The Future of the Internet

Will it be more like reality TV? Or will it be like a patch? [deployed over several days by The Global Internet Engineering Security and Operations communities: Red are vulnerable domains, green are protected]

Your ability to forecast is important for shaping the future. In fact, the ultimate criterion for a successful forecast is whether is helps people make better decisions. I used to forecast products we imported. Trust me, you learn to know your numbers - no product, no sales, no profit and no growth. Not good.

When we think about the future, what we are doing to some degree or another is infer what is to come from what is now. Going back to my sales forecast, I would make sure many variables were taken into account - especially that no one on my sales team was sandbagging (a technical term for lowering the forecast).

I've written about the work of The Institute of the Future as gleaned from the map of the future and Bob Johansen's book Get There Early before. In the forward, Deloitte's Stanton Smith shares his story of dealing with Parkinson's, his new "normal" as he calls it, and how he's learned to be data based and objective in dealing with his future, yet to remain open to new ways of looking at the data.

People with Parkinson's, he writes, need to learn to deal with dilemmas. He describes Johansen's book as the stage for beginning to connect the dots, to "think the unthinkable". As I'm writing this, leaders are facing a world of increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity - a world laced with dilemmas.

We, too, are facing dilemmas on a daily basis. Some of them revolve around the current tight economic cycle, some around the same tools we embraced with such enthusiasm - social media. My take is that we will need to grow our way out of both, and not in the way you may think.

Seeing the world differently can be uncomfortable, yet we must not only adapt, but learn to think differently not merely to survive, but to prosper. To learn to manage our own dilemmas, writes Smith, we need to understand and analyze the future context as well as the present facts using feelings and reason in equal measure.

I was reading some of the background research that generated a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project survey of internet leaders, activists, and analysts to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020 [hat tip Geoff Livingston]. These are some of the key findings:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020. There are many reasons why mobile applications make sense - from lack of infrastructure in poorer countries to faster connectivity. This is great news for those in the mobile application business. However, beware of the get out of my phone sentiments.

• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness. We just talked about trust. 

What do you think about the research's prediction?

Transparency heightens individual integrity and forgiveness. In 2020, people are even more open to sharing personal information, opinions, and emotions than they are now. The public’s notion of privacy has changed. People are generally comfortable exchanging the benefits of anonymity for the benefits they perceive in the data being shared by other people and organizations. As people’s lives have become more transparent, they have become more responsible for their own actions and more forgiving of the sometimes-unethical pasts of others. Being “outed” for some past indiscretion in a YouTube video or other pervasive-media form no longer does as much damage as it did back in the first decade of the 21st Century. Carefully investigated reputation corrections and clarifications are a popular daily feature of major media outlets’ online sites.

• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.

• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

How do you sense the future to provoke new ways of understanding the present? Can we be open to new ways of looking at the data? Do you think we will learn from our mistakes, and begin to develop a body of ethics - personal and collective? Which one will prevail - being in love with everyone, or learning that not everyone is in love with us?

Comments

[Brian DR1665]

I truly hope that the commingling of physical and virtual reality lends itself to a greater sense of purpose and personal responsibility. People are becoming less and less afraid of recognition on the internet. Where anonymity was once a strength, it is fast becoming a weakness or crutch.

Even so, there are still a great many individuals on the web who perceive complete anonymity, despite the contrary. Until people recognize that, in an environment which will, for some time to come, be predominately based upon the written word, literacy counts for even more. I find myself unable to engage in conversations with others about videos on YouTube, for example, for the simple fact that the vast majority of the commentary is among the most vile and ignorant to be found in the social realm.

We will undoubtedly need to become creatures of balance and adaptation in the future. As the virtual world permeates more and more of the physical, and the social and professional boundaries blur, I feel that, next to recognizing the importance of commitments (trust), literacy will still play a critical role in the future, even when the medium becomes speech- and video-based.

