The Future of the Internet

Many people would say that the human race entered the so called ‘information age’ – the age of the internet decades ago, but with the announced released of the first operating system to be designed since the internet: Google’s ‘Chrome OS’, are we only just truly entering an internet age?

The internet is incredibly young, little over a decade old, and I believe we should look at the internet today as aircraft were a decade after the Wright brother’s infamous flight – not even nearing the pinnacle of what will be achieved.

The internet is already incomprehensibly enormous and what I think is one of mankind’s greatest achievements – a collation of over 20 billion web pages and that’s excluding the pages hidden from access (estimated by BrightPlanet to be around 3.5 trillion pages). Google, the largest search engine, has only indexed some 3 billion pages or about 190 terabytes of information, by some estimates it would take over 300 years of indexing at the current rate to map the entire web – and that’s without any growth, which incidentally is around 10 million pages a day.

But newer technologies, primarily broadband fibre optics are opening more and more possibilities for a true ‘internet age’.  Mobile devices allow people to access the internet anywhere with satellite coverage. But it’s almost impossible to imagine the amount of information you have access to. 5 million terabytes? That’s quite hard to visualise, well... a terabyte is equivalent to 1000 gigabytes and a gigabyte equals 500,000 typewritten pages – about a small libraries worth. So just imagine the data is about 5 billion libraries worth… easy. 

In the future all your date on your hard drive will be stored online in so called ‘cloud’ computing. You will be able to access all your data from any computer anywhere with no risk of computer failure losing you all your documents or photos. Everything will run in your browser from word editors to games, practically eliminating the need for hard drives at all, except for basic system files. Obviously this technology is only just being developed and is limited – the obvious flaw being that an internet connection would be required to use it at all, but in a world of internet access everywhere this problem will become smaller as infrastructure develops. This is already possible, for all of you that haven’t check out Google Docs.

Then there is the computing developments, an example of which is the release of Wolfram|Alfra the ‘Computational knowledge engine that draws on multiple sources to answer user queries directly’. It is essentially one massive computer program which takes the users input and uses it to find relevant data from the terabytes of the web, try it out, its quite incredible. For example, insert a date to receive various data, including when the sun rose on that day and other fascinating detailed facts. It was said to be a potential Google killer, but as of yet has not really taken off.

Mobile internet is likely to become dominant in the future, leading experts predict that mobile networks will offer a one-gigabit-per-second-minimum speed by 2020. But much further afield and it become hard to predict how the internet will evolve. Perhaps a self conscious internet would eventually be possible? Or less far fetched – the spread of internet based advertising to everything, everywhere, designed to target you as a person.

Whatever the future, one thing is clear: the internet will continue to grow and be a basic feature of life for the foreseeable future.