How The Future of the Internet Will Look
Look around you. It’s amazing how technology has changed! The same goes for the Internet. In the past years, Internet changed nearly every aspect of our life. Social media allowed us always to keep in touch with each other, and YouTube provided us with an infinite amount of videos both for entertainment and education. We got used to it, didn’t we? But have you ever tried to imagine how the Internet will look like in only a few years? How will new advancements make our world a different and better place? Here are a few ideas of how the internet will look.
The Internet of Things will become a usual thing
We already talked about how the world would look like with the Internet of Things. That’s definitely the future of the internet. The current IoT already connects our house appliances such as fridges, alarm clocks, coffee machines, and so on. Soon, our world will become “connected” as never before. That connection will extend to our cars, healthcare devices, and even our clothe. The most important is the flow of the information. All that depends on the satellites that are the main, but at the same time invisible, part of the World Wide Web infrastructure. In the future, wherever you find yourself, in the middle of the sea or in Sahara, you’ll anyway have a high speed internet.
The Virtual and Augmented Reality will become highly important
Our smartphones became our best friends as they let us access the internet in the real world. However, the future belongs to nexgen devices capable of creating a world where anything is possible. We already can see the applications of Virtual Reality in forms of Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.
Your Job May Be Taken By a Machine
Look around you, we’re already surrounded by machines capable of doing various manual tasks. In the future, machines will be able to accomplish high-level and intellectual tasks. The need to work could be decreased with the availability of jobs. That’s why it’s highly important to find a balance to avoid challenges with joblessness and unbalanced resource distribution. Nevertheless, these little drawbacks can’t minimize the importance of a richer and more connected world.
Great Improvements in Healthcare Industry
One of the fields which would be influenced by the internet is Healthcare. WIth micro technology development, implantable devices would become a usual thing. Having combined them with the IoT, we’d be able to achieve outstanding results. It’d be easy to prevent various diseases as doctors would always be alerted by these devices. They’d be capable of collecting and processing data in real time over the internet. As a result, the population will be healthier as never before, with a much longer lifespan.
The Full Integration of The Internet
In the future, the Internet won’t be a place where we go to login in our social media, find funny videos with cats, or searching some information. In general, the terms “going online” or “looking on the Internet” for something won’t exist anymore as future technologies will be capable of creating an environment where everyone will be constantly online.
A More Comprehensive Recorder of Our Daily Life
We’ll have the big picture of how our friends, family, or other people spend their time (if they want to share this information with us). This will absolutely change the way we think about people, communicate with them, or establish trust. As a result, the concepts of “failure” and “success” of communication will be inevitably changed. This idea belongs to Judith Donath, who’s the founder of the Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. Most of her life she spent writing papers about various aspects of the internet and its social impact.
Consisting of Different Networks
The Internet will consist of several networks. Some of them will require from you a verified authentication to access. The main goal of other networks will be to preserve your privacy and anonymity. The Internet will be the same but at the same time quite different. The future problems with privacy, security, and cyber policy will make us connect to separate channels controlled by a number of several protocols.
It Has Never Been Easier to Get Education
Even at the current stage of Internet evolution, we’ve had such resources as Wikipedia, Coursera, and Khan Academy. The Internet provides us with all necessary opportunities to get a decent education at no price (disregarding the fact that you’ll anyway have to pay for the internet:)). Many researchers are sure that these resources will be getting better and better over time. Imagine how universal access to all human knowledge will impact humanity!
The Dark Market
So far, we talked only about the advantages of the future internet. However, everything could be entirely different. Imagine our world as a big black market without boundaries, where everything will be available online for a certain price. Cyber terrorism will become a usual thing. Finally, people will forget about privacy, confidentiality or anonymity. Digital criminal networks will become an asylum for terrorists and other scammers. Your safety would depend only on your skills and knowledge.
Internet on Other Planets
For now, Earth is the only planet where you may access the Internet. But scientists promise that by 2030 we’ll be able to connect from Mars! In the near future, we’ll start Mars colonization and the first settlers will need the Internet to communicate with their family and friends. Having launched the satellites around the Mars will allow them to transmit Internet data back and forth. Nevertheless, it’ll take about 24 minutes to transmit data back to Earth (that’s only one way!).
The Bottom Line
All the predictions described are possible but that doesn’t mean the internet will look this way. Historically, only a few predictions about the future technology come true. Frequently, they tend to take shape in the way we don’t really expect. No one is actually able of accurately foreseeing of how the internet will look like in future. However, we can be fairly certain that the Internet may absolutely differ from the the current version.
