Before you know it, the Internet will cease to exist. But it’s not what you think.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Chairman Eric Schmidt spoke during a panel in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, where he was asked for his thoughts on the future of the Internet. He said something that had turned heads: “the Internet will disappear.”
Schmidt explained that in the near future there will be an abundance of IP addresses, devices, sensors, wearables and other gadgets to interact with people that you won’t even sense it. Soon, the Internet will be an element of your presence every minute of the day.
“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,” added Schmidt, who was accompanied by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in the panel. “A highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world emerges.”
The Google head discussed how the Internet and tech industry will produce a tidal wave of jobs in the future rather than destroy an entire generation of employment opportunities. According to Schmidt, for every job created in the technology sector, there are seven more produced in the non-tech sector.
“It’s the same thing that happened when people stopped farming and started using tractors. They find new skills and services,” said Schmidt. “So while there is an enormous assumption that this time it’s different. That somehow no one is going to have a job in the world, and it’s just going to be the Davos elite who is going to have a good time and everyone else is going to be rioting is completely false.”
Finally, Schmidt talked about the matter of market dominance and there are so many durable tech platforms prevalent now and more will be coming in the future. He noted that consumers are witnessing a “reordering and a future reordering of dominance or leaders” due to the ubiquity of smartphone apps.
It remains unclear as to what the “smartphone app infrastructure” will look like in the future.
“A whole new set of players emerges to power smartphones, which are nothing but super-computers,” the Google chairman argued. “I view that as a completely open market at this point.”
Both Sandberg and Schmidt celebrated the Internet and purported how important it is for every person in the world to have the ability and means to access to the Internet.
