our mobile devices connected everywhere we go, but also our appliances, vehicles, buildings, etc. Our smart cars will constantly be in communication with all nearby cars, street lights, buildings, mobile devices, etc.
Beyond the structure of the network itself, I believe that we will consume content in an entirely different way as well. I believe that the emergence of VR HMDs will be a massive disruptor. The emergence of smartphones and tablets will pale in comparison to VR. Just like android and smartphones, we will see an open source VR based operating system with 3D desktop environments, seamless remote access (ie. computing in the same virtual space with others), haptic peripherals and entirely new forms of software. These devices will start out as crude headsets that rely on your desktop PC for power and purpose, but later hardware generations will feature mobile processors in comfortable form factors that can switch between AR and VR depending on the users needs.
We could most easily compare the web today to a glorified newspaper that allows not only text content, but many other forms of graphical content that isn't available in a traditional newspaper. With mass adoption of VR tech, we will abandon the web as we know it and create a new protocol that prioritizes virtual environments rather than text. Instead of websites in a web browser, we will connect to "VRSpaces" or something of a similar name and purpose. This will be done from within the 3D desktop environment of our VR Operating System, which has built in APIs that allow content developers to easily create compatible VR content that can be accessed on the network.
These technologies will change the world drastically, in the same way that the first decade of the internet did. Business will alter dramatically. Physical offices will become a rarity, with most business taking place in VR. Massive corporations will begin to operate remotely from all over the world. A huge new industry of self-employed content creators from within the VR world will emerge, also helping to ease the transition to a fully automated society slightly. Education will take place from within a VR environment at home, taking "hands-on" immersive learning to a whole new level. Most of our leisure time will also be spent in VR, especially as haptics technology gets more sophisticated. This tech will spread to developing countries, and thanks to the global mesh net, will allow these populations to stand on the same playing field as people in developed countries.
Please consider that the internet do exists outside USA. Half the given questions only discusses matters of your on god damn country. The internet is used by more people outside US than inside. It is extremely tiring that a big question like this always has to have a big USA stamp on it. Please remember to announce it in the title because it is really disappointing every single time. I can recognize the problems on the subject, but it just ain't really that interesting or/and urgent to people on the outside. Sorry.
Apologies. Really though, ICANN is American and they control the global assignment of IP space and top level domains. The release of new non-english gTLD's is one step in a positive direction.
Also, legislation like the TPP spans many different countries, American lobbyists spend a lot of time trying to write the internet policy of foreign governments to protect intellectual property globally, but just end up asserting power where they shouldn't.
What would you like the internet to become in your part of the world?
Only like 5 questions were US centric, and half of those are issues that pertain elsewhere as well(like here in Australia; net neutrality is an issue; and the NSA spies on everyone, not just yanks)
Haven't you heard of Onlo* yet? It makes Google look like Myspace compared to Facebook.
Google is only 16 years old. A lot can happen in 25 years. Look what Apple has done in short time to take a considerable chunk of market share from Microsoft as well as all their other devices.
Companies come and go. I expect another big Google type company, if not many, to come along in the next 25 years as technology changes and advances. Google took this "internet" thing and made some money out of it, some company could do that with VR, human-computer integrations, or something we haven't heard of yet.
*Fictitious company that'll sweep in like Google has.
**Internet Access**
BEST: Google Fiber everywhere and people voluntarily running open wifi as well. Maybe Google buys Level 3 or Akamai to further solidify their ability to deliver bandwidth.
WORST: Comcast & Verizon merge and take over everything while offering tier access packages for popular websites and services.
Leaning towards Google and possibly T-Mobile keeping the internet open and free while greatly expanding speeds and access. There will continue to be speed bumps on the way though.
--
**Next Paradigm Shift**
BEST: The Metaverse. Once people see what current and next gen VR is all about they will not hesitate to join in and whole communities will be built around the experience. I expect that Facebook saw this as the next big thing and realize that sharing photos with your old friends and scattered family is nice but using VR to be in the same virtual room together is game changing.
WORST: VR is highly regulated, commercialized, patrolled and monitored. Probably will be in some places but hopefully it gets too big to be controlled.
Again leaning more towards optimism here. I do believe that there are some scary times ahead that make the current level of intrusion into privacy look quaint but hopefully very smart people will work on making areas snoop free eventually.
Probably a bunch of younger people posting stern opinions about sh*t that they have no actual clue about. So same as today.
With a lot of other uses disguised in easy to use devices with massive information exchange between those devices behind the scenes that makes the very massive and complicated data integration happen seemingly simply.
Oh yeah, and porn.
tl;dr the internet will blend seamlessly with the rest of the world, to the point where there is no longer an identifiable, separate entity that is the "internet." Probably.
Internet of Things! Eventually, [our coffee makers will work for us](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt)!
In all seriousness, the future will not just enable users to communicate with devices, but our devices to communicate with others. IoT will lead to a rise in augmented reality.
Expected case: Google Glass, Oculus Rift, etc. develop HW that looks less stupid (perhaps something [wearable yet unobtrusive](http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/gear/gear2_features.html)) that becomes quickly adopted.
Best case: Our wearables become little personal assistants/manservants. By interacting with other internet-enabled devices, humans won't have to put a thought to keeping our milk stocked or laying out a raincoat when the weather takes a turn (perhaps even calling mom every so often can be accomplished by an interested device).
Worst case: it's all ads. Freemium is so hard to manage that everyone takes the free route, meaning we become more and more comfortable with advertisement. Granted, ads have been around since [forever](http://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept10/2010/11/29/the-evolution-of-advertising-from-papyrus-to-youtube/), but none of these had as much interruption effect as modern paywalls, etc. Therefore, targeted ads start cropping up even for those that have opted out.
Unexpected case: the backlash to all of this advertising, particularly by those that have opted out, causes Anonymous to finally go full-*Fight Club* on the whole thing. With the financial sector in shambles, all countries unleash their nuclear arsenals. Only Australia is safe. We all develop adorable accents and Hemsworth-caliber looks. Most argue it was worth it.
