From Internet to Ubernet by 2025

By: American Decency Staff

In just one decade, the Internet will be a “seamless part of how we live our everyday lives,” according to a new report from the Pew Research Internet Project.

Or it could be the means to a “very dystopian world that is also profoundly inegalitarian.”

The possible scenarios were based on the prognostications of thousands of experts on science and the Web, including Joe Touch, director of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute.

“The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives. We won’t think about ‘going online’ or ‘looking on the Internet’ for something – we’ll just be online, and just look,” he said.

But another perspective comes from John Markoff, senior writer for the Science section of the New York Times.

“What happens the first time you answer the phone and hear from your mother or a close friend, but it’s actually not, and instead, it’s a piece of malware that is designed to social engineer you?” he asked.

“What kind of a world will we have crossed over into? I basically began as an Internet utopian (think John Perry Barlow), but I have since realized that the technical and social forces that have been unleashed by the microprocessor hold out the potential of a very dystopian world that is also profoundly inegalitarian. I often find myself thinking, ‘Who said it would get better?,’” said Markoff.

The report by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie was done in conjunction with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. It canvassed hundreds of experts about the future “of such things as privacy, cybersecurity, the ‘Internet of Things’ and net neutrality.”

Read more at http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/03/from-internet-to-ubernet-by-2025/#wiEVVCjyiAStmTe3.99

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