22 years ago, email and the fledgling world wide web were both limited, English-only, text-only technologies.  With dreams of someday getting pictures of my grandchildren by email, I worked with Ned Freed and others to define MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), a format standard that put pictures, sounds, non-English text, and more into a form that everyone could use. 

I’ve watched with awe as the Internet’s explosive growth has brought us to a time when MIME is probably used over a trillion times per day, in essentially every web page and email message.  Closely observing the way these technologies have evolved so far has given me some strong hunches about what we should expect next.

Over the last 25 years, the web and the Internet have instigated a tremendous change in how we share, access and consume information, buy, sell and express ourselves. A world without the Web is almost unimaginable and this has all happened in an astonishingly short space of time. The Web is the killer app for the Internet. Today, there are surely very few people in the developed world untouched by it.

As Internet capabilities continue to grow, what do the next 25 years have in store? As it stands today, we are lacking a coordinated international effort when it comes to Internet governance. Whether or not we establish such governance will largely determine if we can look forward to a future in which the Web continues to change the world for the better, or leads us in the other direction. 

The kinds of alternatives we will need to choose between are exemplified by three emerging topics and technologies.

1. Healthcare: Here we could see tiny implantable web-enabled devices becoming the norm. These devices would have great benefits, from being able to help detect and prevent diseases by alerting medical professionals to vitamin deficiencies, irregular cell counts or even degrading organ functioning. These same devices though will need to be well protected to ensure patients are not put at potentially life-threatening risk should access to them fall into the wrong hands.
2. Crime prevention: Today we are in the middle of a high profile, international data privacy debate and discussion about surveillance technology. But what will we have to contend with in the next 25 years as Internet capabilities continue to advance? Surveillance cameras and other technology will continue to radically shrink in size and cost. This will mean we can expect to find cameras and tracking equipment everywhere in the world – even embedded in our clothing, enabling us to record everything.

   On the one hand, this recording of our every move could result in a major decrease in crime as criminals will be acutely aware that they are always being ‘watched.’ But, on the other, unfiltered surveillance may also mean a rise in intrusive snooping from government agencies, corporations, and other entities. We’ll need to carefully consider how such surveillance technologies should be used or controlled.

3. Technology’s impact on manufacturing: This week, there has been widespread coverage of a survivor of a serious motorbike accident having pioneering surgery to reconstruct his face using a series of 3D printed parts, making the UK one of the world’s pioneers in using it in this way. As 3D printing becomes ever more cheaply available, people will print items at home, using designs available over the network that would require experts and specialist machinery today.

   This could also give rise to a boom in home invention. But producing for yourself everything you need on your own 3D printer from designs you license from the inventor could significantly impact traditional manufacturing.

   A 2013 paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne, of the University of Oxford, stated 47% of all jobs could be automated in the next two decades. What would this mean for the UK workforce? Our expectations of production and manufacturing will change as we see a further shift to an economy based, not on the production and supply of physical objects, but digital ones.

The World Wide Web has already transformed our society. Looking back over the last 25 years, I doubt anyone could have predicted all of the progress we’ve seen up until this point. I certainly didn’t see everything. Looking forward, I’ve never gone wrong with predictions based on Moore’s Law, which defines the likely advances in technology, though not in the way we choose to use it.  (I know, there are recurring articles predicting the end of Moore’s Law, but they’ve all been wrong so far.)

It’s hard to say with certainty what will actually become reality in 25 years, but with continued levels of technological acceleration and Moore’s Law, the possibilities are seemingly endless.  We need to be careful to choose those innovations that will make the world a better place.  The hardest thing to predict is how our political systems will respond to such innovations.