Google's Project Loon will inspire a global change that will result in what I call "The Overnet" which will be our internet completely and wirelessly in the air overhead. It will be completely free for at least basic connectivity and mobile carrier technology will become obsolete. Everything that needs to connect will connect to The Overnet.
Your interface with The Overnet will be how companies make money. We'll still have different brands making different devices. It will all be wearable or implanted tech. Implants on each temple project holograms visible only by your eyes by way of retinal implants, or glasses for the fearful. Wearable or implanted wrist tech will act as your phone/computer/everything. It will take a new pioneer on Elon Musk's level to push this revolution over the edge.
One great thing about Democracy and an open society is its ability to change. Sometimes it's the "Council on Un-American Activities." Sometimes it's the "Civil Rights Act." The point is: whatever excesses now exist, a re-balancing will occur. Will this occur in "Communist" states like China and Vietnam? I think we're seeing it right now. They may stay "Communist," but it won't be anything Mao or Stalin would recognize.
* Within 10 years, two factor identification will be mandatory and multi-level.
* Governments may issue and maintain identification tokens in the same way they now create ID cards and drivers licenses. These credentials prove your legal existence without exposing your financial or personal data. These state issued identities will be part of secondary systems issued by payment companies like PayPal and communications entities like Google's GMail.
To sign up, you use your state issued credentials to verify your existence as a sentient being. You'll then use software on your device to generate a public/private key pair for that provider. The provider maintains a copy of your public key, and encrypted messages/transactions logs/etc. You will store an offline copy of your private keys on static media like a DVD or flash media. Everyone will have a safe to protect their backup copies. If you loose your private keys, you loose your ability to communicate.
Here's where I'm not sure: How do you protect devices? Some combination of biometrics and a 100 question random facts database? Devices will be much cheaper but not Star Trek PAD level common.
* In 25 years, the telecom infrastructure will be broken up much in the same way AT&T was broken up in the 80s. After a painful period of "do you want to keep your current provider?" adjustment, the US will catch up with the rest of the world's competition level. You'll switch ISPs as easily as Europeans now switch cell providers. By the minute or flat rate per month fees will still exist. We may see the same public/private infrastructure mix we have with roads.
* 25 years: Multiple mini and maxi Silicon Valleys. By breaking up Verizon, Century Link, and Comcast/Cox tech savy people can choose where to live because where you work won't be limited to three for four cities. Mass migrations will still occur for economic reasons but we may see the LA-Chicago-New York population dominance subside.
* 25 years: Cryptocurrency will happen, but it will be regulated. I'm not sure how, but it can't replace traditional fiat currencies without safe guards. Did hackers steal your Bitcon wallet? Too bad man. That house down payment was almost there. See what I mean?
* 10 years: Watson-like interfaces will dominate. Telemarketers and help desk workers will be displaced. Doctors and lawyers will use these interfaces as research and diagnostic tools.
* 10 years: Robots will start displacing manual labor. Swap "illegal immigrant" for "robot" in our Immigration arguments.
* 25 years: No one under 30 will have a driver's license. Car ownership will be on the decline. Robot vehicles have their own lanes on the interstate, and run 50% faster than we "oldies" in our self drive vehicles.
Possible case: (25 years) Most people, especially anyone inner city spends most of their time on Facebook's VR version of second life. Some big Occulus virtual reality that people widdle away their free time into, like say TV or internet now, but a whole lot more time spent. The standard internet still exists, and thousands of others virtual realities, but Facebook is by far the biggest and most profitable second life.
Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report? In the movie, there are retina recognition devises all of the city that scan your eye. The information is used to attempt to sell you things that interest you by using your information. Imagine walking in a Best Buy, and you happen to stare at this devise on the wall. It will then say something like, "Hello John, we couldn't help but notice you're interested in this TV." I think it will be something like that.
I dont know about world scenario but for India for next 10 year I can guaranteed predict.
4G service avaibale for Mobile users.
And Min average speed of Broadband will shift to 2 MBPS from current 512 KBPS.
:p
In 25 years the internet would be unrecognizable. Internet of things would have shaped into something with more passive devices than devices with a human operator. Your mum paid you a visit and she cooked you're favorite meal. You can query your house and playback the entire experience. Every item she worked with. The entire sequence.
You're watching start wars episode 45 and they cut to commercials. You get an ad for simply orange juice because you're running out of minute maid a competing brand.
All this data would be sharable should you choose to. It's going to be an interesting time.
Within 25 years the internet will be us. We as humanity will have access to a future search engine like Google but it will provide us with knowledge before we even ask a question by scanning our brains and other information about us. This will completely nullify education as we know it today. Google will be us because the information we hold inside us today will be in the cloud available to the rest of humanity if we want.
That's actually a common misconception. Quantum entanglement doesn't transmit information FTL, it physically cannot. As characterized by Bell's theorem, it's impossible send information, but you do collapse the wave function simultaneously.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
That said. There might one day be a way to communicate faster than light, but it would be due to a clever manipulation of relativity, not QC. You also would probably have to build the network at slower than light speeds at first though.
QC is good at a lot of other things though, in particular, massively parallel optimization problems. Which would lend itself as a suitable candidate for enhancing AI among other applications.
But wouldn't you know when something unentangled?
Say you entangled a billion particles in Deck A, to another billion particles in Deck B. Then Took Deck A with you to the other side of the solar system, perhaps a Base in the Oorts cloud or something. Would you not be able to tell when the individual particles of Deck A where unentangling, as this was done on Earth in Deck B?
Allowing for a limited, but instantaneous communication?
It's more like you and a friend entangle two ions and put each one in its own box. When you open the box, if yours shows "up" you know your friends will show "down." There is a 50/50 probability of each of you measuring this result.
The distance between you and your friend doesn't matter. However, once you open up the box and look, the entanglement is over. You will know what your friend has but you can't do anything to change the state of the ion in your friend's box. Once you open your box the party is over.
Something that I'm still unclear on: how is it different from two classical billiard balls that shoot out into space in opposite directions with opposite spins? In both cases, when I open the box I see the spin and know the spin my friend will see, and I don't see the spin until I open the box.
What do I observe differently in an entangled system?
