(Newswire.net — January 23, 2015) Davos, Switzerland — Questioned by journalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, about the future of the Internet, Google guru Eric Schmidt gave an unexpected answer.
“I will answer very simply that the internet will disappear,” Schmidt said on Thursday.
Schmidt said that there will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that we are wearing, and all those things will be interacting in a way that we wont even notice. So the disappearance is not being without it, the Internet would become as the “air we breath” without thinking of it.
“Things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time,” he explained. “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.”
At ‘The Future of the Digital Economy’ panel in Davos, Schmidt concluded, “A highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world emerges.”
CEO Vittorio Colao, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, joined Google executive Schmidt at the panel agreeing the Internet will become the necessity as “the water or the oxygen” in an “ultra-dense connectivity situation.”
A group of Harvard professors, however, said the future is a much grim Orwellian world because of the Internet, AFP reported on Thursday.
“Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible…How we conventionally think of privacy is dead,” said Margo Seltzer, a computer science professor at Harvard University.
“It’s not whether this is going to happen, it’s already happening,” said Sophia Roosth, a Harvard’s genetics researcher. “We live in a surveillance state today,” she said.
The Harvard greyheads said in the future, mosquito-sized robots will fly around stealing samples of people’s DNA. The privacy as we have it today will disappear entirely, they said.
“We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism,” concluded Roosth.