Imagining the Internet Thinking ahead about the future can help make it a better place to be Elon University and Pew Internet Project

Imagining the Internet offers a KidZone, Teachers’ Tips, a history of communications, and a look at the most fascinating scenarios for the future. It also includes predictions from today and yesterday.

The Imagining the Internet project started as a collection of predictions of the future of the internet made by people between 1990 and 1995, in the “awe” stage of this new communications/information tool. People like Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) and others who cared about the knowledge explosion the internet would unleash, are collected - more than 4,000 predictions from about a thousand people - voices of the early internet. Early ’90s Predictions

The site has brief biographies about the many prescient people who made remarks that tell us something about our future.

Different words or phrases may precede a printed prediction - the “cue” words that tell a reader a prediction is to follow. These are also included on the site.

The Early ’90s predictions are sorted into categories, which makes it easy for people who use the site to find predictions that are tied to particular topics of interest.

People who want to search through the Early ’90s predictions can do so in a variety of ways. The site also contains thousands of predictions made today by people from all over the world, and it includes predictions found in surveys of internet experts. More predictions are found in the “Voices of the People” area - to which you can contribute.

The Elon/Pew internet surveys ask technology stakeholders to comment on important issues for the future. The results yield an enormous amount of revealing predictive data. A great deal of the material is posted online on the Imagining the Internet site.

The fall 2004 Elon/Pew survey of more than a thousand people making thousands of predictions yielded the trends above.

The 2004 and 2006 studies show that what people in the 1990s were saying about possibilities and threats to our future still hold true today…

Leaders of the early 1990s knew the decisions made in the developmental stages of the internet would come to change people's sense of self, of space, of community, and of relationships – even down to the molecular level.

“Centers are everywhere and margins are nowhere.” - Marshall McLuhan Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan's global village, in which "centers are everywhere and margins are nowhere" had come to pass. This new technology would not only reshape our social spaces, its ability for embeddedness would also come to consume us.

The transportation, energy, and communications improvements that have brought comfort, wealth, and prosperity over the decades since the 1700s have made people dependent upon burgeoning numbers of networks to accomplish their daily tasks – including an extensive power grid that makes it all work.

Microelectromechanical system - MEMS Artificial intelligence is taking on more and more duties as developments allow it to become invisibly stitched into the networked world.

The dystopian view is taken by the man known as the Unabomber - jailed for his anti- technology acts of violence.

Professor Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon said in a 1990s interview in Wired magazine that by 2030 robots will be able to learn and master skills and network information with other robots. Thus, the task of understanding the world will be shared among millions of robot minds; by 2040 robots will take over all work, and industry will become hyper-efficient. Humans don't have to work, they live in luxury, everything is really run by robots, and at this point, anything could happen...

Moravec is an advocate of foresight. In the same Wired interview, he said:

Some people see the Internet as an early manifestation of what is to become a collective consciousness, a neobiological civilization with a global mind – a "godmind," or an unlocatable, omnipresent entity. They say Earth's complex systems are about to be exponentially raised to untraceable levels of interlocking, interweaving complexities. Danny Hillis, an inventor of massively parallel computing said…

The following ideas have been suggested as future potentialities by experts at think tanks and other foresight organizations. These are generalized from the body of literature available in early 2006, when this program was prepared. It is a round-up of fairly conservative scenarios…

The companion book to the site offers an in-depth study of the predictive statements collected by the work initiated by Elon and Pew. It is a handy compendium of the most telling predictions.