Full Responses: How Might Human-Tech Evolution Circa 2019 be Judged in 2069?

For-credit and anonymous responses by expert respondents

In the summer of 2018, Elon University and the Pew Research Center canvassed experts, asking them a number of questions about the likely future of the internet. The canvassing was undertaken in a tip of the cap to the Oct. 29, 2019, 50th anniversary of the first host-to-host connection on the ARPANET, which had its first connection Oct. 29, 1969. On this web page you will find all respondents’ full responses to the question:

“What will historians’ verdict be 50 years from now about the impact of the internet on people’s social, economic and political lives today?”

If you wish to read the full “Historians’ Verdict” survey report with analysis, click here:
https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/surveys/x-3-internet-50th-2019/

This was one of many 50th anniversary questions asked of these respondents. If you wish to read more on this topic, please see the much more comprehensive “Next 50 Years of Digital Life” report:
https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/surveys/x-2-internet-50th-2019/

Among the key themes emerging from the answers were:

• The network of networks ushered in a risks-ridden time resulting in overwhelming social concerns
• The network of networks helped humanity reduce risk, improved countless lives
• 2019 was a difficult turning point at which people overcame big challenges
• 2019 was a dangerous turning point of human failure
• The internet led to overwhelming advances for global good despite its down sides
• It initiated a somewhat dystopian social decline along with its high-value social benefits
• It enabled overall change for the better, change for the worse
• The internet could eventually lead to technology’s overthrow of humanity
• The development of the internet will not seem very significant to historians of 2069
• Future historians might not be well-informed about the early 2000s due to ‘digital decay’
• Will there be any historians 50 years from now?

Written elaborations by respondents who took credit for their remarks

Leonard Kleinrock, Internet Hall of Fame member and co-director of the first host-to-host online connection, professor of computer science, University of California – Los Angeles, said, “In 50 years, I believe historians will look back and recognize that a revolution occurred in the first 50 years that significantly impacted social interaction. It allowed an individual to reach out to countless others, seamlessly, instantly, at essentially no cost in money or effort, and, at times, anonymously. This was a formula for greatly expanded interaction, commerce and curiosity. At the same time this was a perfect formula for the dark side. Perhaps in 50 years we will be in a position to form a proper judgment as to the nature of its value to humanity.”

Vint Cerf, an original member of Kleinrock’s ARPANET research team, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, Internet Hall of Fame member, currently vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google, wrote, “I think it will be net positive, but we will have become a society that depends heavily on digital literacy and critical thinking to defend against abuse and misinformation.”

Paul Vixie, an Internet Hall of Fame member known for designing and implementing several Domain Name System protocol extensions and applications, wrote, “The information revolution ushered in the era of popular delusions and the madness of crowds.”

Lawrence Roberts, pioneer designer and manager of ARPANET and Internet Hall of Fame member, commented, “Historians 50 years from now will credit the internet with the most major impact on people and their lives. However, that is already true for many of us and they may take it all for granted by then.”

Steve Crocker, CEO and co-founder of Shinkuro, Inc., internet pioneer and Internet Hall of Fame member, responded, “Jared Diamond has written about the long history of risk reduction. I think historians will look back on this period, see a continued reduction in risk and attribute much of the improvement to the internet and AI.”

Henning Schulzrinne, co-chair of the Internet Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society, professor at Columbia University, and Internet Hall of Fame member, said, “As with any major technology, from cars to electricity, any assessment will need to be nuanced. In some cases, the internet has acted as the better replacement for existing modes of communications (email replacing fax, IP-based communication replacing the voice telephone network), in others it has accelerated societal trends that were already visible, such as wealth inequality and societal fragmentation.”

Jonathan Swerdloff, consultant and data systems specialist for Driven Inc., wrote, “In 50 years historians will be shocked that we had access to nearly all of the knowledge in history and used that power to take photographs of our dinner.”

Baratunde Thurston, futurist, former director of digital at The Onion, co-founder of comedy/technology start-up Cultivated Wit, said historians might say, “Social lives: Although there was a period of great upending in which our social lives became more tenuous and fractured, the internet largely benefited us socially. It enabled not only the discovery of like-minded people but unexpected connections among people who didn’t seem to have much in common but were able to find that commonality. Economic life: The internet has largely had a negative impact on most people’s economics. While a few people were able to capture outsized economic upside from networked technologies most people lacked the power to negotiate better terms and were left to chase ever-changing algorithmic management directives and be compensated with discounts on Netflix. Political life: It is still unclear whether the internet improved or made worse the average person’s political life. Increased volatility over economic disenfranchisement and social fragmentation made for a period of extremely combative politics that came close to civil war on a number of occasions. But, with more inclusive management of shared resources, politics today objectively benefits the greater number. Still, that stability has some feeling sidelined.”

Fiona Kerr, industry professor of neural and systems complexity at the University of Adelaide, Australia, commented, “It will be ‘back to the future’ in many ways. People love bright, shiny things. We adopt them quickly and then work out the disadvantages, slowly, often prioritizing on litigious risk. The internet has been a wonderful summary of the best and worst of human development and adoption – making us a strange mixture of connected and disconnected, informed and funneled, engaged and isolated, as we learn to design and use multipurpose platforms shaped for an attention economy.”

Juan Ortiz Freuler, a policy fellow and Nnenna Nwakanma, the interim policy director for Africa, at the Web Foundation, wrote, “Unless we see a radical shift soon, the internet as we know it will likely be recalled as a missed opportunity. History will underline that it could have been the basis for radically inclusive societies, where networked communities could actively define their collective future. A tool that could have empowered the people but became a tool for mass surveillance and population control. A tool that could have strengthened the social fibre by allowing people to know each other and share their stories, but out of it grew huge inequalities between the connected and not-connected, both locally and across countries.”

Benjamin Kuipers, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, wrote, “In the positive future scenario I choose to endorse, historians will say that now is the time when humanity explicitly learned about the critical roles that trust and cooperation play in the viability of societies. Humanity began to learn how to recognize and defend itself against individuals willing to exploit fear and distrust to accumulate power. Just as the Great Depression led to advances in economics making it possible to manage the economy with some degree of success, our current crisis will lead to a science of social trust and cooperation that will help society survive and thrive.”

Thad Hall, a research scientist and coauthor of “Politics for a Connected American Public,” wrote, “I doubt the ability of historians to get certain types information 50 years from now about today. Historians have used letters and other documents for their work. When my letters are in a Gmail account that dies with me how will this research be done? And will there be Twitter or Facebook archives that can be searched 50 years from now? I doubt it.”

Mechthild Schmidt Feist, department coordinator for digital communications and media at New York University, said, “I believe our time will be seen as a parallel to the first wave of media/transportation/political innovation at the start of the 20th century: creative and innovative with an almost naive utopian-optimistic outlook in a hyper-capitalist environment not seeing the writing on the wall. We will be the generation that had science and computer models of our climate but, instead of seeing the big picture and using our knowledge to phase out fossil fuels and innovate resource use, we went for the self-indulgence of hyper-consumption of ever-new gadgets. With stock profits driving all decisions, a responsible plan for the next generations was never implemented. If our civilization survives those in the future will not judge us kindly since we cannot claim a lack of knowledge.”

Ken Birman, a professor in the department of computer science at Cornell University, responded, “I believe historians will be awed by the inventiveness of technology innovators in this era, and by our social resilience in the face of such extreme disruptive change. But they will also be horrified that we were so complacent about the erosion of privacy and security, and that we left ourselves so open to manipulation by various forces out to reshape the world in so many ways, be those political, religious or even social. In the coming 50 years we will surely mature and invest in the needed technology to make this connected world a safer world, too. But today, that deficit stands out, and historians will be harsh when they judge us relative to this one aspect. The harm to entire cultures that oppressive monitoring and surveillance can cause is frightening, and those future historians will be in a position to document that harm – harm that people are actively inflicting today for all sorts of reasons. But I think the good will easily outweigh this harm over long periods.”

Andrew Tutt, an expert in law and author of “An FDA for Algorithms,” said, “The mainstream consensus view among historians will be that the internet vastly improved peoples’ social, economic and political lives. A vocal minority of historians will likely contest each of those claims on the grounds that the internet’s benefits have been unevenly distributed and occasionally detrimental. Some will emphasize the way in which the internet led to social isolation and violent extremism. Some will decry the way in which the internet concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a small number of powerful companies. Some will say that the internet had a destabilizing effect on politics and contributed to the dissolution of political norms. But, in the aggregate, it cannot be denied that the good has far outweighed the bad along all of these dimensions.”

Tomas Ohlin, longtime professor at Linköping and Stockholm universities in Sweden, responded, “They will see it as strange that internet-supported increased political participation took so long.”

Laurie Orlov, principal analyst at Aging in Place Technology Watch, wrote, “The internet, so cool at the beginning, so destructive later, is like the introduction of the wheel – it is a basis and foundation for the good, the bad and the ugly. As the wheel preceded the interstate highway system, so the internet has become the information highway system. And, just like roads, it will require more standards, controls and oversight than it has today.”

Guy Levi, chief innovation officer for the Center for Educational Technology, based in Israel, wrote, “The title of the best-seller will be: ‘The Internet in the Age of Inequality.’”

Eliot Lear, principal engineer at Cisco, said, “It’s a mixed bag, like everything else. On the whole the internet has proven to be a wealth of knowledge and entertainment. But it has also isolated us from our local communities.”

Kenneth Grady, futurist, founding author of The Algorithmic Society blog and adjunct and adviser at the Michigan State University College of Law, responded, “Fifty years from now, historians will note the rise of the internet accelerated inequality in the world occurring at this time. Economic, financial, social and political inequality (to name a few) all jumped because of what the internet provided. It will take many decades to reduce that inequality, and the lead some have gained over the others may make that impossible.”

Jerry Michalski, founder of the Relationship Economy eXpedition, said, “Historians will marvel at how we let potential utopias slip from our grasp, descending instead into willful blindness, global battles over limiting world views, petty superstitions and very real fears for personal safety.”

John Laudun, a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “It will be mixed. If we choose wisely in the next few years, historians will perhaps wonder how we could allow so many private and public entities to behave so badly in earlier days. If our path is unwise, then those same historians will look back and yearn for the freedoms we still had ‘back then.’”

Geoff Livingston, author and futurist, commented, “They will say this was a great period of transition, and that the internet forced us to confront the worst aspects of our humanity. Whether we succumb or not to those character defects as a society remains to be seen.”

Ken Goldberg, distinguished chair in engineering, director of AUTOLAB and CITRIS “People and Robots” Initiative, founding member, Berkeley AI Research Lab, University of California – Berkeley, wrote, “It spurred a huge leap forward in humanity’s ability to learn and collaborate.”

Larry Lannom, internet pioneer and vice president at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), an expert in digital object architecture, said, “In 50 years the internet will be seen as a major component of the state of existence, much as automobiles would have been regarded in 1950 or trains in 1900. But the internet is just the networking component. The increase in computing power, especially in what is now called AI, will be dramatic, and the consequences of that are hard to predict.”

Robert M. Mason, a professor emeritus in the Information School at the University of Washington, responded, “They will say the leaders and institutions in the developed nations in the late 19th century and early 20th century failed to recognize the internet’s remarkable opportunities and their global responsibilities to realize these opportunities.”

Joly MacFie, president of the Internet Society New York Chapter, commented, “Today will be seen as an inflection point – the end on the initial ‘open’ era, and the start of the second.”

Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of “Alone Together,” said, “We are at a point of inflection. Now is the time to determine what those historians will think of us in every aspect of our civic and informational life. They go together.”