[Geoff Livingston]

The social tolerance issue was the thing that stuck out in my mind, and of course you and I blogged about this simultaneously. I thought some of the comments in individual sections were fascinating, in particular David Brin's insights. All in all, the report did leave me wanting for more.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Brian - I am particularly interested in promoting literacy. English is my second language and I constantly strive to learn it as well as understand the culture, which is so different from my native one. The more we are curious and interested about each other, the better. I will not be afraid that someone will pop out of a dark alley and say something smart. The alternative is quite frightening. Balance and adaptation, just like the suspensions of a fine car (could not help it).

@Geoff - I agree. I spent a great deal of time digging deeper and was left with the sense that this would make for a good discussion. Thank you for pointing ht study out to me.

[The Lovable Rogue]

Valeria, I think that collaboration will be one of the big developments of the future. As the Internet increasingly facilitates connectivity, it seems likely that teams will become ever more diverse and geographically dispersed, coming together briefly and then breaking apart in search of new tasks.

Whilst increasingly widescale collaboration is arguably one of the more obvious potential future Internet developments, we still see very few organizations actively engaging therein. Organizations should look to the future to develop the competencies required to effectively engage therein. Ignorance on the other hand, will invariably cause the organisation to stagnate. As you correctly mention, change can be uncomfortable; effectively outsourcing one's operations to the organisation's stakeholders can be uncomfortable. Yet I see this as one possible avenue for exploration.

Insightful as ever, Valeria.

[Ralf Beuker]

Hi Valeria,

and thanks for your ongoing service! Could you please be so kind and share the source of the picture/illustration you've embedded in your posting. Thanks a lot!

[Denis]

My apologies to sounds a bit like doomsday, but in a nutshell I believe that the future of the internet is to avoid that nothing controls the past.

Yes... I know, it's 1984.

However, by looking at local politics (Valeria, I guess you are following it too) internet is taken as a kind of danger for any traditional organisation, economic corporations too, instead of an opportunity to turn to a more substainable business.

[Carolyn Ann]

The future of the Internet should give marketers nightmares... :-) What will happen to the concept of "being proactive" when search engines become intelligent in a true sense. The ersatz/pseudo thing we currently enthuse over can hardly be called "intelligent; "dimly aware" is probably the best it can manage.

True intelligence is when the search engine(s) learn your preferences, collect, summarize and forward the information you're interested in. Without being asked - just simply by watching what you look at.

Privacy, as a concept, is much in debate. We have the American model, and the European one. (I'll ignore the Chinese model: privacy is not a concept they know. Unless you're in power.) The compromise - one will have to come - will be something between the archaic and individual model of the Europeans and the commercial and transparent one of the US. What this means for marketing remains to be seen, although I get the feeling that marketers, as a group, will probably start influencing the debate.

I don't know about behavioral lapses of individuals; the forgiveness factor is so much a part of managing perception that it's impossible to describe it any way; except, perhaps, as "arbitrary". It used to be that no one cared, because there were so few ways of checking on a persons' past. Now - it's like some nightmare version of that Jim Carey vehicle, The Truman Show.

One thing is for sure: the future ain't what it used to be! :-) (Sorry, I couldn't resist. I can't remember who said that, though.)

Carolyn Ann

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Chris - finally the comments showed up at the post! In your first paragraph, you describe the business idea behind Conversation Agent. It is easier to talk about change than to do change. However, if we roll up our sleeves and join in the work with gusto, I think it might be fun in the end.

@Ralf - the map of the decade is from The Institute of the Future. Thank you for the kind words.

@Denis - yes, organizations fear lots of things. Those with assets fear litigation; those with less assets are anxious to get bigger on their own terms...

[Valeria Maltoni]

Carolyn Ann:

I don't know if this was before we met. I wrote a couple of post on AI agents as Conversation Agents, a-la Web 3.0 (people cringe when I write that). What you describe here is similar to that I opined then.

Great point about definition of privacy being culturally-driven. I should have thought of that! I'm laughing to myself because I used the Truman Show as an example of what happens today in a presentation at MIMA last March.

The quote is from Yogi Berra.

[Sarah Montague]

This was one of the most interestings reads I've had in awhile - both the post and the comments. Thank you.