SXSW: The Internet As We Know It Is Gone, Says Amy Webb – 03/13/2023 – Market

The West’s attempts to promote a free internet have failed, and if there ever was a truly open global computer network, that time is over.

The sentence for what would be the end of the internet as we know it was given on Saturday (11) by the futurist Amy Webb in her speech at the technology and arts festival South by Southwest, in Austin, when she released the long-awaited report in the city of Texas your company’s annual forecast.

The document compiled by the Future Today Institute brings 666 trends over more than 800 pages, covering artificial intelligence, metaverse and web 3.0 and how these areas influence medicine, entertainment and governments.

The conflicting relationship between governments and the internet is a recurring theme in the document. Right on the first pages, the report questions whether this will be the year in which the States will be able to reduce the power of big techs, citing as an example the attempts of US congressmen to separate the part of Google ads from the rest of the company and also the new regulations that the European Union can impose on large platforms.

In this context, data came to be seen as synonymous with power in geopolitics. “Country leaders see data as critical to competitive advantage, while technology companies depend on it to thrive and grow,” the document states.

“This positions big tech and the government as adversaries in France, the US and the UK, while China’s big tech companies are reluctant companions of Chinese Communist Party leaders.”

Another topic of the moment, artificial intelligence, also had a lot of prominence. According to the study, this decade will be marked by the use of generative artificial intelligence, that is, systems that create new content, concepts and ideas while communicating with users —the popular ChatGPT is perhaps the best-known example of this type of tool.

If applied to science, generative artificial intelligence should start to develop new proteins, antibodies and drugs by the end of this year, according to the report. In the creative sector, artificial intelligence ceases to play a supporting role and is now used to compose new songs and scripts.

“Artificial intelligence will weave itself into most of our digital experiences,” said the analyst.

Webb also pointed to the fragmentation of individuals on the internet, stating that people will have several digital versions of themselves, each one aimed at a specific purpose, which will generate an ever-increasing gap between who we are in the physical world and on online platforms. .

Finally, the report also points to the growth of interfaces that will compete with smartphones, such as smart glasses and contact lenses, but points out that these tools will still take a long time to be mass adopted.

The study has been launched annually since 2007 and has great penetration in the market, reaching more than one million downloads in each edition, according to the Future Today Institute website.

Rather than delve into a topic, the study is a large compilation of predictions of what could happen with technology and changes in the area that had a major impact —previous reports gave a lot of prominence to NFTs, for example.