Oscar Gandy, emeritus professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, responded, “I can’t know what historians’ verdict will be, although I suspect that my critical assessment is or will be shared by a great many: That we have been led astray.”

R “Ray” Wang, founder and principal analyst at Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research, said, “The verdict will show that the first 50 years was about exploration and freedom; the second 50 showed a struggle to fight the forces of evil and keep the internet as an open means of communication, sharing and collaboration. And in the end the goodness of humanity won out, leading to sweeping laws assuring rights, for instance, digital privacy became a property right where individuals have control over the data spun off of their interactions and could monetize it at will or choose not to monetize.”

Marc Brenman, managing partner at IDARE LLC, said, “History will be written by machines, which will praise themselves.”

Luis Pereira, associate professor of electronics and nanotechnologies, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, responded, “A qualitatively unprecedented degree of social revolution started with unpredictable risky outcomes.”

Warren Yoder, longtime director of the Public Policy Center of Mississippi, now an instructor at Mississippi College, responded, “That it took well into the second half of the net’s first century for people to change the polity to handle net-induced changes to the culture and the economy.”

Josh Calder, a partner at the Foresight Alliance, commented, “Historians may conclude that we have misunderstood the relationships between information, society and human nature, and were only beginning to figure out what we had done.”

Brock Hinzmann, a partner in the Business Futures Network who worked 40 years as a futures researcher at SRI International, said, “Historians might say, if they live that long, ‘We told you so.’”

Monica Murero, director of the E-Life International Institute and associate professor in sociology of new technology at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, commented, “I foresee that historians’ verdict in 50 years will focus on the dual aspects of the phenomenon (positive and negative outcomes) and the raising power of the people using social media for creating, circulating and influencing information, and the commodification of big data generated by those practices trying to circularly predict and influence social practices and consumption.”

Grace Mutung’u, co-leader of the Kenya ICT Action Network, responded, “They might probably begin by describing the internet with Frankenstein’s story. It grew bigger than its creators.”

Robert Bell, co-founder of Intelligent Community Forum, wrote, “We created something that became a monster and then learned to tame the monster.”

Peter Reiner, professor and co-founder of the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia, Canada, commented, “It is difficult to predict how things will play out in 50 years’ time, as the internet is likely to morph into a monster that is much different and likely more unwieldy than the internet we know today.”

Sy Taffel, lecturer in media studies at Massey University, New Zealand, wrote, “They will say the provision of free culture came at the cost of the commodification of community and mass surveillance.”

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation and author of “Commonspace: Beyond Virtual Community,” responded, “I hope historians will say ‘Wow, those humans saw how the internet and AI took a wrong turn, and they were smart enough to roll up their sleeves and put it back on the right path.’”

Dan Schultz, senior creative technologist at Internet Archive, responded, “We were woefully untrained and unprepared for the mind-searing power of instant communication between every thought and memory of the world.”

Zoetanya Sujon, a senior lecturer specializing in digital culture at University of Arts London, commented, “In terms of economic and political lives, this stage of networked technologies (e.g., internet, social media platforms, news and information circulation) will likely be seen as an era where rules and governance need to be redefined – as did journalism in the age of yellow journalism (late 1800s) and photography (e.g., Warren and Brandeis’ seminal text on privacy in response to the violations associated with early photojournalism) and the obvious gap between legal and social definitions of abuse (e.g., non-consensual image sharing and revenge porn, Facebook’s political manipulation through targeted advertising and misuse of personal data as in the Cambridge Analytica case, Snowden and mass surveillance revelations, and, finally, ambiguous or non-disclosure of advertising, e.g., #influencers #sponsors, etc.).”

Greg Shannon, chief scientist for the CERT Division at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, said, “It was a Golden Age! Enlightenment 2.0.”

Nicholas Beale, leader of the strategy practice at Sciteb, an international strategy and search firm, commented, “Amongst the great fruits of the internet they allowed some foul weeds to flourish that, choose one: wrecked Western society or they eventually pruned effectively for the common good. Which of these two alternatives will be determined by events, but should be clear in 50 years’ time.”

Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science at the School for Planning and Public Policy and the Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University, said, “A historian’s view will be of the internet as a disrupter of order. Looking at the historical literature in the communication field of ‘innovation diffusion’ there will be no previous cases that look anything like the speed and depth of public penetration and use of the internet. The internet will be seen as having reallocated information and power in a way that we now cannot know. There will be new winners and new losers, as is always the case.”

Serge Marelli, an IT security analyst, responded, “There was more porn (just acknowledging a trend), more advertising, less privacy, fewer users-citizens’ rights (e.g., right to privacy), more money for big corporations, and politics and democracy fell short.”

Hari Shanker Sharma, an expert in nanotechnology and neurobiology at Uppasala University, Sweden, said, “Modern times are known as Kali Yoga (Material Age). Material growth up to a point makes life easy. Excess of wealth leads to misuse and often indulgence in evil. History cannot escape reality. While good aspects will be praised, bad parts will be criticised.”

Thomas Streeter, a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, said, “If historians are still doing their job well in 50 years, they will wonder why we talked so much about the internet in the 1992-2016 period when so much else was going on that we noticed only too late.”

Miguel Moreno-Muñoz, a professor of philosophy specializing in ethics, epistemology and technology at the University of Granada, Spain, said, “They will note the emergence of mass-surveillance, the accelerating pace of technological development and the introduction of the ability to interact at a distance with the physical world and with other humans.”

Michel Grossetti, a sociologist expert in systems and director of research at CNRS, the French national science research center, wrote, “The period 1969-2018 was more impacted by global warming and economic deregulation than by technological changes.”

Michael M. Roberts, internet pioneer, first president and CEO of ICANN and Internet Hall of Fame member, responded, “Historians have a hard time dealing with a technology-based phenomenon that touches essentially every aspect of human lives, and indeed, challenges the very notion of what it means to be human. (And historians seldom agree with each other.) Fifty years from now, I think historians will be finding it difficult to establish context for measuring impact. The acceleration of change is creating a sense of life on the edge. But there are big challenges out there. Will we have dealt with anthropogenic changes on the planet as we watch Miami go underwater?”

Simon Biggs, a professor of interdisciplinary arts at the University of Edinburgh, said, “Historians might one day observe how we delivered ourselves as consumers to be consumed – similarly to how historians today observe the hypnotic control fascists had over their populations in the mid-20th century.”

Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media at City University of New York, responded, “If historians are still around I think they’ll see mostly a missed potential.”

Marc Noble, a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “My guess is that historians will look at the development of the internet as quite positive from an economic perspective but very cloudy when social and political aspects are considered. People are far too easily manipulated, and the internet has proved a very useful tool for manipulating large swaths of people to do very foolish things.”

Rich Ling, a professor of media technology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, responded, “In 50 years, historians will likely look back and see the rise of populists such as Trump as one of the results of the development of the internet. These movements use the unfiltered speed of the internet to play on the fears of people and use unverified half-truths and lies to pursue their agenda. At the same time, historians will also see the development of more targeted and refined services that can help people with their lives. It is my hope that it is the latter that is the major result.”

Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois – Springfield, wrote, “On the scale of the discovery of fire, the wheel and cultivation of crops, the interconnection of humans will be judged as a very important step toward becoming the beings of the universe that we are destined to be.”

Perry Hewitt, a marketing, content and technology executive, wrote, “They will say, ‘Forgive them; for they know not what they do.’”

Frank Tipler, a mathematical physicist at Tulane University, commented, “The answer depends on whether there are human level AIs in 50 years. If there are, historian verdicts are irrelevant.”

Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future and author of “The Nature of the Future,” responded, “They will view the impact of the internet on economic, social and political lives in exactly the same way historians today are viewing the impact of the robber barons (railroad, oil, banking magnates) of the early 20th century. Development of the platform that has become an everyday utility was preceded by privatization of the commons, creating a powerful new class of digital robber barons but also leading to extreme wealth inequalities and social unrest (similar to what we saw with the development of physical infrastructure). Just like in the 20th century, the situation was not sustainable, and we had to break up some of the digital monopolies, regulate some as utilities and develop new social policies that would correct for some of the economic inequalities.”

Toby Walsh, a professor of AI at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and president of the AI Access Foundation, said, “Like the Industrial Revolution before it, the Internet Revolution will be seen to have improved people’s social, economic and political lives, but only after regulation and controls were introduced to guard against the risks.”

Alan Bundy, a professor of automated reasoning at the University of Edinburgh, wrote, “They will see it as a massively disruptive revolution, at least equivalent to the Industrial Revolution and happening much faster and with more widespread societal disruption.”

Anthony Judge, author, futurist, editor of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, former head of the Union of International Associations, said, “[They will see it as] an amazing opportunity inappropriately exploited in a period of crisis, requiring a much-higher-order response to knowledge management across a diversity of mutually contradictory views.”

Andrew Wyckoff, director of the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, wrote, “Historians will be bemused by the fact that few of the major nation-states were able to successfully foresee the need to proactively shift their policy frameworks, cast in the image of industry (especially motor vehicles), to the new economic and social paradigm driven by ubiquitous computing and data, and instead reacted defensively to the transformation, inflicting more pain and angst on citizens than needed.”

Karine Perset, an economist in OECD’s digital economy policy division, said, “Historians’ verdict 50 years from now could be that in 2018 we were still in the Middles Ages in regard to the internet and interconnected AI systems, just beginning to shift the paradigm for the human race.”

Michael R. Nelson, a technology policy expert for a leading network services provider who worked as a technology policy aide in the Clinton Administration, commented, “It will be seen as a positive development even more important than the Industrial Revolution. We could actually see totally new forms of governance.”

Jim Spohrer, director of the Cognitive Opentech Group at IBM Research-Almaden, commented, “It was just another technology.”

Robert M. Mason, a professor emeritus in the Information School at the University of Washington, responded, “They will say the leaders and institutions in the developed nations in the late 19th century and early 20th century failed to recognize the internet’s remarkable opportunities and their global responsibilities to realize these opportunities.”

Sasha Costanza-Chock, associate professor of civic media at MIT, said, “Accurate histories will pay attention to the ways that the internet had both positive and negative impacts on people’s lives, and on how a relatively small section of the planet’s population reaped most of the benefits while the majority received most of the harms.”

Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, U.K., and executive director of the Web Science Institute, said, “They will note how much self-harm society is doing with the internet. Hopefully in 50 years’ time we will have developed an antidote.”

Richard Forno, of the Center for Cybersecurity and Cybersecurity Graduate Program at the University of Maryland – Baltimore County, wrote, “Future historians will likely note that the internet simply reflects the human condition, complete with all of its good and bad qualities. Looking back, they’ll probably also wonder how we as a society survived so that they are able to be around to ask that question!”

Michael Kleeman, a senior fellow at the University of California – San Diego and board member at the Institute for the Future, wrote, “What started with great promise was compromised by profit vs. social incentives and in the end was a mixture of information distribution and social control. We can access more, we know each other less and we are more controlled and have no privacy.”

Bill Woodcock, executive director at Packet Clearing House, the research organization behind global network development, commented, “In retrospect the internet will be seen in much the same way as television and the advertising industry are today: technologies that held initial promise and sparked people’s imaginations as to how they could improve society and the human condition, but which eventually just became tools of avarice. The intellectual utility of the internet, which was clear to its users in the 1970s and 1980s, gave way to get-rich-quick schemes in the dot-com boom and the era of spam, and it has continued downhill since the arrival of Facebook, spearfishing, man-in-the-middle attacks and mass surveillance.”

Mario Morino, chairman of the Morino Institute and co-founder of Venture Philanthropy Partners, commented, “As of today, their assessment would regrettably be about political impact.”

