What will technology look like in 2050? “It’s the internet, stupid”

The Economist asks what technology do you think will transform our future most significantly, and why? The answer is the same as it has been for the last 30 years — it’s the internet, stupid.

Let me explain why.

30 years ago, when I was 12, I connected for the first time. Nowadays kids are connecting practically from birth, so maybe I missed out on 11 years of native internet use but otherwise I’m an early adopter.

Accoustic Couplers was a way of connecting your computer to the digital network

Since that time I’ve seen the speed of my access to the internet increase from 300 “bits per second” to 22 million “bits per second”. That’s a 74,000 fold increase!

But not only speed, the internet has also increased in size.

The internet started as a military technology called ARPANET and made its way into the universities before emerging as the “World Wide Web” and general appeal.

Back in 1977 you could draw a map of the whole internet.

While in 1977 you could fit the whole internet on a piece of paper, now there are 17.6 billion devices connected to the internet. You’d struggle to map the internet these days. Even if you could fit 100 on a sheet of paper that’s still a stack of paper 88km high!

So the internet has got bigger and faster. I think it’s a fair to extrapolate and expect that pattern to continue in the next 30 years.

But I don’t think what we see from the internet today — getting answers to our questions and communicating with our friends — is the real impact of the internet — we have yet to realise its full civic and political impact.

At a hackathon with Mark Zuckerberg in 2009 he said to us “we’re just at 1% of what Facebook can do”. Now Facebook is not the whole internet but it feels pretty similar architecturally. If Facebook is only at 1% what is the internet at?

Take a look at this typical model of how we organise ourselves today:

This diagram shows authority — everyone reports upwards.

Most human organisations today have this hierarchical, top down structure. Authority is given at the top and devolved down the organisation.

This same structure is seen in charities, businesses, churches, mosques and governments. It’s been that way for millenia.

Now look at the internet diagram from 1977 again. There is no hierarchical structure.

Which of the nodes has the authority? Who is in charge? No-one.

And yet it has grown from hundreds to billions of nodes in 40 years? What’s going on?

All the other technologies we are getting excited about right now, the blockchain to disrupt finance, the internet of things to disrupt our homes, artificial intelligence to disrupt our work. They are all being built on a flat non-hierarchical internet.

That means, we’re not building the future on the authoritarian structure of the last few millennia, we’re building it on the technical equivalent of a cell based terrorist network.

What joins the nodes on this network is not devolved authority but shared belief. What you believe suddenly matters more than who you work for or where you live.

Arab Spring, Hackers, Beliebers — believe me we’re at less than 1% of the tribes the internet will transfer power to.

So when you ask me, what technology will dominate our lives in 2050. I already know the answer — it’s the internet, stupid.