Future Tense — Conclusion

What is inter­est­ing here is that a lot of the trends we will see over the next few years are about blur­ring dis­tinc­tions between online and offline world. I used to joke around that I lived online and went to the real world just for power sources but, as a new gen­er­a­tion that con­sid­ers online appli­ca­tions a given and fails to see where those bound­aries are comes of age, we are going to see some major changes.

The first change I envi­sion is a gen­er­a­tional con­flict over rights and gov­er­nance on the Inter­net. I alluded to it in a pre­vi­ous entry but I am increas­ingly won­der­ing whether we are not see­ing the end of the care-free inter­net. As IPza­tion impacts more busi­nesses, they will ask for gov­ern­ment help and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion. Sim­i­larly, some busi­ness will flock to the Inter­net to avoid reg­u­la­tions (for exam­ple, one could see tele­vi­sion com­pa­nies pro­duc­ing edgier con­tent for the unreg­u­lated online medium than they do for the TV medium which, in the US, is under the watch­ful eyes of the FCC). IPza­tion allows for side­step­ping a lot of laws because it is in an area where few laws have been enforced.

The sec­ond change I believe will hap­pen is a move to a more con­nected set of data across all sys­tems. I cap­ture this trend as IPza­tion, a new word I coined to reflect the belief that every sys­tem will have an IP and the net will become the under­ly­ing infra­struc­ture for every form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. One of the down­side of this is that it will increase the poten­tial impact on such a crit­i­cal archi­tec­ture. One could envi­sion armies try­ing to take down por­tions of the net­work in coun­tries they are at war with. Sim­i­larly, one could see rad­i­cal groups or ter­ror­ists try to attack Inter­net infra­struc­tures to under­mine eco­nomic activ­ity. At the cur­rent time, lit­tle safe­guards are in place to present such cat­a­strophic attack but we’ve been saved by the fact that, while impor­tant in people’s lives, the net is not crit­i­cal yet.

The third change I see is a poten­tial fight between large net­work providers and users. As the net becomes a more crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, there will be a push to lower access cost to it to ensure that every­one is con­nected (some­thing known as clos­ing the dig­i­tal divide). How­ever, large net­work providers will see this as a unique oppor­tu­nity to solid­ify their power and their eco­nomic poten­tial and will fight any attempt at gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion. On the other hand, gov­ern­ments, see­ing that eco­nomic power, will want to move towards stronger reg­u­la­tions of the net. One other poten­tial out­come of all this would be that some users would start cre­at­ing a net infra­struc­ture out­side of the exist­ing one, only con­nect­ing it to the cur­rent Inter­net in a very loose fashion.

The fourth change I see is that soft­ware appli­ca­tions are going to become harder to pro­gram. As one injects the human ele­ment as a key actor in the devel­op­ment of a sys­tem, the level of com­plex­ity of that sys­tem will start get­ting to the point where it adapts to human behav­ior. The issue here is that such self-healing code (a dream at the cur­rent time but poten­tially a real­ity in the future) will evolve beyond human com­pre­hen­sion, not because they will become smarter than human but because they will rely on the col­lec­tive intel­li­gence of their user base, thus mak­ing it almost impos­si­ble for a sin­gle user to com­pre­hend how it works.

The fifth change I see is a large shift in eco­nomic value to vir­tual worlds. Elec­tronic games have already taken a sub­stan­tial chunk of money from more tra­di­tional form of enter­tain­ment. I sus­pect that they will actu­ally move beyond enter­tain­ment and start real­iz­ing some of the dreams or distopias envi­sioned in many sci­ence fic­tion books. There are already mil­lions of dol­lars going through those envi­ron­ments and thus, I would ven­ture to say that com­pa­nies in that space are cur­rently under­val­ued as peo­ple are still stuck in a mind­set that sees them as enter­tain­ment and not poten­tial busi­ness areas.

Those, of course, are long-term trends. In my view, I’ll con­sider myself lucky if I’m right within the scope of a decade. I sus­pect that those changes may take longer than a gen­er­a­tion to fully come through but either way, I will con­tinue writ­ing about them over the next few years.

This is the sixth arti­cle in a 6 part series. You can read the fol­low­ing parts here:

• Part 1: Intro
• Part 2: Always on
• Part 3: IPzation
• Part 4: Sensors
• Part 5: Par­tic­i­pa­tory Applications
• Part 6: Conclusion