Patrick Lambe, a partner at Straits Knowledge and president of the Singapore Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization, wrote, “They will report this was a period of immense social and political turmoil brought about by the capabilities that new technology gave without sufficiently-mature institutional mechanisms in place to govern the effects. This is analogous to the political and social turmoil in early modern Europe following the introduction of the printing press.”

Henry E. Brady, dean, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California – Berkeley, wrote, “The verdict will be that it had an impact that was greater than the invention of the printing press, greater than the invention of new and faster modes of transportation in the 19th century and greater than the impact of the atomic bomb. Historians will note some terrible impacts where technologies are used to oppress populations, but they will also note that it provided billions of people with easier and better lives.”

Joseph Potvin, executive director at the Xalgorithms Foundation – creating specifications and components for an “Internet of Rules” – responded, “They’ll say, ‘Bateson’s cybernetic vision only really began to take form in 2020 when…”

Kyle Rose, principal architect, Akamai Technologies, responded, “The verdict will be that change was overwhelmingly positive but not monotonic. The internet has enabled both positive and negative social changes, but as an eternal optimist with respect to human progress, I believe the negative changes will be merely temporary as society figures out how to adapt.”

Garland McCoy, founder and chief development officer of the Technology Education Institute, wrote, “I hope in 50 years the internet will still be the Chinese fireworks and not become the British gunpowder!”

John Lazzaro, retired professor of electrical engineering and computer science, University of California – Berkeley, commented, “When historians look back on 1968-2018, the internet won’t make the top-three list of highest-impact changes during that time. A tribute to Neil Armstrong upon his passing said it best: ‘As long as there are history books, Neil Armstrong will be included in them.’ The Apollo program will top the list, and list items two and three will be judged relative to it. And if you take a moment to think of the contenders for the other slots (for example, the advent of modern family planning and its social and demographic consequences), you may be surprised to find that the internet falls off of your own list of candidates as well.”

James Hendler, professor of computer, web and cognitive sciences and director of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for Data Exploration and Application, wrote, “They will say that the interaction of people around the world was changed in myriad ways, both for the better and for the worse.”

Christian Huitema, internet pioneer and consultant and former Internet Architecture Board president and chief scientist at Bell Research and Microsoft commented, “We developed a wonderful communication technology only to see it captured by large corporations and governments. It will take several generations for humanity to regain control.”

Frank Feather, futurist and consultant with StratEDGY, commented, “Future historians will be different from previous human historians because we will be entering a DigiTranshuman society. These historians will take a more comprehensive and unbiased view of history and will view it within a futuristic context of change and evolution. They will acknowledge its stumbles, but also point out how the foundation has been set for a full DigiTranshuman society to evolve fully by 2100.”

Jonathan Grudin, principal design researcher at Microsoft, commented, “Historians will say that by overwhelming us with ceaseless information about the present the internet ended our ability to take time to think about and learn from history.”

Jan Schaffer, founder and executive director of J-Lab – The Institute for Interactive Journalism, responded, “The internet will be credited with great technological and medical advances. It will be blamed for a decline in the quality of life and, writ large, a decline in longstanding democratic processes and expectations.”

James Gannon, global head of eCompliance for emerging technology, cloud and cybersecurity at Novartis, responded, “They will say the impact of the internet was not universally positive, but overall exhibit a strong bias toward seeing it as a positive force for humanity.”

Brad Templeton, chair for computing at Singularity University, software architect and former president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, responded, “They will scarcely be able to imagine life without it or before it. Even today it is hard to recall how we did so many things without the network. We did them, but they were vastly more difficult. My hope, though, is that they will view these as the dark times, the times before we found solutions to the propaganda problem.”

Lee McKnight, associate professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, commented, “Historians will condemn us for our neglect of ensuring cyber-physical security and trust even as our daily lives, firms and national economies grew ever more dependent on the internet. The naive belief that lessons of the past, that open societies and open systems are always under attack from those that prefer the opposite. Why we ever thought it a good idea to cede to digital platforms all of our inherent human data will be a mystery and the subject of many dissertations and archaeological digs, and forensic investigations.”

Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, wrote, “It will depend on the historian. Since victors write history the retrospective view will be that there were lots of winners (corporations, individuals and groups who survive). If the current political climate continues – even for only a few more decades – one verdict will be that the net and the web helped contribute to the total rearrangement of the political system, both in the U.S. and globally. It will also have widened the haves-to-have-nots gap in many places.”

Jerome Glenn, executive director of the State of the Future reports for the Millennium Project, said, “The internet laid the foundation for the evolution of the global Conscious-Technology Civilization and the Self-Actualization Economy.”

Doug Schepers, chief technologist at Fizz Studio, said, “The impact of decentralized authority will be compared to the social upheaval after the emergence of the Gutenberg press. Both good and bad.”

Devin Fidler, futurist and founder of Rethinkery Labs commented, “This is a transitional period. The fundamental challenge was to wisely design complex man-made ecosystems and operating systems that function from the individual to the global scale. There were mixed results.”

Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles, author, editor and journalist, responded, “History might see us as participants in a golden age of cyber innocence where concepts of unfettered personal expression were viewed with respect and promise. As always, innocence falls prey to experience, and sometimes to betrayal and bitterness, so that those of us who believed in an expansive and open World Wide Web, rooted in respect and mutual interest, were ultimately proved delusional.”

Andreas Kirsch, fellow at Newspeak House, formerly with Google and DeepMind in Zurich and London, wrote, “It will be seen as a big catalyst for change, and it will be seen as the main reason for whatever the prevalent ‘world order’ will be.”

Danil Mikhailov, head of data and innovation for Wellcome Trust, responded, “Undoubtedly the 21st century will be seen as the century of the internet and of the algorithm. They are the transformative technology of the age, our steam, electricity and nuclear.”

Charles Ess, a professor expert in ethics with the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway, said, “I used to scoff as techno-evangelists such as John Perry Barlow who solemnly pronounced (with next to no evidence) that the invention of the internet was tantamount to the invention of fire in terms of its revolutionary consequences for human beings, our societies and our planet. I now think that it will count as a major component and driver of the emerging anthropocene – an era in which human mastery and possession of nature threatens to radically transform and, to some degree, annihilate what has been relatively normal for human societies and the large environment for some 10,000 years or so (longer if you look back to earlier societies and evolution). I’m hoping the good will outweigh the bad – but I find it difficult to discern clear and strong reasons to support anything more than a very modest hope that more good than not will follow.”

Chao-Lin Liu, a professor at National Chengchi University, Taiwan, commented, “The internet changed people’s interactions and being forever.”

Denise N. Rall, a professor of arts and social sciences at Southern Cross University, Australia, responded, “I feel historians (if they still exist, if they are intelligent) will be appalled by the lack of civility and intelligence that dominates our current media communications.”

Ben Shneiderman, distinguished professor and founder of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at University of Maryland, said, “Remarkable transformation, largely for the good, but as with all technologies, troubling down sides.”

Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, commented, “Critical historians will marvel at how the dialectic of adaptation and manufactured preferences ramped up over time.”

Dan Buehrer, a retired professor of computer science formerly with National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, responded, “It is still a toss-up whether or not social discussion groups can be effectively controlled by governments.”

Erik Huesca, president of the Knowledge and Digital Culture Foundation, based in Mexico City, said, “The transformation of our cultural diversities in one narcissistic behavior of all cultures.”

David Wells, chief financial officer at Netflix, responded, “Tremendously positive [in retrospect] tempered by the need to focus on continued education and critical thinking skills.”

Bart Knijnenburg, assistant professor of computer science active in the Human Factors Institute at Clemson University, said, “Historians will see this time as a turning point where the internet is increasingly becoming part of our daily lives. The internet is no longer a ‘place’ where you find information but is increasingly turning into a virtual digital ‘layer’ on top of the real world. This is happening right now, and historians will see this decade as the starting point of this new wave of internet-based innovations.”

Aneesh Aneesh, author of “Global Labor: Algocratic Modes of Organization” and professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, responded, “The Internet of Things, governed by what I call algocracy, will have the biggest impact on how we live. Social anomie, economic inequality and democratic deficit are likely to increase but there will be plenty of joy and enchantment resulting from technological breakthroughs.”

Danny Gillane, a netizen from Lafayette, Louisiana, commented, “I don’t think we will have any historians in 50 years. Those who write what looks vaguely like what we consider history will have grown up knowing only a world with the internet and smart devices, a world where the loudest people drown out the multitudes. How can they realistically judge the impact of the internet?”

Paola Perez, vice president of the Internet Society chapter in Venezuela, and chair of the LACNIC Public Policy Forum, responded, “In social life, people don’t have distances; we can see each other even if we are separated be thousands of kilometers, but we don’t share in-person many good moments now. Economic life is growing; the people in rural areas and all the people in general can sell many things on the internet. In politics, the elections have been digitized but many times they may have been violated.”

Brian Harvey, lecturer on the social implications of computer technology at the University of California – Berkeley, said, “The bourgeois historians will think it’s wonderful, treating ‘fake news’ and the like as aberrations. The socialist historians will think separately about owners and workers, rather than ‘people,’ and will understand how the net helps the former and hurts the latter.”

Dalsie Green Baniala, CEO and regulator for telecommunications for Vanuatu, wrote, “Life was real in the last 50 years. Happiness existed in many countries, including Vanuatu.”

Ed Lyell, longtime internet strategist and professor at Adams State University, responded, “That is the question isn’t it? By then will we have changed the 2018 direction of the internet away from the concentrated power of a small number of very large for-profit corporations? Will we have created governance and business models that enhance the quality and access of the internet for the masses, or will we have just left it only for the wealthy urban dwellers. Historians will report the answers to these questions, and in their review we can judge whether the internet has been good or bad, and for whom.”

Eileen Donahoe, executive director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University, commented, “Historians’ verdict about the impact of the internet on people’s social, economic and political lives will depend on whether or not we find a way to distribute the economic value that flows from the internet more widely in the next generation.”

David Klann, consultant and software developer at Broadcast Tool & Die, responded, “Historians will find that the internet has had a positive impact on people over the first half of the 21st century.”

Betsy Williams, a researcher at the Center for Digital Society and Data Studies at the University of Arizona, wrote, “The optimistic and libertarian ideals built into early internet communities were not automatically self-sustaining. Political and economic pressures shaped the internet; notable examples include the end of America’s net neutrality policy, the Great Firewall of China and Russian interference in other countries’ elections. Coalitions of internet users and civil libertarians engaged in constant advocacy and lawsuits, targeting governments and the dominant corporations of the time, including Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. These coalitions and the alternative ‘open’ structures they built maintained various portions of the internet as public spaces, places where users had rights, or places of anonymity.”

Christopher Leslie, lecturer in media, science and technology studies at South China University of Technology, wrote, “I would hope that historians would say that the technology did not change anything on its own – that’s technological determinism. Hopefully they will say that history shows how technologies are shaped and approved by the societies where they exist and recognize the importance of an educated public to monitor and support appropriate technologies.”

Andrew Whinston, computer science professor and director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce, University of Texas – Austin, said, “The verdict will be written as positive since we will live in controlled societies.”

Anirban Sen, a lawyer and data privacy consultant, based in New Delhi, India, wrote, “Historians will see the geometric rise in human evolution; however, for all the advancement they will wonder why the human consciousness did not rise. And they will realise that the human brain is primitive and limited and, despite all the wonders of tech, it still processes everything the same way it did eons ago. Consequently, humans could not take advantage of all that technology had to offer but continued to stumble at the gateway of collective growth.”

