Institute For The Future

For most of its history, using the Internet has involved conforming and contorting to the logic, architecture, and input/output mechanisms of machine networks. Humans have genuflected before immobile computer screens, tethered our limbs to mice and keyboards, and craned our necks to use the smartphone screens in our hands. The human experience of the Internet, however, will change dramatically in the next ten years.  The technical and network foundations are being laid that will allow humans to interface with the network much more naturally and effectively. The new Internet geometry will allow permeability, flexibility, and the capacity for learning. And while it will continue to extend human capacities, it will do so in way that retains human proportions

On Wednesday and Thursday, May 16 and 17, we host our annual client-only Technology Horizons conference, where we immerse ourselves in the emerging capacities and communicative habits offered by the next-generation Internet and introduce our map of the Internet Human | Human Internet. The map explores how, as impressive as they are on their own, combinations of foundational internet technologies will produce radically new capacities for productivity, connectivity, and communication and create new kinds of experiences in our homes, workplaces, and other contexts of our daily lives. 

The conference is an opportunity for convergence between leading thinkers, makers, and stakeholders in the future internet experience. In addition to the map, the conferences features exercises designed to amplify the experience of combinatorial innovation in small, experimental bursts aimed at making the building blocks of the future human Internet experience relevant for organizations and their domains of expertise.

For everyone who can’t make it to the conference, you can participate online by following the hashtag #InternetHuman. We’ll be tweeting live from the conference under the handle @iftf.

Overview of Wednesday May 16th:

The day starts with Tech Horizons Research Director Jake Dunagan (@dunagan23) introducing our new Human Internet | Internet Human map and explaining how we’ll be exploring its ideas throughout the conference. 

Distinguished Fellow Mike Liebhold (@mikeliebhold) explains combinatorial innovation and the core technology forecasts that make up the map. 

In three panel sessions throughout the day, Research Affiliate Henrik Bennetsen (@henrikbennetsen), Research Manager Devin Fidler (@devinfidler), and Research Directors Lyn Jeffery (@LynJ) and David Pescovitz will present overviews of each of four action potentials: flow, sense, control, and emerge. Each of these panels describes how the characteristics and dynamics of the four action potentials will help shape the Internet over the next decade by featuring leading voices, designers, and contributors. 

In the Flow panel, Henrik is joined by Scott Jenson (@scottjenson), Creative Director at Frog Design and Linden Tibbets (@ltibbets), Founder of If This Then That (ifttt.com). Both Scott and Linden describe the opportunities and challenges of getting technologies to work together to create seamless experiences for human interaction.

The Emerge panel captures the potential of coordinated services and activities, and how the Internet will develop in unexpected and transformative ways. Devin is joined by Anand Kulkarni (@polybot) of Mobile Works and Greg Little from oDesk to look deeply into the algorithms and processes that will  define the design and distribution of organizational tasks.

David introduces Sense as the potential for human-machine interfaces to leverage all of our human senses, making both more intuitive and more amplified. Janna Anderson (@JANNAQ), Director of Imagining the Internet at Elon University presents the results of her research looking at the accelerating impact of networked technology and how it will change our lives and our world. 

Lyn opens the Control action potential panel by asking how personal identity and privacy are impacting the Internet as concerns over content, access, and security direct, restrain, and redirect online and offline activities. Lyn is joined by Christopher Carfi (@ccarfi), VP of Social Business Strategy for Ant’s Eye View and Mark Belinsky (@mbelinsky), Founder and Co-director of Digital Democracy.

The Smule Band closes out the first day. As creators of apps that let anyone become a musician with their devices, they treat us to a performance and a group-wide collaborative composition. 

Overview of Thursday, May 17th:

Our second day opens with reflections on the first day, helping us begin to see some of the stretching and rippling in the next ten years of the Internet. Jake builds on these insights with some of the critical tensions. As public controversies, these are tensions that will introduce new actors and new forms of human and non-human Internet experiences at the intersections of governance, education, technology, development, and health.

Mike Liebhold is later joined by Mike Roberts, Principal with The Darwin Group and former CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Reflecting on the history of the Internet as a way to foresee the future, Mike discusses some of what wasn't anticipated as well as how the surviving principles of interoperability, distributed intelligence, dumb networking, and loose coupling made the Internet what it is today.

The capstone for the conference is delivered by Mitch Kapor, Founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the Level Playing Field Institute. He interrogates the role of capital flows in shaping the future by looking at how science fiction and science fact are influencing future human Internet infrastructure and what it means for education, technology, and human capacity.

We are very excited about the new research we will be presenting at the conference and hope you'll be following along on Twitter with hashtag #InternetHuman.

To learn more about the IFTF's Technology Horizons Program, contact Sean Ness ([email protected]).