Digital life in 2025

I came across a report entitled "Digital life in 2025", that was produced in Elon University. 

Some of the predictions are:

1. Information sharing over the Internet will be so effortlessly interwoven into daily life that it will become invisible, flowing like electricity, often through machine intermediaries.
2.  The spread of the Internet will enhance global connectivity that fosters more planetary relationships and less ignorance.
3. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data will make people more aware of their world and their own behavior. 
4. Augmented reality and wearable devices will be implemented to monitor and give quick feedback on daily life, especially tied to personal health.
5. Political awareness and action will be facilitated and more peaceful change and public uprisings like the Arab Spring will emerge. 
6.  The spread of the ‘Ubernet’ will diminish the meaning of borders, and new ‘nations’ of those with shared interests may emerge and exist beyond the capacity of current nation-states to control. 
7.  The Internet will become “the Internets” as access, systems, and principles are renegotiated
8. An Internet-enabled revolution in education will spread more opportunities, with less money spent on real estate and teachers.
9.  Dangerous divides between haves and have-nots may expand, resulting in resentment and possible violence.
10.   Abuses and abusers will ‘evolve and scale.’ Human nature isn’t changing; there’s laziness, bullying, stalking, stupidity, pornography, dirty tricks, crime, and those who practice them have new capacity to make life miserable for others.
11.  Pressured by these changes, governments and corporations will try to assert power -- and at times succeed – as they invoke security and cultural norms. 
12.  People will continue – sometimes grudgingly -- to make tradeoffs favoring convenience and perceived immediate gains over privacy; and privacy will be something only the upscale will enjoy.
13.  Humans and their current organizations may not respond quickly enough to challenges presented by complex networks.
14.  Most people are not yet noticing the profound changes today’s communications networks are already bringing about; these networks will be even more disruptive in the future. 
15.  Foresight and accurate predictions can make a difference; ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’

I like the last one.  I think that the rest are also thought provoking.   Details about each of these predictions can be found in the full report - enjoy!

World Stream computing to replace the Web

I came across an interesting article by David Gelernter.  Gerlenter, a Yale Professor, who co-introduced the term "lifestreams" in the 199o-ies, proceeds in the same spirit and talks about "worldstreams" which he defines as a collection of heterogeneous real-time messaging stream  (may be thought as a collection of streams).   His prophecy is that this will be a disruptive technology for the web, browsers, search, operating systems.  We will no longer surf in sites and search the web,  but we'll browse the worldstream, and ask the worldstream to bring us what we want, in the time we want it, instead of search for it.    The event processing grand challenge, which was part of the event processing manifesto,  and talked about the "event fabric" was similar in nature, but the manifesto authors did not claim that the web will be replaced,  it will probably not happen in one step anyway.    However -- certainly interesting observation, and promises bright future...