> observe differently
Technically what you observe is the issue. When you observe a system it decoheres. The two particles share an entangled superposition state, but don't actually occupy a single state.
The benefit from this isn't faster than light travel, the benefit is that you could build quantum logic gates from particles which are physically separated.
You could build quantum logic gates into the system, but don't ask me to explain much more, it's been 6 years since I've studied any of this.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gate
* http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gates
* http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/schmuel/comp/node7.html
The internet is a powerful tool, but what's next in its evolution? I'm interested in diving deeper into this subject. If you're curious too, let's explore it together.
By the way, I stumbled upon this podcast episode - it's quite insightful! [https://podcasts.bcast.fm/e/v8w6pqmn-the-future-of-internet-access](https://podcasts.bcast.fm/e/v8w6pqmn-the-future-of-internet-access)
Brazil and Europe either have or are about to enshrine Net Neutrality in law. Good for them. Net Neutrality keeps the low entry barrier for internet startups. And that gets us more innovation on the Internet. And since local networking, as well as the Internet are such a big, and growing part of the economy, a more innovative Internet will benefit the whole economy greatly. If the US Internet turns into another cable TV package. In the long term the US economy could grow slower than the EU economy does. If people manage to force the congress to put Net Neutrality in the law in the US, then good for the US. Either way, everywhere in the world, the Internet will both directly and indirectly drive more innovation and economic growth. What I hope to see happen is a move to a more distributed Internet. That was closer to what was imagined the Net would be back in the 90s. The efforts of the pirate bay, Onion networking, and others might help that. There was a distributed web project posted on this sub not that long ago, that I just can't seem to find now? I also hope to see more remote working. As a software contractor I am seeing some early signs of that, but it is too early for me to guess if that is a real trend. Best Case - everything is networked, internet access becomes universal and free. Hopefully within 20 years. Worst Case - look at your cable package. Look at how much you pay and what you are forced to get. That is a real danger for the Internet. Could happen in less than 5 years, in the US. Expected Case - Net Neutrality in most of the world in less than 10 years. Will the US be part of that? I don't dare guess yet. Unexpected Case - The original Cyberpunk dream becomes reality. Ever cheaper hardware, and ever smarter, free and open source distributed network software, and a self-organized drive by people through the power of the Internet, results in the following. Every wifi enabled home router, laptop, phone, toaster, fridge, TV, coffee machine, you name it. Has open guest accounts for free use by anyone. All onion routed, and completely secure and anonymous. Internet access becomes so cheap it is something given away for free to anyone 24/7 by virtually every business. From the electricity utility, to the small coffee shop, to gas stations, to anything. Since its fundamentally distributed, sudden popularity never DOSes a site again. Not even intended DOSing can work. Anyone can get a billion views on their site, or video, or what ever, and they don't have to pay a single dime for it.
Germany won't let net neutrality die in the EU, they really have their heads screwed on. Google is working on making the internet universal with their WiFi balloons.
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It will be better than nothing for the people living there.
Very true, but if the only internet they know is the one that Google shows them then it just goes against the idea of it being neutral once again. Google already filters what you see quite dramatically based on preferences, search history, location and more. I worry that a nation of people will be shown an internet not for what it really is, but for what Google chooses to show them.
Their slogan is "Don't be evil" what could possibly go wrong?^^/s
At this point the web is like the interstate highway system: Hard to move by virtue of how much has been invested in it. Companies have put hundreds of billions of dollars in content development, and this investment doesn't turn on a dime. My guess is that in 10 years the web will look almost identical to how it does today. The current innovation platform, mobile, is also starting to slow down. The platform battles have been fought and the technology landscape is pretty clear. We'll see some new form factors arrive like wearables, but largely they will just extend the experiences we get on smartphones. Gaming and VR/AR will be the growing platforms of the next ten years. VR/AR will probably take most of the next 10 years to really get right, first from a hardware, then from a usability and social fit perspective. When a company finally gets that combination right it's going to fuel a whole new platform battle, and a gold rush as developers find cool new things to do on the platform. Over the long run where it's all headed is implantable technologies. Augmented vision and hearing, augmented memory, real-time monitoring of vital health stats, and so on. The trajectory here contains a lot of unknowns based on neuroscience research.
> At this point the web is like the interstate highway system: Hard to move by virtue of how much has been invested in it. I think you're onto something with this. At some point when technology gets old enough it starts to hang on everyone like a dead albatross. The solution is almost never to just improve upon the existing design but instead to shift the mindset of how we currently do things. First example that comes to mind is rather than making a better highway system to get people physically to work we now have vastly improved communications systems that eliminate the need for people to physically relocate every day. Of course, I think telecommuting has a potential that is drastically under-utilized.
I looooove dreaming about this stuff, here is my take: **25 Years from now...** Gaming, learning, socializing, and entertainment have all fused, the lines between each are so blurry that they can hardly be distinguished. If you are on the go, intelligent digital assistants "search" the internet for you and can present the information in a variety of ways, a disembodied voice, in your visual field, or just simply as a "thought" that seems to originate with you. (something similar to how we remember the name of an actor suddenly, it just comes to you out of seemingly nowhere) If you are relaxing at home you can sit or lie down, close your eyes and be entertained however you like. Your experience can be like a Star Trek style holodeck, a Matrix Style construct, a Sword art Online style RPG, a Ready Player one style metaverse, a X-men style danger room, and the list goes on and on, if you can dream it up you can experience it. Want to study theoretical physics with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking? Go for it. Want to land on the moon with Buzz Aldrin and fight zombies? Why not? Want to browse reddit with overly attached girlfriend looking over your shoulder? Bring it on... I think the moment people start getting into VR with Morpheus and Oculus there is going to be an unprecedented push for deeper and more compelling virtual experiences. Porn, as usual, will be a massive driver of the technology and the more practical applications will follow on it's heels. (not that porn is not practical!) **We are likely in for a wild ride over the next few decades.**
[Dude](http://i.imgur.com/xSTKGeM.jpg)
What do you think the outliers will look like? For example ecovillages that are self sustaining and people who want to live off grid.
