Recent release from the PEW internet project titled The Future of the Internet III reporting on a survey of experts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, and the structure of the Internet itself improves.  They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

Key Findings from the report:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and
• copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected, and the results will be mixed in
• terms of social relations.
• “Next-generation” engineering of the network to improve the current Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

PDF download of the report available here.