I magine, in the not-too-distant future, a world where the internet becomes a part of everything.
WELCOME TO THE MATRIX: Internet visionaries Steve Crocker, left, and Vint Cerf, appearing via the internet, at a discussion moderated by Pichai Chuensuksawadi, centre, editor-in-chief of the ‘Bangkok Post’ last month to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the founding of the ‘‘.th’’ top-level domain name in Thailand. PHOTO: COURTESY OF PICHAI CHUENSUKSAWADI
The vision implies a planet undergirded by some all-penetrating computing and communications force somehow imbedded into the appliances we use, the vehicles we ride, the buildings we inhabit, and the clothes we wear.
Sound possible? Well, it's already happening, say two people who should know _ a pair of men who actually had a hand in inventing the internet.
High school mates, college chums, professional colleagues, and life-long friends from Van Nuys, California, Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf are widely recognised as two of the ''founding fathers'' of the internet. A year after their induction as inaugural members of the Internet Hall of Fame, the pair took part in an event held in Bangkok on June 6 to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the founding of the ''.th'' top-level domain name in Thailand, organised by the THNIC Foundation.
Mr Crocker engaged a who's who of Thai internet heavyweights in a lively discussion moderated by Bangkok Post editor-in-chief Pichai Chuensuksawadi, while Mr Cerf arrived, fittingly enough, on-screen via the internet from his home in the US state of Virginia.
Mr Crocker, who is chairman of the board of ICANN, a Los Angeles-based organisation which oversees the sharing of internet infrastructure resources, believes the net will eventually recede into the background of everyday life much like another humankind-altering invention of profound utility _ electricity.
''The internet will disappear,'' he says, matter of factly. ''We don't say we are 'on-electricity' any more, and at some point in the future will stop saying 'on-line' since the internet will always be with you, and will be a part of everything.''
Fellow net pioneer Mr Cerf, vice-president and chief internet evangelist for Google, concurs. Recalling Mark Weiser's 1980s futuristic notion of ''ubiquitous computing'', he posits that rapidly advancing voice recognition technology is the game-changer that will make the fantastical notion a reality in the near term.
Fashionably sporting the latest pair of Google Glass, a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display, Mr Cerf vividly demonstrated the capacity of having a smartphone-like hands-free ability to interact with the internet by using natural voice commands and body gestures only, with no keyboards.
''I just took your picture,'' he informs the five-star hotel ballroom audience in Bangkok, ''and I'm looking at it now on my laptop.''
In a similar way, practically everything we will use in the future will have a computing capability, Mr Cerf predicts. Importantly, this power will be completely ''submerged'' underneath everything we do, so the focus of people's attention will gravitate to the application of the new devices that just happen to be enabled by the internet, he says.
Picture smart automobiles will be manufactured with nanotechnology particles empowered by the world wide web as part of a real-life ''auto matrix''. Such self-aware vehicles would function and communicate car-to-car, car-to-roadway, and car-to-the-internet. Jaw-dropping technologies like 3-D printing and digital fabrication at the molecular level will propel science fiction to science fact.
In the realm of computing, Mr Cerf is royalty; an erudite high-tech oracle who sees what's next like few others. He gained renown as co-designer over 40 years ago of the TCP/IP protocols which remain the core architecture of the internet, and in 2005 he was awarded America's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given to any US citizen.
Coining the phrase ''the grand arc of history'' to underscore how time has a way of transforming ''expensive, big and impersonal'' technologies into being ''inexpensive, small, and personal'', both scientists cite the profusion of the mobile smart phone as just the start of what's to come. Mr Cerf says: ''Six-and-a-half billion mobile phones are now in use around the world and only 30% of those are smart phones. Over three billion people are now connected to the internet.''
He praised the Thai government for declaring its adoption of the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6), the new internet protocol capable of providing an identification and location system for virtually all human-made objects. Mr Cerf stresses its importance: ''It is capable of supporting 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses which is what we will need when literally tens of billions of devices are part of this network environment.''
Indeed, the ''Internet of Things'' where all objects _ from tea cups in the pantry to satellites in space _ could be linked online, launching humanity forward in untold ways. Such unbridled connectivity will bring undeniable pressures, and evolving standards are not always easy to predict. Moreover, new technology often precedes social norms and conventions, experts say, and this becomes trickier when it crosses international horizons. It begs the question: Can we make sure our future never becomes the dystopian ''Matrix is everywhere'' net of Neo and Morpheus?
Mr Crocker notes that bad behaviour in one jurisdiction can create victims in another country. So international agreement as to what constitutes unacceptable behaviour will become necessary through a mixture of moral suasion and legal methods, starting at the regional level.
''What we see from the internet is that the precursor for global norms is a faster rise of regional norms,'' Mr Crocker said.
Nation-states, in particular, will need to adjust to the introduction of internet technologies that challenge existing boundaries.
''We are going to have to cope with a Post-Westphalian view of the way our world functions and recognise that countries cannot exercise full sovereignty if there are things that happen within their borders that affect others,'' Mr Cerf says..
Mr Crocker illustrates the internet's timeless and magnetic power with an anecdote from yesteryear. As a graduate student at UCLA in the late 1960s, he was a member of the group of researchers who sent the first electronic message between two computers of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, the forerunner of today's internet. ''People wanted in back then when it was just starting,'' he confesses, of the privileged few who had sole access to the revolutionary computer-to-computer communication network, ushering in the ability to send emails.
''The very idea of being disconnected from that capability was simply unpalatable,'' Mr Crocker said.
In a similar way, he says, the combination of technology, resources and decreased cost will one day afford humanity universal inclusion with the internet. ''The digital divide is the last piece of this grand narrative puzzle,'' he said.
Google's chief internet evangelist hopes that any future concerns of content are addressed through critical thinking rather than censorship and suppression. Global sharing of knowledge, free expression and inventing new applications are undeniable positives, and humanity has always benefited from open and free flow of information, Mr Cerf says. Says this 'father of the internet': ''Several billion minds rejecting bad information is a much more powerful tool than anything we can invent either legally or technically.''
Shawn Kelly is senior media specialist at the Asian Institute of Technology.