Divina Frau-Meigs, professor of media sociology at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France, and UNESCO chair for sustainable digital development, responded, “Historians will need to have access to extensive internet archives in order to make up their narratives on the impact of the internet. Few initiatives are doing this at the moment, and it may lead to biased or inaccurate storytelling. In any case, as a sociologist myself, I say that the internet has brought a new paradigm, ‘the cyberist era.’ This era is the beginning of a new moment in humanity. It would be a mistake to look at it through the prism of the ‘modernist era’ and the ‘postmodernist era.’ Historians will need imagination to deal with the cyberist era and its shift from consumerism to participatory cultures and from text-based to multimedia-based knowledge construction.”

Micah Altman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and head scientist in the program on information science at MIT Libraries, wrote, “The late historian Melvin Kranzberg insightfully observed that, ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ In the last 50 years, the internet has been transformative and disruptive. In the next 50, information, communication and AI technology show every sign of being even more so. Whether historians of the future judge this to be good or bad will depend on whether we can make the societal choice to embed democratic values and human rights into the design and implementation of these systems.”

Justin Amyx, a technician with Comcast, said, “Historians will look on our times as a time of adaptation – our ability as humans to adapt to our changing environment – with the evolution of technology outpacing our ability to adapt to a digital landscape. Learning to co-exist with this rapid change, from analog to digital, has been a very bumpy road that is far too often overlooked.”

Bryan Johnson, founder and CEO of Kernel, a leading developer of advanced neural interfaces, and OS Fund, a venture capital firm, said, “They will say the internet demonstrated that the world was too complex and contained too much data for humans and especially any one human to make sense of. History will look back on this as a defining moment in human well-being, when we realized that we must incentivize radical human improvement or go extinct. We’ve hit our ceiling at what our default cognitive configuration can achieve, and the internet helped us realize that.”

Dan Geer, a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “The illusion that trust is transitive but risk is not.”

Rik Farrow, editor of “;login:”, a publication of USENIX Association, wrote, “Quite simply, the internet has had a similar impact in changing the world as other advances in communication: telegraph, radio, phone and TV. Information is more available, but so is propaganda.”

E. Ohlson, a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “Empowering people to engage is generally considered a universal good, but it really depends on the people and the engagement. Reference Arab Spring vs. President Trump’s political base. People will be empowered and engaged to bemoan the very things that have given them their power and engagement.”

Andrian Kreye, a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Germany, said, “Historians will look at the current impact of the internet either as the first mistakes mankind learned from or as the beginning of a development destroying many advances society made in the 20th century.”

Alf Rehn, a professor of innovation, design and management in the school of engineering at the University of Southern Denmark, commented, “Historians will talk about the internet much like they talk about electricity today. They will acknowledge its impact, but they, much like everyone else, will wonder how we ever managed without it.”

Bryan Alexander, futurist and president of Bryan Anderson Consulting, responded, “Historians will see humanity of 2018 as living through a renaissance in human creativity and communication. Like the Italian Renaissance, this also meant political and social problems, at times involving the internet.”

Johanna Drucker, professor of digital humanities in the department of information studies at the University of California – Los Angeles, said, “We will be shocked by the rapid acceleration of destabilizing influences and the rate at which civility can break down. Hopefully it can also be rebuilt with the same forces.”

Arthur Bushkin, an IT pioneer who worked with the precursors to ARPANET and Verizon, wrote, “Of course, the impact of the internet has been dramatic and largely positive. The devil is in the details and the distribution of the benefits.”

Charles Zheng, a researcher into machine learning and AI with the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, commented, “Historians in 50 years will have a better sense of nuances of the effect of the internet and will understand a complex picture of the many positive and negative effects rather than a simple verdict of ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ However, one particular aspect they will be in a far better shape to appreciate will be the importance of the internet for nurturing the influential ideologies and social movements that play a major role in the coming half-century. I also expect that many of the important historical figures of the next 50 years may come from unconventional social backgrounds but will credit their education largely to the internet rather than a traditional schooling system.”

Bebo White, managing editor of the Journal of Web Engineering and emeritus associate of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, said, “That it was one of the most (if not the most) monumental shifts in human history.”

Adam Powell, senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, wrote, “Fifty years from now historians will be saying, ‘They had no idea what was coming.’”

Anthony Picciano, a professor of education at the City of New York University Interactive Pedagogy and Technology program, responded, “Historians’ verdict 50 years from now will be positive about the impact of the internet on people’s social, economic and political lives today.”

Bruce Edmonds, a professor of social simulation and director of the Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester (U.K.) Metropolitan University, wrote, “That it has, in many ways, been profound – shifting the ground on which production and interaction happens – but also that a new social space inevitably opens up new conflict and even wars for groups seeking to control that space, and hence also a destabilizing impact.”

Clark Quinn, executive director at Quinnovation, wrote, “Fifty years from now, historians will be able to document the significant discontinuity that was the internet. They will note that the impact of a global information network has been profound in commerce, in politics and in personal relationships.”

Benjamin Shestakofsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in digital technology’s impacts on work, said, “We will reflect on this moment as a time when the social dangers posed by monopolistic tech firms came fully into view.”

Jamais Cascio, research fellow at the Institute for the Future, wrote, “A growing number of historians/analysts will declare that the internet was a mistake (much as many present-day observers now say suburbs and automobiles were a mistake to adopt). In 50 years, the nostalgia for the mythical early internet before bots and trolls really got bad in the 2020s will be commonplace, as at that point people who lived then will be dying off.”

Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute and professor of strategic foresight at New York University, commented, “What do I hope historians’ verdict will be 50 years from now? That we made the right choice in the years 2018-2020 to rethink access to the internet, data ownership and algorithmic transparency, thus setting all of humanity on a better course for the future.”

Amali De Silva-Mitchell, futurist, responded, “We could not have coped with the enormous increase in population and stress on services and product consumption without the internet.”

Cliff Lynch, director of the Coalition for Networked Information, responded, “The verdict will be nuanced, not a clear win or a clear loss. But without question a massive change. Note that there is a values question lurking here: What constitutes an improvement? It’s not clear that there’s wide agreement on the answers to this.”

Edson Prestes, a professor and director of robotics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, responded, “They will see us as very primitive!”

Jennifer J. Snow, an innovation officer with U.S. Air Force USSOCOM Donovan Group and SOFWERX, wrote, “Historians will be surprised. I think we will see those nations and peoples we tend to ignore rise to the top because they will use these technologies to the best of their ability to better themselves and their countries while richer nations will become mired down in fake information, lack of trust and lack of public support leading to the rise of virtual nations that will offer people the opportunity to join a voluntary nation regardless of where they live that best meets their needs, beliefs, morals and norms while traditional nation states will struggle mightily to transform and adopt new mechanisms of power that don’t translate well to existing state structures. Traditional leaders will cling to what power they have left and become irrelevant while new power leaders will rise and create new forms of government and societies.”

Anita Salem, systems research and design principal at SalemSystems, wrote, “The internet did not live up to its promise and became instead a mechanism for manipulation by the moneyed. While the internet opened the doors for modern communication and allowed people of all ages, backgrounds and economics ready access to information and tools that could better their lives, it also provided a backdoor for corporations to manipulate the population for their own benefit. The democracies and people of the world were not mature or empowered enough to prevent its misuse. The fundamental tenets of capitalism and the growth of unregulated corporate and authoritarian power proved to be its downfall.”

Alan Mutter, a longtime Silicon Valley CEO and cable TV executive, now a teacher of media economics and entrepreneurism at the University of California – Berkeley, said, “We got smarter and dumber at the speed of light.”

David Bray, executive director for the People-Centered Internet Coalition, commented, “Technology will undoubtedly impact people’s lives over the next 50 years. However how we choose to use these technologies at the individual, community and global society levels will determine whether the net impacts are good or bad. What we are seeing is an increasing affordability and availability of technologies that only were available to large nation-states 20 years ago.”

Lindsey Andersen, an activist at the intersection of human rights and technology for Freedom House and Internews now doing graduate research at Princeton University, said, “I suspect historians will see a mixed picture, full of ups and downs. They will see wild successes and terrible failures, and the winners and losers. They will see how it simultaneously brought the world together, while encouraging tribalism and fear of the ‘other.’ Whether they see it overall as a positive development, it will without a doubt have fundamentally altered the world.”

David Cake, an active leader with Electronic Frontiers Australia and vice-chair of the ICANN GNSO Council, wrote, “We will understand the current era as a period of turmoil and confusion in which many things happened that seem like obvious risks in hindsight.”

Teus Hagen, Netherlands internet pioneer, former chair and director of NLnet and member of the Internet Hall of Fame, commented, “It was stupid to think that information you hope to find on the internet will meet quality standards.”

Bob Metcalfe, Hall of Fame co-inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, now a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Texas – Austin, said, “Fortunately we do not pay much attention to the verdicts of historians, which are ‘a pack of lies written about events that never happened by people who weren’t there.’ I think the major impact will be economic. If only we had more economists who weren’t baffled by the digital economy. I remain baffled, unable to make reliable predictions. Ask Ray Kurzweil.”

Craig Partridge, chief scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies for 35 years and Internet Hall of Famer, currently chair of the department of computer science at Colorado State University, wrote, “I suspect they’ll see us as being in the later stages of a digital Wild West. We’ll be seen as being in a time where the opportunities were so obvious and plentiful and likely positive that society and governments were somewhat reluctant to interfere – with the result that great things happened but also some bad things. And they’ll talk about how we built these grand innovations (voice-controlled houses, self-driving vehicles) without fully securing the underlying infrastructure.”

Alex Halavais, an associate professor of social technologies at Arizona State University, wrote, “We are living through a period of amazing shifts and reorganizations of society. The turn of the millennium, thanks in no small part to the internet, marks the start of a new epoch in human history, and while changes will continue to occur, the seeds of those changes were planted over the last couple of decades. It will only be in retrospect that we will fully recognize this.”

Adam Popescu, a writer who contributes frequently to the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, Vanity Fair and the BBC, wrote, “That it has gone from cute to menacing: swaying elections, spying, targeting citizens in a concept Orwell could never conceive. That is BS, you say. Well, all it takes is a Google search. When you see the ads tracking you on any site, they’re watching, and it’s private companies as much as the government.”

Alex Simonelis, computer science faculty member, Dawson College, Montreal, said, “Vint Cerf Bob Khan and Tim Berners-Lee will be on par with Gutenberg.”

Barry Chudakov, founder and principal of Sertain Research and author of “Metalifestream,” commented, “The internet will be considered the most consequential communication tool ever invented, with revolutionary impacts. Historians will say the internet altered and often shattered borders, barriers and horizons, starting with the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’ where ‘the cyber effect’ turned each person to a branded identity. As a universal agora, socially it extended and enhanced relationships by obliterating distance – yet this also challenged relationships in equally powerful and unsettling ways. Economically it opened numerous opportunities but global participation – and global competition – made these opportunities precarious and are often fleeting rather than permanent. Politically the new-identity morph of the internet made messaging both easy and suspect as bad actors impersonated and used disinformation and distortion (lies) to undermine information and gin up fear and tribal loyalties.

David J. Krieger, co-director of the Institute for Communication & Leadership in Lucerne, Switzerland, wrote, “It will be seen as a revolution comparable to the invention of writing or the printing press.”

Craig Mathias, principal at Farpoint Group, an advisory firm specializing in wireless networking and mobile computing, commented, “Overwhelmingly positive, while noting that no solution of this scale is perfect, however perfection might be defined.”

David A. Banks, an associate research analyst with the Social Science Research Council, said, “Historians will most likely treat much of the hysteria regarding ‘internet addiction’ as an oddity on par with pearl-clutching essays about the moral dangers of men taking train rides with unwed women. Much further down the road, I think there’ll be a reckoning with regard to the Silicon Valley epistemology chronicled by Fred Turner. The liberal-professional classes’ obsession with data and predictive models will look so alien that no one will be able to understand why and how anything they said was considered influential, let alone smart.”

Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow at Oxford Internet Institute, wrote, “We might think of today as an era of mass confusion rather than mass communication. Historians will smirk at how naive we were to think we could arrange technologies and that they would just ‘work’ or only have positive effects.”

Alexey Turchin, existential risks researcher at Foundation Science for Life Extension, responded, “The internet will probably go unnoticed and be less discussed than the things it connects, like AI, bits, Bitcoin, smaller networks, etc.”

Jennifer King, director of privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, said, “Their responses will be mixed and unprecedented. Current events have demonstrated how fragile the public’s grasp of science is and how easily science can be undermined despite the ways in which scientific progress has enabled these technologies.”

Fred Davis, mentor at Runway Incubator, San Francisco, responded, “Generally it will be seen as positive, despite various calamities along the way.”

Kenneth R. Fleischmann, an associate professor at the University of Texas – Austin School of Information, responded, “Overall, the verdict will be that our society has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, and the degree to which that change is a result of the internet versus other forces is challenging to determine, given that the world is an imperfect experimental setting. It is undoubtedly the case that we live in a very different world than we did 50 years ago, and the internet of today is both a cause of that and a product of that.”

Hume Winzar, associate professor and director of the business analytics undergraduate program at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, wrote, “It was a wonderful opportunity screwed up.”

Kenneth Cukier, author and data editor for The Economist, commented, “It enabled fringe views to coalesce and influence the mainstream politics, media, commerce and discourse. It neutered the idea of the mainstream. Everyone was shunted into a subgroup. It balkanized the public sphere.”

Lou Gross, professor of mathematical ecology and expert in grid computing at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville, said, “That it led to the advancement of some groups and regions over others and led to enhancing many of the conflicts around the world rather than to alleviating them.”

João Pedro Taveira, embedded systems researcher and smart grids architect for INOV INESC Inovação, Portugal, wrote, “Maybe as an indomitable, uncontrolled and unbridled beast. The internet has changed people’s lives in such way that we may be unable to keep up.”

Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center at City University of New York’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism, commented, “Just this morning, when I shared a picture of myself in a Gutenberg T-shirt (from his birthplace, Mainz) while holding a book by the Gutenberg scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein that I was rereading, a scholarly friend chided me for praising a work that has been challenged by academics since. That is to say, we are still arguing about the influence of movable type and the book almost six centuries after their introduction. You can bet that in 50 years, historians will have no verdict, only an argument.”

John Willinsky, professor and director of the Public Knowledge Project at Stanford Graduate School of Education, said, “Historians will see it as profound and epoch-making as the introduction of the printing press in the West during the 15th century.”

Helena Draganik, a professor at the University of Gdansk, Poland, responded, “The internet began as a medium of communication between scientists and between IT professionals. It became an information/communication global medium that is regulated by internationalized norms and laws.”

Robert K. Logan, chief scientist at sLab and OCAT and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto, Canada, said, “The advent of the internet created advantages and disadvantages but on the whole it was for the best.”

Glenn Grossman, principal consultant for Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), wrote, “Historians will see the internet as a force that changed our culture, just like the printing press did centuries ago.”

John Leslie King, computer science professor, University of Michigan, and a consultant on Cyberinfrastructure for the NSF CISE and SBE directorates for several years, commented, “The impact has been huge, but in most cases, not what the futurists of 2018 thought it would be.”

Greg Lloyd, president and co-founder at Traction Software, responded, “They were incredibly lucky no one was able to block introduction and early success of the intranet and web, although many giant companies and some governments tried. It was more like winning a Pachinko game than the Industrial Revolution, but the stakes were just as high.”

Frank Kaufmann, president of Filial Projects and founder and director of the Values in Knowledge Foundation, said, “It depends upon the historian. If she is an idiot, she will come up with dumb analyses. If she is creative, wholesome, balanced, integrated, she will come up with good, interesting, challenging thoughts, writing, analysis and reflection.”

Manoj Kumar, manager at Mitsui Orient Lines, responded, “It depends on the school of thought. But overwhelmingly the span of last 50 years has changed the world for better, creating question marks for the next 50 years. The achievements may leave the historians bewildered at the pace which itself can provide the clue for its regress.”

Karl M. van Meter, faculty of social sciences at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and author of “Computational Social Science in the Age of Big Data,” said, “That verdict will depend heavily on what happens to the current U.S. government and Donald Trump as an individual and as president. Facebook and Twitter are now declining. If Trump and company are kicked out, the internet could be considered positively, otherwise it would be considered negatively.”

José Estabil, director of entrepreneurship and innovation at MIT’s Skoltech Initiative, commented, “They will note how fundamentally we underestimated what was possible to achieve.”

Jean-Daniel Fekete, researcher in information visualization, visual analytics and human-computer interaction at INRIA, France, said, “They will compare the arrival of the internet to the invention of the printing press in terms of spreading knowledge; it was Renaissance 2.0.”

Fred Baker, independent networking technologies consultant, longtime leader in the Internet Engineering Task Force and engineering fellow with Cisco, commented, “I expect they will use the word ‘revolutionary,’ much as historians today describe the impact of postal mail, Morse Code and the telephone system.”

Liz Rykert, president at Meta Strategies, a consultancy that works with technology and complex organizational change, responded, “The ability to be connected and the difference this has made for human safety and development creates positives, despite the potential downsides.”

John Sniadowski, a director for a technology company, wrote, “They will say that the internet became a massive, uncontrolled social experiment driven by corporate greed and governmental attempts to use it to gain intelligence on general populations.”

Gianluca Demartini, a senior lecturer in data science at the University of Queensland, Australia, wrote, “They will describe how it has enabled the democratic process at scale.”

Fernando Barrio, director of the law program at the Universidad Nacional de Rio Negro, Argentina, commented, “In 50 years’ time historians will be sharply divided. There will be those who focus on positives for the lives of individuals with access to the benefits provided by the internet and its expansion, and there will be those who emphasize the perils for the people left behind – the lost privacy, the negative side of the alliance between governments and huge corporations and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.”

Paul Jones, professor of information science at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, responded, “We will have struggle in the immediate future. As with sailing, printing, industrialization, mass transportation and other advances, the intelligence revolution is being co-opted as a way to achieve power and dominance. But also, over time, our lives will continue to be enriched and provide even to those at the margins improved situations and that one essential: hope.”

Jack Gieseking, a University of Kentucky professor expert in cultural geography, American studies and gender and sexuality, said, “They will say that establishing supportive policy for all – over data and the people it belongs to as well as algorithms and the people they define – rather than allowing capitalist accumulation for a few would have made for a much better world.”

Jean-Claude Heudin, a professor with expertise in AI and software engineering at the Devinci Research Center at Pole Universitaire Leonard de Vinci, France, wrote, “It was the most important advance since the invention of writing and printed books.”

Joseph Konstan, distinguished professor of computer science specializing in human-computer interaction and AI at the University of Minnesota, said, “The internet (and computing/information – they all come together) will be seen as having been as powerful a revolution, and a faster one, than any prior to it, including the Industrial Revolution. In the long run (once we include robots, AI, etc.) this may well be on the scale of agriculture in the degree of change to society.”

Timothy Leffel, research scientist, National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, wrote, “They will observe that, in many ways, the rise of the internet has improved the world but it hasn’t been without its costs that were sometimes severe and disruptive to entire industries and nations.”

John Verdon, retired futurist and consultant, wrote, “When the digital environment shifted the world to a new attractor of governance and efficiency that favored self-organization the depth and force of incumbents’ in-fighting to preserve the problems to which it was the solution was stunning.”

Charlie Firestone, communications and society program executive director and vice president at The Aspen Institute, commented, “The internet will be viewed as an important first step in global connectivity, leading to the widely different modes of communication that arose over the past 50 years.”

Jeff Johnson, computer science professor at the University of San Francisco, previously with Xerox, HP Labs and Sun Microsystems, responded, “They may say that the internet as we now know it was an inevitable stage but one that eventually had to be replaced with a system that is less free-wheeling and more secure that prevents distribution of false information and is less driven by advertising (and more by subscription fees).”

Ian Peter, pioneer internet activist and internet rights advocate, said, “The histories we read in 50 years’ time will no doubt put a positive spin on developments and point to the (real) advances that that have been made and that have a positive effect. They are likely to gloss over many major issues however as they cease to become relevant to normal perceptions in that era.”

Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, wrote, “That all depends on how we respond to the current crisis. At the very moment when the bottom-up networked revolution is affording us the opportunity to disperse power closer to the people, both our politics and our business are concentrating power in fewer hands. We can change this, but we need to act now.”

Leonardo Trujillo, a research professor in computing sciences at the Instituto Tecnológico de Tijuana, Mexico, responded, “They will say the internet is an important technology for human development that brought about the potential to greatly simplify how information is generated, shared and communicated but it also led to the development of powerful surveillance and propaganda tools that had a negative impact in the way democracies function.”

Karen Oates, director of workforce development and financial stability for La Casea de Esperanza, commented, “It’s hard to say. If, as a society and a people, we are unable to respect the God-given dignity of each person, extend compassion to others and love our neighbors as ourselves, I think historians will see the U.S. as another fallen empire like the many that have gone before. We will have misused technology to the detriment of many, especially the lower classes.”

Jay Sanders, president and CEO of the Global Telemedicine Group, responded, “In the same way society grew and matured during the Industrial Revolution the internet afforded an exponential growth in basic knowledge and expertise.”

Geoff Arnold, CTO for the Verizon Smart Communities organization, said, “They will note the naïveté of governing institutions in the face of manipulation, leading to Trump and Brexit.”

Yvette Wohn, director of the Social Interaction Lab and expert on human-computer interaction at New Jersey Institute of Technology, commented, “The internet in itself is not to blame; how people use the internet determines how much the internet influences them.”

Steven Thompson, an author specializing in illuminating emerging issues and editor of “Androids, Cyborgs and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society,” wrote, “Disaster. Contributing to the fall of mankind. Sorry, but I wax apocalyptic, and the internet is at the heart of it.”

Mike Meyer, chief information officer at Honolulu Community College, commented, “The historians’ view of the first 75 years of the internet will be that for the first time we have a detailed history of a fundamental paradigmatic change in human civilization. The arguments will be on the overall impact of the resulting definition of humanity’s view of the universe. Currently the assumption has become that this is on the level of the scientific revolution in Western Europe, but it may be in 50 years that it will be seen as closer to the Neolithic transition.”

Marek Havrda, director at NEOPAS and strategic adviser for the GoodAI project, said, “It will be a mixed verdict including positives such as increased productivity and connectedness among individual people, but also negatives including contribution to societal division and partial erosion of democracy in democratic countries and potentially ‘Big Brother’ scenarios in non-democratic countries. The verdict will depend on whose writing it.”

Ross Stapleton-Gray, principal at Stapleton-Gray and Associates, an information technology and policy consulting firm, commented, “The 2016 U.S. election will be seen as a major milestone and a rather unfortunate event.”

Mícheál Ó Foghlú, engineering director and DevOps Code Pillar at Google, Munich, said, “Despite the negatives I firmly believe that the main benefits have been positive, allowing economies and people to move up the value chain, ideally to more rewarding levels of endeavour.”

Wangari Kabiru, author of the MitandaoAfrika blog, based in Nairobi, commented, “Historians’ verdict 50 years from now about the impact of the internet on people’s social, economic and political lives today will be that it was an innovative generation. The next generation must wear an invention cap.”

Thomas H. Davenport, distinguished professor at Babson College and fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, responded, “It will be a mixed verdict. In highly democratic societies, it will increase social and political participation and create a flowering of knowledge. In totalitarian societies it will be used to monitor and control citizens and stifle dissent.”