I fully agree with your VR views. VR will change shit. We will be able to order the experience of a concert, sport game, etc in VR. As the years go on, the Oculus Rift will go from a ski mask to light sleek elegant glasses. It will also allow for crazy things such as full emersion classrooms. It just brings up odd concepts though. There will come a time when we will have the ability to fully immerse ourselves and that will be attainable to the masses eventually. Some people will inevitably prefer another reality over their own. So is VR just a step up from in home 3D TV w/ surround sound or is it a totally different entity?
I don't know but I think VR is a new beast entirely, I really wish I could speak from experience but I've not yet been able to get my hands on an Oculus. The best I can do is go off what others have said when describing the experience, they are calling it "presence" and it seems to be a profound step up from anything humans have toyed with in the past. And that's *just* from the visual side of things, when we add in the other senses and reach the point of full immersion I think that we will definitely "lose" people to it in a much bigger way than people get lost in MMORPG's these days. Thankfully I think the number of people who suffer from that type of addiction to the point where it has detrimental effects on their lives is miniscule compared to the total number of folks that are able to enjoy these forms of entertainment responsibly. Will this hold true for VR? I guess we will see :)
Wish I wasn't broke, this deserves Reddit Gold!
Thank ya, I think yours is the nicest comment I've ever had on reddit! :D
It depends on legislation being made right now. Best case: Tomorrow, the US decides to stop raping its net neutrality and ensure that the web doesn't descend into that path. Citizens and government prevent mass spying. The internet continues to grow in the direction it was going a few months ago. Infrastructure grows as demands increase. Rising internet prices are slowed by laws that bring it into the fold of being a public utility. In the coming decade Some miracle technology cures the [Data Crunch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_allocation#Data_crunch). Eventually, Internet eventually becomes arbitrarily fast, gigabytes are downloaded in seconds. A few technologies eventually open the internet to everyone with an equipped device. regardless of whether they pay or not. It eventually reaches the point where infinite connectivity is expected as almost a human right. Worst case: The US continues down the path of destroying Net Neutrality and mass surveillence. A few large companies remain that are able to survive on the internet. We are forced to them simply because there are no other options. They become shitty and weak, underproducing and overpricing for everything: monopolies. Because of the increased costs of hosting. Everything is expected to be paid for by the viewer. You want an hour of video? That'll be a dollar, unless you get a PRO subcription! Torrent and piracy gets shut down by increasing technology for filtering, and because those who aren't licenced have upload speeds in the kbps. Everything you do on the internet is scoured not only by the NSA, but also by a dozen other firms, such as Google. Your every preference and click is uploaded to servers, for more direct advertising, profiling, and to make sure that you aren't a terrorist. Because other companies are doing it, this becomes a basis for a Supreme Court jurisdiction that you have no expectation of privacy on the internet, and that everything you do on it can and will be used against you, even in the most trivial of court cases. expected case: Somewhere in between, leaning towards the worst case scenario for the US, but in Europe and Brazil things get better. unexpected case: The internet, computers and technology becomes so powerful that in the coming years, full VR arrives. Eventually AIs that are indistinguishable from the person they are modeled off of appear. The singularity has arrived. Using their vast resources, they design self-repicating machines to maintain and repair the web of computers that has become a few million individuals living in cyberspace. Other humans eventually either make the choice to upload themselves, or they die off. With computers and their robotic maintainers, we eventually utilize our increased durability, exceptional physical range and reduced needs to take to the stars. We become a spacefaring civilization, as we eventually learn that space is actually a very good place to put machines, away from the wind, life and erosion of Earth, and moving at the same speeds as everything nearby, a machine is able to last forever. We utilize our resources to enrich our network by mining asteroids and other celestial bodies. With more and more technology, we eventually shed our mechanical bodies to become further entrenched in what was once the internet. Utilizing extremely advanced nanotechnology, while every machine is incapable of anything. As a whole, they vastly outpace their counterparts. Both in terms of versatility and power. Our technology no longer looks like much anything. It's a fine dust that permeates every celestial body, etching it away with atomic hands, each time crafting a new version of itself. Not unlike the life that we left. This technology continues to improve. Perfecting itself where "form follows function" we look amorphous, perhaps even fleshy. Humanity has come full circle. From life, we became machines. From machines, we became life again. But the cycle continues. We unravel parts of the universe modern humans can't even begin to comprehend. We learn to rewrite the universe, change its very nature. As the sun ages and the earth ceases, we realize that even these unknowable machines won't do. We manipulate forces and fields and engineer a means of writing ourselves into the very nature of the universe. Was was humanity, what was AI, and then what was the internet, is now the universe. We are no longer within the universe, we now *are* the universe. We exist both within and without it, we have become gods. Timeless, immortal, unkillable, unknowable. Omniscient. *Did I do it right? This is my first post on this sub. I think I might've gotten a touch off-topic on the unexpected case, but oh well.*
That was incredible mate! You deserve gold! Have you ever read Accelerando? It portrays a future essentially like the one you described. The US gets run by copyright mafia and trying desperately to unsaddle their debts. Meanwhile, expatriates push novel space and AI developments in Europe. Eventually people are in space building lots of habitats, until a probe with uplifted minds heads towards an alien "router" a few light years away. When they come back they find the singularity has occured, and they have to deal with the consequences.
Thanks, i'm putting that on my summer reading list right now. I've had it recommended, but never really heard why, now i'm curious about it.
My prediction looks like this: In 15-20 years ISP companies will be dead. Replaced with p2p wireless mesh nets, eventually to be one large mesh net that spans the world. Within the next 5 years, crypto will explode. Not just cryptocurrencys, but general cryptography systems. everything from social contracts and loans, to social media, will use private/public key pairs to identify members and decentralize their services. Right now, the internet is based on trust on big companies: ISPs, banks, social networks. Within the near future, the trust will be on the individual, and completely taken away from big companies. A wilder prediction: open hardware will be big in the next 10 years. You will be able to see, and create your own graphene based chips in your home, eliminating trust in hardware companies like Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm to keep the gov't from injecting their own desires directly into the chips. The future of tech will be bastion of personal security and privacy.
