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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Tech­nol­o­gy Mat­ters

Digital Life in 2025

Ex­perts pre­dict the In­ter­net will be­come 'like elec­tric­i­ty' – less vis­i­ble, yet more deeply em­bed­ded in peo­ple's lives for good and ill

by

20140327

To mark the 25th an­niver­sary of the cre­ation of the World Wide Web, a new re­port can­vass­ing the views of more than 2,000 ex­perts, out­lines how dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy will evolve over the next decade.

The Pew Re­search Cen­tre re­port, part of a se­ries ti­tled, Dig­i­tal Life in 2025, com­piles imag­in­ings by 2,558 ex­perts who were asked an open-end­ed ques­tion about how tech­nol­o­gy will im­pact life by the year 2025. The re­spon­dents weighed in on the fu­ture of such con­cerns as pri­va­cy, cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty, the "In­ter­net of things," and net neu­tral­i­ty.

The study found that many ex­perts agreed on the gen­er­al out­lines of the tech­no­log­i­cal change that lies ahead, which is ex­pect­ed to cre­ate "a glob­al, im­mer­sive, in­vis­i­ble, am­bi­ent net­worked com­put­ing en­vi­ron­ment," by 2025.

In­ter­net will be­come 'like elec­tric­i­ty'

The biggest pre­dic­tion from the re­spons­es is that a decade from now the In­ter­net will be as ubiq­ui­tous as elec­tric­i­ty–we won't even no­tice it's there–"aug­ment­ed re­al­i­ty" and shar­ing in­for­ma­tion through wear­able de­vices will be­come the norm.

For­tu­nate­ly, most ex­perts sur­veyed be­lieve the re­sult of this con­nec­tiv­i­ty will be pos­i­tive. The ex­perts point­ed to a num­ber of promis­ing trends, like "in­tel­li­gent an­a­lyt­i­cal map­ping of the phys­i­cal and so­cial realms," that would make in­for­ma­tion, ed­u­ca­tion and en­ter­tain­ment much more wide­ly avail­able.

But they al­so ar­gued that the In­ter­net would con­tin­ue to dis­rupt tra­di­tion­al busi­ness mod­els, and will make it more dif­fi­cult for the world to ig­nore mas­sive dis­par­i­ties and so­cial prob­lems.

Of course, not all the pre­dic­tions about what our con­nect­ed world will bring are rosy. The ex­perts warn that "abus­es and abusers" will have an even larg­er play­ground. Some ex­perts ex­pressed con­cern about how ex­pand­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty might fos­ter in­creased sur­veil­lance, ter­ror, in­equal­i­ty, crime, and oth­er vi­o­la­tions of per­son­al and in­ter­per­son­al ethics

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