Rob Frieden, professor and Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications and Law at Penn State University, said, “They will say that cyber-optimists oversold and the internet under-delivered. Historians will track irrational exuberance followed by a balancing of good and evil.”

Luke Stark, a fellow in the department of sociology at Dartmouth College and at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, wrote, “Not good.”

Tracey P. Lauriault, assistant professor of critical media and big data in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University, commented, “This question is technologically deterministic; it is assuming that the technology determines social outcomes, when in reality it is a complex mix of place, space, context, economics, culture, history, law, politics and etc. with technology that determines outcomes. In 50 years, if this question persists, they will say that we still do not understand that it is not technology alone that determines outcomes.”

Peter Levine, associate dean for research and professor of public affairs at Tufts University, wrote, “As Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution (probably referring to 1968, not 1789), ‘It’s too early to tell.’ It depends upon whether we are near the beginning of the loss of jobs and the decay of democracies or whether the next decade brings prosperity and better governance.”

Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at NLnet Foundation and director of the Internet Society’s Netherlands chapter, responded, “That depends on who will be paying those historians, and where they live. Of course, if we are unable to stop corporate exploitation and mass surveillance between now and then, the perspective will be different too. Seen from a distant galaxy, the first 50 years of the internet are naive and morally tainted by the fundamental dishonesty of major actors. The U.S. government and the NSA in particular may have had a spectacular espionage success through the internet, but this also means that this period of the internet goes down into the books as the largest and most successful Trojan horse in human history.”

Michael Muller, researcher in the AI interactions group for a major global technology solutions provider, responded, “Historians will develop analytic frameworks beyond unipolarity and even intersectionality. Nonetheless, I hope they continue to see differential impacts depending on each person’s position in society.”

Eugene H. Spafford, internet pioneer and professor of computing sciences at Purdue University, founder and executive director emeritus of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, commented, “It will not be simple, and the changes are still occurring. That impact has not been homogeneous is notable.”

Bob Frankston, software innovation pioneer and technologist based in North America, wrote, “Historians will look back at 2018 as a time still more in the 20th century than the world of the later 21st.”

William Dutton, Oxford Martin Fellow at the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre and founding director of the Oxford Internet Institute, commented, “Many more historians will write many more histories of the internet that capture a nearly uncountable number of innovations and applications that have emerged over the years.”

Matt Belge, founder and president of Vision & Logic, said, “The internet will be seen as profound an invention as anything the human race has ever invented. It won’t be as important as writing or publishing, but that is the only human invention that will be considered more important than the internet.”

Walid Al-Saqaf, senior lecturer at Sodertorn University, member of the board of trustees of the Internet Society, said, “They will say it had major positive impact driven by sharing knowledge.”

Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, wrote, “It will be no different than historians’ view of the impact of electricity and telephony on people’s lives in the mid-1900s. Most historians, except those who are techno-skeptics, will see it as positive.”

Scott Burleigh, software engineer and intergalactic internet pioneer, wrote, “It was very large and results were mixed, the net impact being slightly positive.”

Kathy Brandt, a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “Everyone could interact with a wider world.”

Peng Hwa Ang, professor of communications at Nanyang Technological University and author of “Ordering Chaos: Regulating the Internet,” commented, “Historians 50 years from now will take many lessons from the internet today. One fundamental truth is that anything that is powerful for good can also be powerful for evil.”

Michael H. Goldhaber, an author, consultant and theoretical physicist who wrote early explorations on the digital attention economy, said, “I don’t think historians will have a strong reason to focus on this question. Though a few will, they will not be unanimous. The dominant view will depend on how current trends play out in the next half century. The key verdicts will be that mentalities changed, that geographic ties weakened, that centers of power became in some ways more remote from ordinary people, and yet, in some ways closer (e.g., presidential tweets).”

Sam Ladner, a former UX researcher for Amazon and Microsoft now an adjunct professor at Ontario College of Art & Design, wrote, “It is no different than the ‘impact’ of the written word, or mass media. In other words, the internet’s impact will be written as a tale of unexpected consequences.”

Valarie Bell, a computational social scientist at the University of North Texas, commented, “As with most inventions and innovations, the verdict will be what it is for everything. It is a double-edged sword. No matter what people create, someone will find ways to deviate it, misuse it, harmfully exploit it. That’s just people.”

Theodore Gordon, futurist, management consultant and co-founder of the Millennium Project, responded, “As radio and television shaped their eras, the internets have shaped society and the world.”

Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, director of the Spanish National Research Council’s Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, said, “There will obviously be very positive things to say, but I’m afraid the overall balance will not be very brilliant. We might regret having invented the internet.”

Mike O’Connor, a retired technologist who worked at ICANN and on national broadband issues, commented, “It was a major contributor to the current environmental and authoritarian disaster that surrounds us.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick, the product director at Influencer Marketing, responded, “We cannot know. I’m sure it will be complex. I hope it will be positive. I hope population won’t have collapsed by then.”

Ian O’Byrne, an assistant professor at the College of Charleston whose focus is literacy and technology, said, “Historians will ultimately determine that social media and ubiquitous access to screens was detrimental to people’s social, economic and political lives. Yet, it was a necessary gateway to a better solution.”

Michael Wollowski, associate professor of computer science and software engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, expert in the Internet of Things, diagrammatic systems and artificial intelligence, wrote, “It led to more gossip, less critical thinking, easy access to goods and services and easy swaying of the masses.”

Ryan Sweeney, director of analytics at Ignite Social Media, commented, “The internet will have had such a profound impact that historians will have to segment human history into Before Internet and After Internet.”

Vian Bakir, a professor of political communication and journalism at Bangor University, responded, “They will ask, ‘Why did we let this genie out of the box without iron chains to keep it? Why did we allow society to give up their personal control over what can be easily known about them via their data trails?’”

Tom Worthington, Australian internet pioneer and adjunct senior lecturer in the Research School of Computer Science at Australian National University, said, “People quickly adapt to new technology. The internet will just be seen as normal.”

Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Center, responded, “Like the printing press, historians will evaluate the positives and negatives. The most extraordinary thing is the rapidity of change and the human cognitive limitations to adapt with equal speed.”

Raimundo Beca, partner at Imaginacción, formerly a member of the ICANN board, said, “Historians will say that finally the divide between the haves and have-nots has disappeared.”

Stuart A. Umpleby, a professor and director of the research program in social and organizational learning at George Washington University, wrote, “A Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was eliminated by Newt Gingrich in order to put companies, rather than Congress in charge of technology. Given unrestrained advancements in digital and biological technology, we now need such an office more than ever.”

John Markoff, fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and author of “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots,” wrote, “Their assessment will be mixed.”

Michael Pilos, chief marketing officer at FirePro, said, “They will say that it was one of humanity’s great inventions and that it is up to par with the innovation of the printing press.”

Sam Punnett, research and strategy officer at TableRock Media, wrote, “Historians’ commentary will likely center upon our leaders and their reaction to chaos created by changes enabled by the internet and the flow of data and decision-making made in reaction to the disruption of 20th century systems.”

Stephen McDowell, a professor of communication at Florida State University expert in new media and internet governance, commented, “The early 21st century may be seen as a time of social and industrial tumult and institutional change, leading to efforts to form new industrial and market patterns as well as governing practices and institutions. This may take decades to mature, and the new industrial, market and institutional configurations of the 2040s will be a national and international historical bargain that we cannot fully predict.”

John McNutt, a professor in the school of public policy and administration at the University of Delaware, responded, “There is no question that it has made lives better. That would include historians’ lives.”

Thornton May, technology futurist, author and educator, said, “Historians will say that ‘human agency’ – the choice as to whether to use the tool – is a critical driver of personal and professional trajectories.”

Randall Mayes, a technology analyst and author, wrote, “In several decades, unless we have foresight to prepare for a smooth transition, many people will experience rough times. Then, at some point, the quality of life will improve drastically.”

Martin Geddes, a consultant specializing in telecommunications strategies, said, “Like the railroads and electricity, it takes generations for society to reorganise around a key enabling technology. Their verdict will be that the transformation only really got going in the 2020s, and prior to that we just played with the prototype internet.”

Stephen Abram, principal at Lighthouse Consulting Inc., wrote, “Their view will be positive. People always retroactively justify the present using retrospective coherence goggles. Nostalgia is rarely beyond a lifetime looking back, so the nostalgia of 50 years from now will be today.”

Roland Benedikter, co-director of the Center for Advanced Studies at Eurac Research Bozen, South Tyrol, Italy, responded, “Their views will be mostly positive, but maybe they will say this was only temporarily so.”

Steve King, partner at Emergent Research, said, “Historians will likely find the overall impact of the internet quite positive.”

Steven Polunsky, director of the Alabama Transportation Policy Research Center, University of Alabama, wrote, “You will get the same response as if you asked someone today about the impact on society of the hammer. They’ll think you are crazy for asking.”

Seth Finkelstein, consulting programmer at Finkelstein Consulting, commented, “What type of historian? Political, economic (labor), economic (capital), cultural, gender, science studies, etc.? What is historians’ verdict about the impact of the Industrial Revolution? Whole books could be written on such a topic in various specialties. For example, as industrialization intensified a shift to urbanization, so the internet has increased (but is not the sole factor in) globalization. Each specialty will have to analyze how the internet interacted with other factors bearing on its area. That is, I don’t think there will be one ‘verdict,’ as largely there isn’t any single opinion for such broad subject matter.”

Mark Crowley, an assistant professor expert in machine learning and core member of the Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, wrote, “This period will be seen a merely the first stage of coming to awareness, like a 3-year-old just starting to figure itself out and running into problems. They will find it hard to fathom how changes happened because they will not understand the time before the internet.”

Norton Gusky, an education technology consultant, wrote, “It will be up there with the printing press in regard to the impact on our lives.”

Mauro D. Ríos, an adviser to the eGovernment Agency of Uruguay and director of the Uruguayan Internet Society chapter, responded, “They will see it as mostly positive.”

William Uricchio, media scholar and professor of comparative media studies at MIT, commented, “In 50 years, I hope historians will invert the question. Instead of asking about what impact the internet had on its users, I hope they will instead explore how societies chose to deploy a new technology and what those deployments say about value systems and the social order.”

Christopher Yoo, a professor of law, communication and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, responded, “I think historians will regard the internet as a tremendous tool for economic and political empowerment. Centralized control of information and business opportunities are being displaced by the more decentralized structure of the internet. Although this transformation is not now and will likely never will be complete, it has changed the landscape of opportunities in fundamental ways.”

Angelique Hedberg, senior corporate strategy analyst at RTI International, said, “History looks favorably on the sum total, not the parts.”

Peter Asaro, a professor at The New School, philosopher of sci-tech and media who examines artificial intelligence and robotics, commented, “Historians are never as black and white as this survey. Many technologies have transformed society, economics and politics enormously, from the plough to the steam engine to the airplane. Good historians will note that some benefit, some are harmed, but what is significant is the structure and nature of the changes. If the internet leads to unprecedented tyrannies or another world war, as industrial technologies and imperial aspirations did in the early 20th century, then it will probably be viewed negatively. If we manage to avoid that, it will probably be viewed positively.”

Lane Jennings, a recent retiree who served as managing editor for the World Future Review from 2009 to 2015, wrote, “If human values and human scale and pace are preserved in human/AI interactions, historians may report with pride how AI has made great improvements to human society throughout the world. If not, I fear that people will increasingly choose to ignore uncomfortable facts and disturbing opinions and act rashly on the basis of limited and biased reports and opinions. Technology alone is not to blame. It is how technology is used and for whose convenience it is constructed in the first place that will make or break the future.”