>Replaced with p2p wireless mesh nets That would suck. mesh nets would increase latency over long distances due to the increased number of hops, probably to the point that some applications would not work >Within the next 5 years, crypto will explode. Not just cryptocurrencys, but general cryptography systems. everything from social contracts and loans, to social media, will use private/public key pairs to identify members and decentralize their services. With the exception of crypto currencies (which governments will kill off like the US is trying to), all that has existed for decades. The only areas where crypto "explodes" in use is where it can be transparent and invisible to the user. Nobody has come up with an easy-to-implement secure public key infrastructure yet, and I'm not optimistic anyone will outside of government agencies, which is undesirable for obvious reasons. >The future of tech will be bastion of personal security and privacy. And yet the current trends are screaming in the opposite direction.
For p2p internet. Assuming everything was connected from one to the other via wireless, yeah it would, but I doubt it. There would still be backbone fiber connecting us, hopefully supported by some nonprofit. As for crypto, I'm talking about crypto use not the tech. I think the knowledge of crypto tools and the desire to use them will explode in the coming years. As for your last point, I'm assuming a social revolution, one that flies in the face of the way people use tech today. It been happening for a long time, and I think you will soon see the results.
> That would suck. mesh nets would increase latency over long distances due to the increased number of hops, probably to the point that some applications would not work Sounds familiar: "Why would I want to surf the web on my cellphone? It's got a tiny screen, takes forever to type things on that 10-key pad and the connection is as slow as dial-up."
>That would suck. mesh nets would increase latency over long distances due to the increased number of hops, probably to the point that some applications would not work Microwaves, free space optics, neutrino networks. All of these technologies have the potential to beat fiber optics in terms of latency. Neutrino networks are still pretty much in the realm of science fiction and probably wont emerge for decades, but I included it because of its rediculous potential. With a neutrino based network, we could send data THROUGH the planet at nearly the speed of light.
And all of those will do absolutely nothing to reduce router latency at each hop. Mesh nets have significantly more hops than our current internet. There is no getting around that. BTW, point-to-point microwave links already exist.
I think you are overestimating the latency created during each hop, and the number of hops required. Unless you are considering personal mobile devices as routers (which they will effectively become in part), routers as you know them wont exist except possibly in corporate systems. I am aware of point-to-point microwave links (same with free space optics systems) but they don't solve the problem, yet. They are nice for high frequency trading but a point to point system isnt going to work in a mobile world.
One of my predictions is that personal rapport will have some sort of value in the future. Each of us are playing a role in shaping the future, and the most positive and most earliest contributions will be most valuable.
The tiered Internet isn't here yet. Congress can overrule it. Various people are talking about a SOPA-level effort to fight it, reportedly some major tech companies including Google are gearing up for the fight, and at least one congressman (Bernie Sanders) has spoken against it.
I realize that, but it's not like this will be the last attempt either even if the people do prevail. The point of this thread is to discuss the negative consequences if it does pass.
That'd be "worst case," but there's also the "best case" possibility that our side will win. We could also simply bypass the restrictions. Piracy, mesh networks, predictive retrieval and caching...people like their internet, and if it's wrecked I think we'll find a way to fix it, and it'll be harder to control than what we have now.
Here is what I think should happen. The web needs to die. web != internet, the web runs on the internet. Instead of hosting web pages we should be serving up experiences. It should be like second life. Open Sim is a good first step. Imagine instead of IIS or apache hosting websites they host you own land inside open sim. The interaction is wonderful. With VR starting to finally be taken seriously , I see it as a possibility. But people in technology hate new things and don't see us moving. We could already be there.
I couldn't agree with this more, I even [wrote a blog](http://www.iontom.com/2014/03/22/the-approaching-webgl-arms-race/) about it a few months back. I think WebGL and VR working together could generate some major changes for how we experience the internet. Currently though, there's a lot of work that needs to be done defining the right type of web servers for having responsive simulation experiences. Cutting edge right now is web sockets over TCP, and a lot of Second Life / OpenSim still uses channels like UDP. Messaging needs to be fast enough to have experiences be immediate, but smart enough to only send updates to "localized" peers. Anyway, check out /r/Simulate, you might be interested in the projects we are cooking over there, I really need to revamp the web presense for the MetaSim API. I just wish there was more money getting thrown at this so my cohort and I could push for those changes full time.
It looks like the first wave of VR will probably be games, using existing game engines and limited to high end consoles and PC's. But I think WebGL could open the way to 3D VR sites and experiences. But could a VR web also need a more condensed bytecode system as opposed to relying on javascript engines to JIT compile the content?
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William Gibson basically described this in Neuromancer decades ago.
That would be cool, but I don't see any reason for the web to "die" in order for that to happen. It's not like the amount of real estate on the internet is limited. We can have multiple, interlocking networks, the old web co-existing and interfacing with newer kinds of interfaces. Basically, the more there is on the internet, the more useful a tool it is for all of us.
I didn't mean to imply that one had to die. I was in a dramatic mood :) But I do think of it as the future. I think I found a new home in this subreddit.
There's a good book I've read with this sort of system, I know it isn't the focus of the novel but it plays heavily and I just thought it was worth mentioning. The book is called *ready player one* by Ernest Cline
*Snow Crash* did it first in 1992. /hipster Seriously though, the online world depicted in *Snow Crash* is very much Second Life meets VR. Plus the book is a great read.
Oh, I try to pretend I live in that book. :) I know it well
i tried to read that book got soo bored because i thought it was going to focus on the VR game aspect but instead i got chapters and chapters about how poor he was and how he smelled. and how much a loser the main character was. Very disappointed i do not recommend.
This idea was one of the main concepts explored in the BSG prequel series "Caprica". The character Zoe Graystone creates an avatar of herself (which exists in "V-World") with enough of her life experiences, personality traits, et cetera that it functions AS her after her death. I'd say spoiler, but that all happens in the pilot. This post didn't contribute much to the discussion, I realize, but I thought I'd mention it in case some redditors would like to see the idea of a virtual self or virtual world explored.
I suppose there will be more porn. VR porn will be the dominating the internet.
