The Internet in 2020

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is out with its third report, "Imagining the Internet: A History and a Forecast" today, including hundreds of respondents from the field of computer technology with their thoughts on what the Internet will look like 11 years from now. From the executive summary, here are some key findings:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• 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.

Check out this site, http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/, which includes the report.