George Kubik, president of Anticipatory Futures Group, wrote, “It will be considered one of the greatest accelerators of human evolution.”

Daniel Riera, a professor of computer science at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, commented, “They will say it connected people and enhanced collaboration, it created business opportunities and it changed social realities.”

Matthew Henry, chief information officer at LeTourneau University, Longview, Texas, said, “The internet created the pathway for endless connections: knowledge, devices, people, a way of life.”

Steve Chenoweth, an associate professor of computer science at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, said, “There will be many ways to deconstruct what happens, not just one correct set of opinions. And those opinions themselves will be divided into camps that could be quite isolated by lack of interaction.”

Jennifer Jarratt, owner of Leading Futurists consultancy, commented, “They will ask, ‘How could we have been so slow in realizing what we had and so slow in using it to improve our world?’”

Pedro U. Lima, an associate professor of computer science at Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, said, “They will surely conclude that the internet has revolutionised the world, at least as much as the Industrial Revolution and other similar disruptive events did in the past.”

John Laird, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, responded, “Together with other computer and AI advances, it will be seen as the source of major impact across all areas of human endeavor. This assumes we address climate change and other potentially catastrophic problems.”

Rafal Rzepka, an assistant professor of information science at Hokkaido University and member of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, commented, “The ‘Beginning of the Knowledge Sharing Era’ will be seen to be the start of a new enlightenment, prevailing over religions, superstitions and biased beliefs.”

Peter Eachus, director of psychology and public health at the University of Salford, U.K., responded, “I am one of the lucky people to have lived at a time before the internet arrived and I can therefore see the massive improvements in all our lives as a result of internet developments. Things that used to be incredibly complicated, e.g., booking a plane ticket, can now be done simply and instantly.”

Andrea Romaoli Garcia, an international lawyer active in internet governance discussions, commented, “That it certainly led to a better quality of life.”

Bert Huang, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech focused on machine learning, wrote, “In 50 years, pre-internet social, economic and political lives will be unrecognizable to people in that era.”

Denis Poussart, a consultant in advanced technologies with expertise in computer architecture and AI, commented, “They will see it as a fundamental change, on the same level as, say, mastering mechanical power.”

Written elaborations by respondents who chose to remain anonymous

A few highlights – anonymous respondents said historians 50 years from now might say the current age of the internet:

• “Redefined civilization.”
• “Enabled the rise of another social order.”
• “Could be the most significant era of human history.”
• “Led to the spread and dominion of Western values, economic power and political control.”
• “Drastically sped up technological progress and led to the emergence of global society.”
• “Led to dramatic changes in how people view the world, thus dramatically changed the pillars on which society is built.”
• “Has accelerated capital, communication and connection.”
• “Has simply updated and replicated legacy colonial hierarchies.”
• “Led to data and information becoming a major asset and a ‘commodity.’”
• “Was the era in which humans had to create systems to cope with large-scale continuous disruptions.”
• “Served us in many ways, but failed us in ways that even now we are unaware of.”
• “Was not as important as climate change and other elements of its time.”
• Was the point of creation of  “a Jinn: a genie who grants the insidious and perverse inverse of any wish. In building a technology to bring the world together, we gave it the perfect tool to rip itself apart.”
• “Economically has been a boon. Politically it created polarity. Socially, the verdict is still up in the air. The next 10 years will be important.”

An Internet Hall of Fame member expert in network architecture said, “Overall, I think historians will view the impact of the internet on society as very positive. It provides access to vast troves of information that individuals rely upon in everyday life. It enables friendships, research and business relationships to be established and to prosper across vast geographic distances and time differences.”

A CEO based in Germany responded, “The internet became the underlying operating system for societies.”

An ARPANET and internet pioneer and computer engineer commented, “It will be impossible to separate the effects of the internet from other technological changes. It will look inevitable and be part of a continuum with other historical events.”

A retired program director for the U.S. National Science Foundation wrote, “To be determined. It is quite possible that it will be seen as a quantum leap forward; it is quite possible there will be no human historians left.”

An assistant professor of media studies a major U.S. university commented, “In 50 years, historians will discuss the failure of platform providers such as Facebook and Google to act responsibly as stewards of public culture. The argument that platforms are ‘neutral’ or ‘mere technology’ will seem naive and disingenuous.

A fellow at Harvard expert in digital economic policy commented, “It was the beginning of an autocratic global regime.”

A program director at Harvard University who formerly worked with a team that established what became one of today’s most-successful-ever internet startups said, “They will see that the 0.01% came to hoard all the wealth for themselves.”

A professor of computer science expert in systems wrote, “The traditional role of historians is to record the facts that define history. With the internet and the information infrastructure built on it, we may have rendered historians’ traditional role obsolete. Their new role is to distinguish facts from disinformation, all from the vast sea of data being generated and stored around the internet. If they are unsuccessful in their new role, we will have many contradictory verdicts on every topic, including the impact of internet. Probably, as the millennials already show, there will be more interest in the here and now, and less interest in history.”

A director of a center for digital humanities located in the U.K. said, “That it impacted everything in its detail and content – but not its structure and form. Inequality is still a constant, as are political propaganda, global capitalism, etc. It amplified, exposed and complicated these things – but overall these core sociological constants have remained the same.”

A technical evangelist commented, “Things we consider wildly innovative will be seen as incremental.”

An anonymous respondent said, “It has accelerated capital, communication and connection. However, it has simply updated and replicated legacy colonial hierarchies.”

A pioneering internet sociologist said, “At present, the impact is a positive one, and most people agree. They are better connected to each other and better able to get access to information and goods.”

A researcher and teacher of technical communication responded, “They will think about the ways that we’ve had to change the laws, our perspectives on one another and the ways that we connect with one another. They will see it as a positive but also as a fundamental change in the ways that we connected and reacted to another.”

An associate professor specializing in economic sociology and stratification commented, “They will probably say we were bad at predicting the future impact of technology.”

A lead QA engineer at a technology group said, “They will say we were immature and primitive in the way we used technology (like the times of the Industrial Revolution).”

A digital-strategies consultant commented, “Historians will find our era indistinguishable from Jim Crow policies of the pre-Civil Rights era. Political movements of the 1960s and 1970s will be seen as an odd post-World War II anomaly, along with the memory of a robust middle class. With the return of global fascism, a new global ‘Stasi’ and ‘KGB’ lowering a Velvet Curtain into the deep infrastructure of our once-open internet. Service providers will throttle and censor content; algorithms will hide communications from possible recipients. Instead of mass marches, you will see Dark Web guerrilla groups and secret police disappearing people and laying waste to entire face-to-face communities.”

An emeritus professor of computer science at a major California university commented, “The internet is not an existential threat to humanity and so its effect is largely beneficial. In general, any technology that connects people more to one another is beneficial. We need to distinguish technologies of connectivity from technologies of future superior intelligence and consciousness. General artificial intelligence (GAI) is an existential threat, but not the internet. However, once GAI surpasses human capabilities I am sure that GAI systems will use the internet to take control of humanity. The internet is a tool and can be used, like any tool, for good or evil purposes. In contrast, GAI will not be a tool; it will be an autonomous entity and, ultimately, a competitor to humanity (and to all other biological forms of life, since GAI systems will not be based on biological metabolic processes). Freedom from biology will allow GAI synthetic systems to travel to the stars so, in the long run, humans will be left behind. The real question is: How long can humans delay the inevitable? The longer the better, if you happen to be human.”

A journalist, author, blogger and leading internet activist wrote, “They will remember it as inequality’s handmaiden, and as the apparatus that was used to organize against, and defeat, plutocratic corruption.”

A senior data analyst and systems specialist expert in complex networks responded, “Historians will disagree.”

An internet pioneer, founder and president said, “Facebook will become the new MySpace.”

An executive director for a major global foundation wrote, “The internet will rank among the major technology movements in world history – like gunpowder, indoor plumbing and electricity. And like all of them (with the possible exception of indoor plumbing), its eventual weaponization should have been less of a surprise.”

An information and communications technology policy adviser for an African nation responded, “They will think we really did not exploit the internet well enough and that we should have had an international framework for regulating the internet to stop it from being used by unscrupulous people.”

A professor of AI based at a major university in Italy said, “Social organization will change gradually, there will not be a date for sudden changes. The internet enables the rise of another social order.”

An associate professor of computer science at a U.S. university commented, “Historians will probably see this as the era in which humans had to create systems to cope with large-scale continuous disruptions.”

An assistant professor of social justice based in the U.S. wrote, “Technology will end humanity, as people will no longer strive to be the best they can be.”

A professor based in Turkey wrote, “It was an age of counter-evolution.”

An internet cybercrime and security consultant based in Europe wrote, “They will look at and comment on a period of tremendous transition. (If we manage to store digital data successfully even after systems are terminated or changed, that is.) This era will be given a name ending with ‘revolution.’ They will also be negative and comment on the unforeseen changes no one saw coming at time (as is easy to do in hindsight).”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Historians will agree that the internet has reshaped social, political and economic life, enabling major trends such as remote work, globalized supply chains, online shopping, cloud information services and so on. The past 50 years since the internet’s inception can correctly be identified as an inflection point in society, going from the Industrial Age to the Information Era. There may be debates about whether this was a net positive for the world, but the enormous impact is indisputable.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “We learned more about our nature as a race, and about information’s ability to do great good or great harm.”

An information-science futurist commented, “In 50 years, historians might say, ‘It’s been a rocky ride, but we’ve come a long way since our struggle through the early part of the century. The internet is a powerful force. We must continue to learn from our mistakes and take the long view so we don’t repeat the past.’”

A professor of information science wrote, “It’s ‘the wheel’ and we used it without first assessing whether it is the best tool or not.”

An anonymous respondent said, “They will say the lack of mechanisms to enforce social mores on the internet allowed bad actors to inflict severe social, economic and political pains across the spectrum.”

An anonymous respondent who worked for a pioneering internet company said, “Historians may potentially say it became too controlling of our lives.”

A director of a center for digital health and behavior commented, “There was a lack of political vision and will to ensure legal protections for consumer/user/constituents’ rights and privacy, combined with a lack of vision in how to build media literacy into education curricula.”

A longtime economist for a top global technology company said, “Historians will note the death of privacy.”

A senior strategist in regulatory systems and economics for a top global telecommunications firm wrote, “Social media will be seen as very critical by historians.”

A research scientist based in North America wrote, “They will say the internet has dovetailed with the anti-globalism and pro-nationalist movements sweeping the planet. We created a Jinn: a genie who grants the insidious and perverse inverse of any wish. In building a technology to bring the world together, we gave it the perfect tool to rip itself apart.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Assuming the historians are free and open thinkers who can speak/write without fear of reprisal (if such historians still remain), I suspect that this digital-culture experiment will not be viewed well. Generally, they will have a negative verdict. Sorry for being such a downer, but it is high time we wake up, enough somnambulism.”

An anonymous respondent said, “They will say individual freedom was lost in transition in exchange for perceived personal abundance.”

The managing director of research in Europe for a major IT infrastructure company said, “The communications means led to dramatic changes in how people view the world and thus dramatically changed the pillars on which our society is built.”

A professional with a tech company said, “It was the single most important impact to our social, economic and political climate of the 21st century and it could be the most significant invention of human history.”

A professor of liberal arts based in India responded, “That it redefined civilization.”

A director of marketing for a major technology platform company commented, “The impact was significant.”

A longtime telecommunications policy consultant based in Europe commented, “I expect (and hope) they will have several differing verdicts.”

An expert on defense technologies wrote, “They will see it as they do the advent of other major technologies – printing press, steam power, electricity, television – all have good and bad aspects.”