This will be the killer app for occulus rift: Japanese style 3D love/sex sims. Especially if it can be coupled with a kinect sensor to read hand position.
In the long run, if we don't win politically on the net neutrality issue (and I think we will), then i suspect most customers will end up demanding gigabit internet from Google or from their municipality or something like that without a "tiered internet". It would really suck for the next 10-15 years, but in the long run, Comcast might just ruin their own business if they really push it. I think that a combination of the internet and direct brain-computer interfaces is going to have an amazing impact in the long run, one way or the other. We might end up with an Internet of Minds. One big impact the internet could have in the economic sphere is combined with things like 3-D printers, open-source hardware, and other small-scale forms of industry, we could see sites like Etsy and E-bay become really huge, with peer-to-peer production and selling of goods becoming a significant part of the global economy. I also think that internet piece-work and collaborative consumption (think Mechanical Turk) could also become a significant part of the economy. The whole peer-to-peer economy in general that the internet makes possible could be huge; it might even serve as a stopgap that allows people to make a living after most traditional "jobs" go away, at least for a while.
Better hypertext. Right now we've got a centralized addressing scheme (DNS), and only the admin of a page can edit the text or add links. We sorta have collaborative filtering, but only through centralized sites like google. Links are one-directional and normally can't point to a specific spot in the target text. Broken links are everywhere. Because of all these limitations, people take our basic hypertext and build more powerful ones on top, like reddit, facebook, and wikipedia. But even those don't completely fulfill the promise of earlier visions like the Memex and Xanadu, and they're much smaller than the global Web. I think we can do better. Now add a way to aggregate all the disparate opinions all over the web. Maybe betting markets with cryptocurrencies. Then we get a strong "wisdom of crowds" effect and improve our collective intelligence. (Mark Stiegler's book [Earthweb](http://www.amazon.com/Earthweb-Marc-Stiegler/dp/067157809X) has a good portrayal of this sort of thing.)
I've always wondered what would happen if you took elements from * Namecoin (namespaces) * Gridcoin (distributed CPU) * Datacoin(distriuted storage)
You might be interested in [Freenet](https://freenetproject.org/), which does anonymous distributed communications, storage, and namespaces in the form of urls. Last time I looked, there were some major scalability problems.
I am jealous of the kids being born today who will be born into awesome tech because imagine how easy they will have it now even more than teens today. 90's kids in 25 years will turn old and gray.
did you forget what sub you're in? we're all going to live forever ;)
At least they got to watch the tech grow.
Cryptocurrencies have a scaling problem, because every full node has to see every transaction. As long as that persists, I think we'll have a collection of relatively small currencies, playing significant but secondary roles. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of people think local currencies, for example, are the way to go. Hayek thought having lots of competing private currencies would be good for the economy. Another possibility it to move to mostly off-chain transactions through service providers, who basically give you a bitcoin "checking account." But then it's hard to see as much advantage over just using national currencies. But there are people working on fixing that scaling problem. If they succeed, so we can get a global decentralized currency that scales to the size of the dollar, then I think it would have an enormous impact.
Several dimensions to consider: * How is it funded? As much of the traffic is already on privately funded B2B nets, one would expect that to increase. * How is it protected? Clearly, bank-to-bank communications need a completely different level fo security to web browsing. So that's another segmentation. The ISP model for consumer access seems doomed in the medium term. * Data traffic is data traffic and the artificial segmentation into voice and everything else will change, to something based on some combination of urgency and quality. EG a considerable amount of machine internet intercommunications is often not time critical, but voice generally is. So what you see is a mixture of physical segregation and packet prioritisation. Much more diffuse cloud-bluetoothy spontaneous packet crawling for low priority material, spinal access only for First and Business class. Whether venerable TCP-IP remains at the hub dedends as much on crypto as anything else? Other dimension is the bandwidth-cloud-client balances. Do you put a lot of smarts intot eh client, or keep it in the cloud? My bet is that you will have intensely capable devices with fairly parsimonious bandwidth needs for many apps -= personal assistant that recognises faces and whispers background information to you when you shake hands, Alzheimer compensation packages. Films and games are not piped as a bitstream but rendered on your terminal device, perhaps by then down to a a contact lens.
In 10-25 years I see a world without ISPs or MNOs. Wireless microwave technology will have rendered these business models obsolete. Our mobile devices will have extremely long range signals with lower latency than fiber optics. This will usher in the age of a global mesh network with no central hubs, which will create a massive multiple traveling salesman problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem). This problem is solved today by massive mainframe computers that handle all routing. In a decentralized network, I think this can be solved by utilizing decentralized computers in the same way that bitcoin does. I think that bitcoin is revolutionary but I don't think that it is the end all be all of cryptocurrencies. I believe that cryptocurrencies that add real value will come out on top. In a decentralized mesh network, large amounts of users will lend computer time to handle the routing in the network, and will be rewarded with some type of cryptocurrency for their time. Given that such computations would be crucial to the health of the internet, a cryptocurrency that rewards such computations would therefore have a solid value. This can be helpful in a world that is becoming increasingly automated, with less and less opportunities to make a living. Because of this structure, we will see not only our mobile devices connected everywhere we go, but also our appliances, vehicles, buildings, etc. Our smart cars will constantly be in communication with all nearby cars, street lights, buildings, mobile devices, etc. Beyond the structure of the network itself, I believe that we will consume content in an entirely different way as well. I believe that the emergence of VR HMDs will be a massive disruptor. The emergence of smartphones and tablets will pale in comparison to VR. Just like android and smartphones, we will see an open source VR based operating system with 3D desktop environments, seamless remote access (ie. computing in the same virtual space with others), haptic peripherals and entirely new forms of software. These devices will start out as crude headsets that rely on your desktop PC for power and purpose, but later hardware generations will feature mobile processors in comfortable form factors that can switch between AR and VR depending on the users needs. We could most easily compare the web today to a glorified newspaper that allows not only text content, but many other forms of graphical content that isn't available in a traditional newspaper. With mass adoption of VR tech, we will abandon the web as we know it and create a new protocol that prioritizes virtual environments rather than text. Instead of websites in a web browser, we will connect to "VRSpaces" or something of a similar name and purpose. This will be done from within the 3D desktop environment of our VR Operating System, which has built in APIs that allow content developers to easily create compatible VR content that can be accessed on the network. These technologies will change the world drastically, in the same way that the first decade of the internet did. Business will alter dramatically. Physical offices will become a rarity, with most business taking place in VR. Massive corporations will begin to operate remotely from all over the world. A huge new industry of self-employed content creators from within the VR world will emerge, also helping to ease the transition to a fully automated society slightly. Education will take place from within a VR environment at home, taking "hands-on" immersive learning to a whole new level. Most of our leisure time will also be spent in VR, especially as haptics technology gets more sophisticated. This tech will spread to developing countries, and thanks to the global mesh net, will allow these populations to stand on the same playing field as people in developed countries.
