What will replace the Internet?

Ok, I cant resist. Here's what I think, not necessarily on the topic at the top of the thread, but consistent with the topic to which the thread has mutated.

Humans crave immortality and transcendance. Technology could make both of these possible. At least, the second one and, by extension, the first one.

Transcendance means something like becoming one with other beings.

There is no particular reason why this isnt possible. You just need to ensure that the communications bandwidth between people is sufficiently high.

One way to do this could be to inject nanobots into one's body which swim around to the brain. Once there, they have the capability to access your mind, to communicate its contents, or subsets of its contents, to the outside world, and to receive communications from the outside and embed it into your mind.

I dont think this is how it will actually be done: something else will come along that is better. But the point is: technically we can see one way of doing this, and it doesnt violate any particular laws of thermodynamics or similar.

What does transcendance mean? A good book that studies transcendance (but without explicitly saying so) is "A Fire Across the Deep" by Vernor Vinge.

My vision of transcendance is that your brain is suddenly part of a new, transcendant being. "You" no longer exist, but you did not die, you did not kill yourself, and your body and mind still exists. Merely, now you are part of something larger.

When your mind and body do actually die, of old age, you wont feel any loss because you wont actually be around as a single ego to notice the death process. The death of your body and mind will be somehting like the death of a single cell in your body, part of something larger.

The relevance to this thread is that two things need to happen to make it possible, and one of these involves something like the Internet:

1. we need technology to be able to read and write information directly from and to our mind's substrate.

2. we need very high bandwidth communications technology

If you want to contribute to this vision, this implies that two fields could directly accelerate its instantiation:
- nano research
- communications research

Azelda

Hehe check out my movie review of Robot Stories. The last short film deals with that subject.

Here's a summary of the shorts..
http://robotstories.net/synopsis.html

Depending on your definition, I don't think the Internet will be replaced either. The HTTP protocol has and will continue to morph into other things (none of which are as efficient as the original by the way) but the basic concept of intelligent two way networking is here to stay.

I think Snowcrash was a very good, but maybe not 100% accurate depiction of the future. Stephenson did a lot of research for it, and it shows.

I agree that the term "get on the internet" will disappear. A more common phrase might be "get off the net" which would have use for criminals who are trying to evade the law as well as people who are obsessive about their privacy. We are moving towards a system in which almost everything we do will be traceable, and it will be primarily the laws, as well as common courtesy for us not to know everything there is to know about one another.

Imagine a world in which there are laws that keep you from being prosecuted based on the contents of your grocery bags, purchases at the hardware store, etc, and yet having all the retailers you deal with with all the information necessary to conclude you are a terrorist. We stretch the Bill of Rights these days to include among other things a "Right to Privacy", but even if those words actually appeared in the document (they don't), it's hard to see how such a right will be able to exist in the high-tech future.

In the future, who will I be most concerned about having "my data", the US government?, the UN?, some local gambling or drug syndicate?, my employer?, or Walmart? It's hard to envision how it will be possible to live a normal existence in such a way that none of these entities know much about me. Existence will be enhanced for those who more or less agree with prevailing laws and customs. For others, I'm no so sure.

What will replace the internet? Hmmmm... that's easy. Laying in bed and sobbing uncontrollably