Motherboard/Vice
The 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web
came and went yesterday, along with the requisite retrospectives and
predictions for the next quarter-century of innovation. But few reports
forecasting the future of the web pointed out that in the future, there
may not be a web. At least not as we know it now, as
place you “go” or “visit,” because the next generation of the internet
could be people themselves.
The "Internet of X" is a buzzphrase we're starting to hear a lot: Beyond the much-discussed Internet of Things, there's now the Internet of Pets, the Internet of Plants, and, most interestingly, the nascent Internet of Bodies.
In
other words, 25 years from now gadgets like smartphones, smartwatches,
augmented glasses, virtual reality headgear, and the myriad other
devices merging humans and the internet may be laughably antiquated.
Computers will become so tiny they can be embedded under the skin,
implanted inside the body, or integrated into a contact lens and stuck
on top of your eyeball.
Naturally,
those machines will be wifi-enabled, so it’s feasible that anything you
can do with your phone now you could do with your gaze or gestures in a
few decades. And maybe even more, as augmented reality and virtual
reality come out of infancy and proliferate beyond awkward and
cumbersome devices like Google Glass or the Oculus Rift.
Imagine
an implantable sensor in your arm that can display a person's contact
information when you shake their hand, or an augmented contact lens that
projects a map in front of your eyes as you walk around. It's not that
crazy; smart and augmented contacts are already in development, people are getting digital tattoos, biohackers are sticking computer chips under their skin, and there are several startups selling technology to annotate the world.
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