Google’s chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt has predicted the internet has had its day and will fast disappear.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Scmidt told delegates “that the internet will disappear” and, he believed, most of us won’t even realise it’s happening.
“There will be so many IP addresses … so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”
Schmidt’s argument – known as the “internet of things” – argues that technology will so pervade every aspect of our lives, from talking fridges, internet-abled watches, to self-driving cars; they work so seamlessly on their own that it will ultimately make the internet as we know it redundant.
However, not everyone has endorsed Schmidt’s futuristic and rose-coloured tech future. Last week, US news site AFP quoted two Harvard professors who offer an all the more dystopic view of how we’ll engage with technology.
“Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible. How we conventionally think of privacy is dead,” said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University.
Sophia Roosth, a Harvard’s genetics researcher, said: “It’s not whether this is going to happen, it’s already happening… We live in a surveillance state today.”
“We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism,”said Roosth referring to the “witch-hunts” of suspected communists in 1950s America. Roosth believed we’re fast moving into an age we’re technology means our basic privacy is dead and believed governments and corporations would eventually get hold of blood samples and even our DNA to know absolutely everything about us.