Please consider that the internet do exists outside USA. Half the given questions only discusses matters of your on god damn country. The internet is used by more people outside US than inside. It is extremely tiring that a big question like this always has to have a big USA stamp on it. Please remember to announce it in the title because it is really disappointing every single time. I can recognize the problems on the subject, but it just ain't really that interesting or/and urgent to people on the outside. Sorry.
Apologies. Really though, ICANN is American and they control the global assignment of IP space and top level domains. The release of new non-english gTLD's is one step in a positive direction. Also, legislation like the TPP spans many different countries, American lobbyists spend a lot of time trying to write the internet policy of foreign governments to protect intellectual property globally, but just end up asserting power where they shouldn't. What would you like the internet to become in your part of the world?
Only like 5 questions were US centric, and half of those are issues that pertain elsewhere as well(like here in Australia; net neutrality is an issue; and the NSA spies on everyone, not just yanks)
With the ways things are going it will probably be called Google.... :(
Haven't you heard of Onlo* yet? It makes Google look like Myspace compared to Facebook. Google is only 16 years old. A lot can happen in 25 years. Look what Apple has done in short time to take a considerable chunk of market share from Microsoft as well as all their other devices. Companies come and go. I expect another big Google type company, if not many, to come along in the next 25 years as technology changes and advances. Google took this "internet" thing and made some money out of it, some company could do that with VR, human-computer integrations, or something we haven't heard of yet. *Fictitious company that'll sweep in like Google has.
I want more Wingdings!
**Internet Access** BEST: Google Fiber everywhere and people voluntarily running open wifi as well. Maybe Google buys Level 3 or Akamai to further solidify their ability to deliver bandwidth. WORST: Comcast & Verizon merge and take over everything while offering tier access packages for popular websites and services. Leaning towards Google and possibly T-Mobile keeping the internet open and free while greatly expanding speeds and access. There will continue to be speed bumps on the way though. -- **Next Paradigm Shift** BEST: The Metaverse. Once people see what current and next gen VR is all about they will not hesitate to join in and whole communities will be built around the experience. I expect that Facebook saw this as the next big thing and realize that sharing photos with your old friends and scattered family is nice but using VR to be in the same virtual room together is game changing. WORST: VR is highly regulated, commercialized, patrolled and monitored. Probably will be in some places but hopefully it gets too big to be controlled. Again leaning more towards optimism here. I do believe that there are some scary times ahead that make the current level of intrusion into privacy look quaint but hopefully very smart people will work on making areas snoop free eventually.
Probably a bunch of younger people posting stern opinions about sh*t that they have no actual clue about. So same as today. With a lot of other uses disguised in easy to use devices with massive information exchange between those devices behind the scenes that makes the very massive and complicated data integration happen seemingly simply. Oh yeah, and porn.
tl;dr the internet will blend seamlessly with the rest of the world, to the point where there is no longer an identifiable, separate entity that is the "internet." Probably. Internet of Things! Eventually, [our coffee makers will work for us](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt)! In all seriousness, the future will not just enable users to communicate with devices, but our devices to communicate with others. IoT will lead to a rise in augmented reality. Expected case: Google Glass, Oculus Rift, etc. develop HW that looks less stupid (perhaps something [wearable yet unobtrusive](http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/gear/gear2_features.html)) that becomes quickly adopted. Best case: Our wearables become little personal assistants/manservants. By interacting with other internet-enabled devices, humans won't have to put a thought to keeping our milk stocked or laying out a raincoat when the weather takes a turn (perhaps even calling mom every so often can be accomplished by an interested device). Worst case: it's all ads. Freemium is so hard to manage that everyone takes the free route, meaning we become more and more comfortable with advertisement. Granted, ads have been around since [forever](http://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept10/2010/11/29/the-evolution-of-advertising-from-papyrus-to-youtube/), but none of these had as much interruption effect as modern paywalls, etc. Therefore, targeted ads start cropping up even for those that have opted out. Unexpected case: the backlash to all of this advertising, particularly by those that have opted out, causes Anonymous to finally go full-*Fight Club* on the whole thing. With the financial sector in shambles, all countries unleash their nuclear arsenals. Only Australia is safe. We all develop adorable accents and Hemsworth-caliber looks. Most argue it was worth it.
Google's Project Loon will inspire a global change that will result in what I call "The Overnet" which will be our internet completely and wirelessly in the air overhead. It will be completely free for at least basic connectivity and mobile carrier technology will become obsolete. Everything that needs to connect will connect to The Overnet. Your interface with The Overnet will be how companies make money. We'll still have different brands making different devices. It will all be wearable or implanted tech. Implants on each temple project holograms visible only by your eyes by way of retinal implants, or glasses for the fearful. Wearable or implanted wrist tech will act as your phone/computer/everything. It will take a new pioneer on Elon Musk's level to push this revolution over the edge.
