The Internet Will Disappear, Says Google Pundit Eric Schmidt

By R. Siva Kumar - 25 Jan '15 00:52AM

There was one sentence that stood out at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. When Google guru Eric Schmidt talked about the growth of the web, he said: "I will answer very simply that the internet will disappear."

"There will be so many IP addresses, ... so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, 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. A highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world emerges," Schmidt concluded.

He speculated that sensors and devices will be so widespread that we won't be aware of them. In fact, some rooms will even begin to "personalise themselves" as we walk in, he said, according to dailymail.com.

It was a panel called "The Future of the Digital Economy" in which the speakers included Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Vittorio Colao too put in his word, calling the Internet water and oxygen in an "ultra-dense connectivity situation."

Yet, a number of Harvard professors outlined a world that was different, and developed in a new way. "Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible... How we conventionally think of privacy is dead," said Margo Seltzer, a professor in computer science at Harvard University, according to rt.com.

Agreeing, another generics scientist, Sophia Roosth concurred: "It's not whether this is going to happen, it's already happening... We live in a surveillance state today."

She talked about a strange and deadly era, in which there are mosquito-sized robots that buzz around and steal some parts of DNA, she said. "We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism," she pointed out, referring to "witch-hunts" during the Second Red Scare in the 1950s in America.