Future of the Internet

Anatoly Kirichenko
Future of the Internet

If we think about the Internet and compare it to what it was 10 years ago, it hard to believe that we have gone so far. Today, Google makes obtaining information so easy and so efficient that it takes almost no time at all. If we are sitting and watching a sitcom and decide that we want to know the name or biography of a certain actor, we can know instantly, we can see all the photos of this actor, and we can read the biography within seconds of the search. If we are going to travel somewhere and want to know how to drive, which places to go to, and the best way of getting there, we can use Google maps to quickly figure this out with ease and efficiency. Today, the Internet provides us with possibilities that were unheard of just a decade ago. The biggest and most important step that Google has taken so far is the consolidation of all the worlds’ information. For thousands of years, this has been nothing more than a dream, and people did not actually believe that such a thing is possible. Today, Google is making extensive efforts to copy and scan all books to consolidate all the Web’s information, and to make it very user friendly and easily searchable. Today, it already seems that we have almost achieved this, but there is obviously even more progress to be made.

Google has made searching so easy that we often become fascinated by the possibilities. Using Google Earth, we can zoom into any country in the world and look at specific streets, monuments, buildings, and forests. We can see the distance from one place to another, and we can know exactly how long it will take us to get from one point to another using various forms of transportation. These advancements have made traveling, researching, and just about all other activities much more efficient and more effective. It is hard to imagine what Google has planned in the future, and where the internet will end up years from today.

With the speed of progress today, it is inconceivable that the way we search today will be the same way we will search 10 years from now. There will be more radical changes, so radical that the Internet as we know it will be vastly different. Information searching will be so efficient that we probably won’t even need to scroll through Google results and find the information we need. Instead, there will be some program that reads our mind and search information based on what we are thinking. Then, even without a computer screen, the information will somehow be made available to us and we will be able to use it without even making any effort.

I think that the biggest problem from this will be the loss of human ability and functions. For example, Google makes it so easy to search for information and to get directions that people forget all about their ability to look information up in a textbook or to use their sense of direction to get somewhere. Instead, everything is made so much easier, and I think that making everything much easier is also making everyone much stupider. Many skills that we have had in the past are now lost because of technological innovations that take place. For example, from an intellectual standpoint, people feel as though they don’t really need to learn much or know too much information because everything is so easily available online. Instead of reading about something and taking time out of the day to get to understanding it, people just want the easy way out—to find it on Google and real a paragraph, thinking that they understand the subject. While the Internet has brought many advantages to our lives, it has also led to plenty of disadvantages, only one of which is the loss of our intelligence and our ability to function independently of computers.

In the future, the way things are going, it appears that Google and other innovative technology companies will continue making efforts in the direction of making everything much “easier.” We will be much less education and much less interested in learning and memorizing information, which is very ironic, because by that time, there will be more organized information than at any other point in history. This enormous amount of information becomes overwhelming, and it begins to discourage people from actually learning things on their own. Instead of learning and memorizing information, people will decide that they can just go online and get the information instead of actually putting in any sort of effort into getting the information into their permanent memory.

The future of the Internet will probably bring great advantages with it—things will be even more efficient, we will have information even quicker than we do today (if that’s even possible), and all activities such as traveling and planning trips will be made easier. Much will be lost, however, since our dependency on computers is taking away from our ability to reason and to use our brain for our own purposes. It is my hope that the further advancement of the Internet brings with it more advantages and as few as possible of the disadvantages.