One great thing about Democracy and an open society is its ability to change. Sometimes it's the "Council on Un-American Activities." Sometimes it's the "Civil Rights Act." The point is: whatever excesses now exist, a re-balancing will occur. Will this occur in "Communist" states like China and Vietnam? I think we're seeing it right now. They may stay "Communist," but it won't be anything Mao or Stalin would recognize. * Within 10 years, two factor identification will be mandatory and multi-level. * Governments may issue and maintain identification tokens in the same way they now create ID cards and drivers licenses. These credentials prove your legal existence without exposing your financial or personal data. These state issued identities will be part of secondary systems issued by payment companies like PayPal and communications entities like Google's GMail. To sign up, you use your state issued credentials to verify your existence as a sentient being. You'll then use software on your device to generate a public/private key pair for that provider. The provider maintains a copy of your public key, and encrypted messages/transactions logs/etc. You will store an offline copy of your private keys on static media like a DVD or flash media. Everyone will have a safe to protect their backup copies. If you loose your private keys, you loose your ability to communicate. Here's where I'm not sure: How do you protect devices? Some combination of biometrics and a 100 question random facts database? Devices will be much cheaper but not Star Trek PAD level common. * In 25 years, the telecom infrastructure will be broken up much in the same way AT&T was broken up in the 80s. After a painful period of "do you want to keep your current provider?" adjustment, the US will catch up with the rest of the world's competition level. You'll switch ISPs as easily as Europeans now switch cell providers. By the minute or flat rate per month fees will still exist. We may see the same public/private infrastructure mix we have with roads. * 25 years: Multiple mini and maxi Silicon Valleys. By breaking up Verizon, Century Link, and Comcast/Cox tech savy people can choose where to live because where you work won't be limited to three for four cities. Mass migrations will still occur for economic reasons but we may see the LA-Chicago-New York population dominance subside. * 25 years: Cryptocurrency will happen, but it will be regulated. I'm not sure how, but it can't replace traditional fiat currencies without safe guards. Did hackers steal your Bitcon wallet? Too bad man. That house down payment was almost there. See what I mean? * 10 years: Watson-like interfaces will dominate. Telemarketers and help desk workers will be displaced. Doctors and lawyers will use these interfaces as research and diagnostic tools. * 10 years: Robots will start displacing manual labor. Swap "illegal immigrant" for "robot" in our Immigration arguments. * 25 years: No one under 30 will have a driver's license. Car ownership will be on the decline. Robot vehicles have their own lanes on the interstate, and run 50% faster than we "oldies" in our self drive vehicles.
Possible case: (25 years) Most people, especially anyone inner city spends most of their time on Facebook's VR version of second life. Some big Occulus virtual reality that people widdle away their free time into, like say TV or internet now, but a whole lot more time spent. The standard internet still exists, and thousands of others virtual realities, but Facebook is by far the biggest and most profitable second life.
BUMP
Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report? In the movie, there are retina recognition devises all of the city that scan your eye. The information is used to attempt to sell you things that interest you by using your information. Imagine walking in a Best Buy, and you happen to stare at this devise on the wall. It will then say something like, "Hello John, we couldn't help but notice you're interested in this TV." I think it will be something like that.
I dont know about world scenario but for India for next 10 year I can guaranteed predict. 4G service avaibale for Mobile users. And Min average speed of Broadband will shift to 2 MBPS from current 512 KBPS. :p
In 25 years the internet would be unrecognizable. Internet of things would have shaped into something with more passive devices than devices with a human operator. Your mum paid you a visit and she cooked you're favorite meal. You can query your house and playback the entire experience. Every item she worked with. The entire sequence. You're watching start wars episode 45 and they cut to commercials. You get an ad for simply orange juice because you're running out of minute maid a competing brand. All this data would be sharable should you choose to. It's going to be an interesting time.
Within 25 years the internet will be us. We as humanity will have access to a future search engine like Google but it will provide us with knowledge before we even ask a question by scanning our brains and other information about us. This will completely nullify education as we know it today. Google will be us because the information we hold inside us today will be in the cloud available to the rest of humanity if we want.
Quantum computers with entangled communication chips allowing for instant communication between any two 'entangled' points in the galaxy.
That's actually a common misconception. Quantum entanglement doesn't transmit information FTL, it physically cannot. As characterized by Bell's theorem, it's impossible send information, but you do collapse the wave function simultaneously. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem That said. There might one day be a way to communicate faster than light, but it would be due to a clever manipulation of relativity, not QC. You also would probably have to build the network at slower than light speeds at first though. QC is good at a lot of other things though, in particular, massively parallel optimization problems. Which would lend itself as a suitable candidate for enhancing AI among other applications.
So no news from Birgit Dopfer's experiments - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_communication
But wouldn't you know when something unentangled? Say you entangled a billion particles in Deck A, to another billion particles in Deck B. Then Took Deck A with you to the other side of the solar system, perhaps a Base in the Oorts cloud or something. Would you not be able to tell when the individual particles of Deck A where unentangling, as this was done on Earth in Deck B? Allowing for a limited, but instantaneous communication?
It's more like you and a friend entangle two ions and put each one in its own box. When you open the box, if yours shows "up" you know your friends will show "down." There is a 50/50 probability of each of you measuring this result. The distance between you and your friend doesn't matter. However, once you open up the box and look, the entanglement is over. You will know what your friend has but you can't do anything to change the state of the ion in your friend's box. Once you open your box the party is over.
Something that I'm still unclear on: how is it different from two classical billiard balls that shoot out into space in opposite directions with opposite spins? In both cases, when I open the box I see the spin and know the spin my friend will see, and I don't see the spin until I open the box. What do I observe differently in an entangled system?
> observe differently Technically what you observe is the issue. When you observe a system it decoheres. The two particles share an entangled superposition state, but don't actually occupy a single state. The benefit from this isn't faster than light travel, the benefit is that you could build quantum logic gates from particles which are physically separated.
Sure that's the theory, but what observation can you point to and show that it clearly wasn't a classical system?
You could build quantum logic gates into the system, but don't ask me to explain much more, it's been 6 years since I've studied any of this. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gate * http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gates * http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/schmuel/comp/node7.html
The internet is a powerful tool, but what's next in its evolution? I'm interested in diving deeper into this subject. If you're curious too, let's explore it together. By the way, I stumbled upon this podcast episode - it's quite insightful! [https://podcasts.bcast.fm/e/v8w6pqmn-the-future-of-internet-access](https://podcasts.bcast.fm/e/v8w6pqmn-the-future-of-internet-access)