A professor and center director based in the U.S. South said, “I imagine historians will still be arguing about the positive and negative effects 50 years from now.”

A member of the editorial board of an ACM journal said, “They will point out the digital transformation undergone by organisations and the promise of civic technologies and government technologies to serve citizens.”

The principal at a Silicon Valley communications consultancy said, “It will be mixed! Some will praise it; some will revile it for all the reasons we are debating today.”

An assistant professor of information and management science commented, “Which historians? There will always be apologists for whatever power structure happens to exist, and their voices will always be magnified by that structure.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “It brought about the global leavening of human culture without any one culture losing its uniqueness.”

An assistant professor of Machine Learning at a technological university based in Europe responded, “The internet is a big step forward from the printing press, but in 50 years it will probably be only the first of many such leaps that exponentially improved our ability to share knowledge with each other.”

An expert analyst of defense technologies responded, “Historians will be split, though I think it will be positive.”

A data analyst for a technology company said, “Historians will view the internet in the same vein as the printing press. It opened the door to so many possibilities – mostly good outcomes, but some bad ones as well. The conversation at that time will move more to how society reacted to the internet as it evolved.”

A professor of communications at a California-based university said, “I’m not sure ‘verdict’ is the right word. Also, why historians? What about the views of sociologists and other social scientists? Social scientists will say that the world is now living a new era – the digital or information age. But there are other scientific advancements too.”

An executive director said, “I expect that in the future our uncritical embrace of unregulated resources will be considered naïve and foolish. In particular, studies of the use and abuse of social media will probably keep social scientists busy for decades.”

A director and futurist based in Europe commented, “It will be seen as one of the most important drivers of change in history.”

A senior researcher in a foresight unit said, “The internet led to data and information becoming a major asset and a ‘commodity.’”

The general manager of an internet domain organization wrote, “In years to come, the internet will be seen as one of the world’s greatest inventions.”

A professor at an institute for theoretical physics responded, “It depends on how effectively we change it in the next few years to make the subversion of democracy more difficult.”

A professor emeritus expert on technology’s impacts on well-being wrote, “I hope that we turn it around and it becomes positive, but I think historians will credit the internet with opening up the world’s library and providing countless amounts of information with the tap of a finger. I worry about what this is doing to our attention spans and what the shortening of our attention is doing to our performance both productivity-wise and with our relationships.”

A chief information security officer said, “They will realize that the ideas of ‘1984’ and ‘The Lord of the Flies’ were realized by the net.”

A professor of computing sciences based in Mexico said, “That it was a milestone of the size of printing at least.”

A postdoctoral associate at a major U.S. technological university said, “Historians will be surprised at how people functioned without the internet in 50 years. They will probably look at the pre-internet age as we do the pre-industrial age.”

A director with a regional internet registry responded, “It depends entirely on whether that future has become utopian or dystopian. For either potential outcome, the answer is pretty obvious.”

The co-founder of an online civil liberties organization based in the Silicon Valley wrote, “Who knows? Will enough internet history be saved to enable them to reach a verdict?”

A professor and director of a cognitive science unit based in Europe said, “They will say, ‘How naive they were.’”

A general manager based at a U.S. university wrote, “Historians will wonder why we allowed such destructive forces to be unleashed unchecked and why so many people did nothing about it.”

A professor of computer science who is expert in AI said, “It will be rated as a major transformer of society – on the order of movable type or the internal-combustion engine.”

The director of a center for technology and society located in the Silicon Valley area responded, “We will look back on the 2018 internet as having had a significant economic and social impact due to the enabling of communication and a growing negative political and social impact from disinformation, hate and harassment.”

An associate professor of communications based at a Middle Eastern university wrote, “The internet was probably the greatest technological breakthrough and socially revolutionary technology between 1970 and 2020.”

An online communities researcher said, “That it seemed to have promise, but eventually those speaking of that promise were the capitalists and they didn’t care what happened as long as they made money so everything else fell apart.”

An associate professor of international business based in the U.K. responded, “The result was both greater good and greater harm.”

A doctoral student based in Europe researching the future of human-machine interaction commented, “Historians might need to reconsider their role as storytellers, as the internet is a great case study in the history of technology showing that the technology of history is not a single, linear construct, but gathers together many different and often contradictory stories. The impact of the internet on people’s social/economic/political lives is the recognition that people’s social/economic/political lives are reflected in its construction; and since many different people (or clusters of people) tend to have very different views on the same historical events (see Wikipedia wars), historians will definitely need to contemplate that.”

A U.K.-based physicist expert in quantum computation wrote, “It will be seen as beneficial to a degree comparable with the greatest technological innovations in human history.”

An associate professor of cognitive science and AI based in the South Pacific wrote, “They will say the internet had a big impact.”

A fellow at a Europe-based center studying human intelligence commented, “It depends where you live, how much money you have and what race you are.”

A professor of applied computational linguistics based in Europe wrote, “Hopefully, it will be retrospectively seen that there was a crisis – as bad actors used the internet to undermine consensus – but it was overcome.”

The former director of a center for information technology research and society based in California said, “They will comment on the good and the bad, as with any technology.”

An associate professor of computer science based in Scandinavia wrote, “They will call it (and are already calling it) the Computer/Networking Revolution (following after the Industrial Revolution).”

A professional technologist commented, “If things continue as they are now, historians will look back at the early days of the internet and see its revolutionary potential – a limitless place where we could spend our time together, learn anything or be anyone. The web will be viewed as a place that was first animated by the soaring idealism of the scientists and early technologists who occupied its channels. But then, as the web evolved, attention and investment turned to a small number of highly-controlled-yet-reliable meeting venues where people were encouraged to be reliable personas. So, I hope history is re-written along the way.”

An anonymous respondent said, “It will be that it provided a vast amount of instant data but resulted in the worst-documented period of the last thousand years because data is transient and users are recommended to delete old material.”

An expert in statistical analysis, economics and survey methods who works with the U.S. government said, “Their view will be positive.”

A distinguished engineer working for one of the world’s largest computing hardware companies commented, “Economic life will be seen to have improved. Social life will be seen as worse off because of comparisons and seeing only the best part of other people’s lives. Political life will be more transparent – corruption will come to light quickly.”

An anonymous respondent based in Turkey wrote, “There will be a bunch of information and junk on the net and less awareness of how to search and find quality.”

A professor of mathematics and statistics commented, “They will say that people in 2018 were really easily influenced by the internet – some were almost completely dependent on it for their social lives – and they were not very discerning about its content or use.”

A lecturer in communications law based in Washington, D.C., wrote, “They will see it historically as a net plus, a net positive for society, but not by much.”

A research scientist who works for Google said, “It was a net positive; there were lots of displacements; there were huge challenges to social systems.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “That it drastically sped up technological progress and led to the emergence of global society.”

A principal architect for a top-five technology company and longtime contributor to the IETF predicted, “After a massive crackdown on the Bonnies and Clydes of Cyberspace, history will mark the end of the ‘Wild West’ internet phase.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “They’ll say the internet added a lot but it took away a sense of community and society was forever changed. We can’t relate as well to each other, the common man or the common good any longer.”

An anonymous information administration manager commented, “Is 50 years enough time to come to a verdict? That implies a level of finality I do not foresee happening by then. We still argue about the necessity and morality of the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II, surely one of the technological milestones of the 20th century.”

An anonymous respondent said, “They will say it upended things as much as the printing press did.”

An anonymous respondent noted, “Historians always discuss and differ. They probably will think it made a large change in people’s lives, although I am sure there will be some revisionists who will say that the impact of internet has been overstressed.”

A policy adviser for the U.S. banking system commented, “It cannot be predicted. Looking backward is a more reliable way to evaluate the likely future than making unsubstantiated predictions.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Verdicts will be too diverse to analyze simply.”

A computer scientist commented, “I don’t believe society will be able to support historians’ writing in 2069.”

A digital and interactive strategy manager commented, “They will note that Russia and Cambridge Analytica used technology and propaganda to swing some U.S. voters into opting for Trump as president. Misinformation spreads, and the president is not held accountable for his inaccurate comments.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Fifty years from now it will still be too close to decide. In 500 years, they will look at us as we now look at the Renaissance.”

A top research director and technical fellow at a major global technology company said, “They will say the internet led to a deep and wide transformation of human society. It will be noted as a major, largely positive, disruption by historians.”

A member of the Internet Hall of Fame said, “No way to know.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Economically it has been a boon. Politically it created polarity. Socially, the verdict is still up in the air. I think the next 10 years will be important ones.”

An anonymous respondent said, “That it served us in many ways, but failed us in ways that even now we are unaware of.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “It created a new social order, as did previous revolutions.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “That there is no privacy because of it. That we responded too slowly to regulate technology before it was further implemented into society.”

A director of e-business research at a large data-management firm said, “That is was the fourth (or fifth) Industrial Revolution.”

The founder of a technology research firm wrote, “It brought many positives, many ills.”

An anonymous respondent who worked for a pioneering internet company commented, “They will not be able to imagine that anything different could have happened. Once things change, they become ‘progress.’”

A professor of psychology for a human-computer interaction institute commented, “Historians will say that it initiated the decline of a social fabric, perhaps to good and perhaps to evil.”

A strategy consultant wrote, “The verdict will be seen as positive for the spread and dominion of Western values, economic power and political control.”

A post-doctoral fellow studying data and society said, “Historians would say the internet has created both opportunities and challenges for people.”

An engineer and chief operating officer said, “It will not be a topic of historical debate unless you are happy to lose your job and have your identity disrupted.”

A well-known writer and editor who documented the early boom of the internet in the 1990s wrote, “Rather like electricity, it will be hard to imagine anything like modern life without it, and so it will be hard for them to pass any judgement beyond ‘inevitable.’”

A digital rights activist commented, “I’ll be happy if we have historians 50 years from now and manage not to bomb ourselves into oblivion.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “That it has been good.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Historians will see it as a negative.”

An anonymous respondent said, “The impact is already here. Therefore, I think that something else will actually generate the impact that historians will discuss in 50 years.”

An anonymous respondent who works at a major global privacy initiative said, “They will say its profound impact touches everything. Who really thought about connected cars and smart refrigerators? And there’s more to come we haven’t thought about.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “They will see it as positive.”

An anonymous respondent said, “It has led to the penetration of the latest communication and information technologies more quickly into society.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “I have no idea, and I don’t think it can be summed up in 100 words. I’m sure they’ll say it was radically transformational toward societies worldwide as a whole, but I don’t think we can know the nature of those transformations before they happen.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “They will say that real-life interactions were greatly reduced.”

An anonymous respondent said, “That overall it was positive, and it has mostly improved people’s lives but that it still needs to evolve to reach under-served populations.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Historians will note an increased obsession with self, a loss of privacy and a bipedal global economy. They will also note a wealth of global knowledge resulting from the internet.”

An anonymous respondent observed, “New technology is always disruptive. In 50 years there may be a clearer context – if we are still here.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “The internet has significantly changed people’s social, economic and political lives. However, historians in the future will look at it as a small move. It might not seem to be as big to them as it seems to us. They will be more interested in the architecture that we are laying down that may or may not become essential to the future of the internet.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “It will depend on what else has happened by then.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “The internet’s impact will be seen as transformational in terms of social, economic and political lives.”

If you wish to read the full “Historians’ Verdict” survey report with analysis, click here:
https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/surveys/x-3-internet-50th-2019/

The content on this page was made in reply to one of many ARPANET 50th anniversary questions asked of these respondents.
If you wish to read more on this topic, please see the much more comprehensive “Next 50 Years of Digital Life” report:
https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/surveys/x-2-internet-50th-2019/