Pew Research, which seems to be interested in just about everything, conducts a "future of the Internet" survey every few years in which they throw outrageously open-ended and provocative questions at a chosen collection of observers in the areas of technology and society. Pew makes participation fun by finding questions so pointed that they make you choke a bit. You start by wondering, "Could I actually answer that?" and then think, "Hey, the whole concept is so absurd that I could say anything without repercussions!" So I participated in their and did it again this week. The Pew report will aggregate the yes/no responses from the people they asked to participate, but I took the exercise as a chance to hammer home my own choices of issues.

(If you'd like to take the survey, you can currently visit http://www.facebook.com/l/c6596;survey.confirmit.com/wix2/p1075078513.aspx and enter PIN 2000.)

Will Google make us stupid?

This first question is not about a technical or policy issue on the Internet or even how people use the Internet, but a purported risk to human intelligence and methods of inquiry. Usually, questions about how technology affect our learning or practice really concern our values and how we choose technologies, not the technology itself. And that's the basis on which I address such questions. I am not saying technology is neutral, but that it is created, adopted, and developed over time in a dialog with people's desires.

I respect the questions posed by Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic article--although it's hard to take such worries seriously when he suggests that even the typewriter could impoverish writing--and would like to allay his concerns. The question is all about people's choices. If we value introspection as a road to insight, if we believe that long experience with issues contributes to good judgment on those issues, if we (in short) want knowledge that search engines don't give us, we'll maintain our depth of thinking and Google will only enhance it.

There is a trend, of course, toward instant analysis and knee-jerk responses to events that degrades a lot of writing and discussion. We can't blame search engines for that. The urge to scoop our contacts intersects with the starvation of funds for investigative journalism to reduce the value of the reports we receive about things that are important for us. Google is not responsible for that either (unless you blame it for draining advertising revenue from newspapers and magazines, which I don't). In any case, social and business trends like these are the immediate influences on our ability to process information, and searching has nothing to do with them.

What search engines do is provide more information, which we can use either to become dilettantes (Carr's worry) or to bolster our knowledge around the edges and do fact-checking while we rely mostly on information we've gained in more robust ways for our core analyses. Google frees the time we used to spend pulling together the last 10% of facts we need to complete our research. I read Carr's article when The Atlantic first published it, but I used a web search to pull it back up and review it before writing this response. Google is my friend.

Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?

Our computer usage will certainly move more and more to an environment of small devices (probably in our hands rather than on our desks) communicating with large data sets and applications in the cloud. This dual trend, bifurcating our computer resources between the tiny and the truly gargantuan, have many consequences that other people have explored in depth: privacy concerns, the risk that application providers will gather enough data to preclude competition, the consequent slowdown in innovation that could result, questions about data quality, worries about services becoming unavailable (like Twitter's fail whale, which I saw as recently as this morning), and more.

One worry I have is that netbooks, tablets, and cell phones will become so dominant that meaty desktop systems will rise in the cost till they are within the reach only of institutions and professionals. That will discourage innovation by the wider populace and reduce us to software consumers. Innovation has benefited a great deal from the ability of ordinary computer users to bulk up their computers with a lot of software and interact with it at high speeds using high quality keyboards and large monitors. That kind of grassroots innovation may go away along with the systems that provide those generous resources.

So I suggest that cloud application providers recognize the value of grassroots innovation--following Eric von Hippel's findings--and solicit changes in their services from their visitors. Make their code open source--but even more than that, set up test environments where visitors can hack on the code without having to download much software. Then anyone with a comfortable keyboard can become part of the development team.

We'll know that software services are on a firm foundation for future success when each one offers a "Develop and share your plugin here" link.

Will social relations get better?

Like the question about Google, this one is more about our choices than our technology. I don't worry about people losing touch with friends and family. I think we'll continue to honor the human needs that have been hard-wired into us over the millions of years of evolution. I do think technologies ranging from email to social networks can help us make new friends and collaborate over long distances.

I do worry, though, that social norms aren't keeping up with technology. For instance, it's hard to turn down a "friend" request on a social network, particularly from someone you know, and even harder to "unfriend" someone. We've got to learn that these things are OK to do. And we have to be able to partition our groups of contacts as we do in real life (work, church, etc.). More sophisticated social networks will probably evolve to reflect our real relationships more closely, but people have to take the lead and refuse to let technical options determine how they conduct their relationships.

Will the state of reading and writing be improved?

Our idea of writing changes over time. The Middle Ages left us lots of horribly written documents. The few people who learned to read and write often learned their Latin (or other language for writing) rather minimally. It took a long time for academies to impose canonical rules for rhetoric on the population. I doubt that a cover letter and resume from Shakespeare would meet the writing standards of a human resources department; he lived in an age before standardization and followed his ear more than rules.

So I can't talk about "improving" reading and writing without addressing the question of norms. I'll write a bit about formalities and then about the more important question of whether we'll be able to communicate with each other (and enjoy what we read).

In many cultures, writing and speech have diverged so greatly that they're almost separate languages. And English in Jamaica is very different from English in the US, although I imagine Jamaicans try hard to speak and write in US style when they're communicating with us. In other words, people do recognize norms, but usage depends on the context.

Increasingly, nowadays, the context for writing is a very short form utterance, with constant interaction. I worry that people will lose the ability to state a thesis in unambiguous terms and a clear logical progression. But because they'll be in instantaneous contact with their audience, they can restate their ideas as needed until ambiguities are cleared up and their reasoning is unveiled. And they'll be learning from others along with way. Making an elegant and persuasive initial statement won't be so important because that statement will be only the first step of many.

Let's admit that dialog is emerging as our generation's way to develop and share knowledge. The notion driving Ibsen's Hedda Gabler--that an independent philosopher such as Ejlert Løvborg could write a masterpiece that would in itself change the world--is passé. A modern Løvborg would release his insights in a series of blogs to which others would make thoughtful replies. If this eviscerated Løvborg's originality and prevented him from reaching the heights of inspiration--well, that would be Løvborg's fault for giving in to pressure from more conventional thinkers.

If the Romantic ideal of the solitary genius is fading, what model for information exchange do we have? Check Plato's Symposium. Thinkers were expected to engage with each other (and to have fun while doing so). Socrates denigrated reading, because one could not interrogate the author. To him, dialog was more fertile and more conducive to truth.

The ancient Jewish scholars also preferred debate to reading. They certainly had some received texts, but the vast majority of their teachings were generated through conversation and were not written down at all until the scholars realized they had to in order to avoid losing them.

So as far as formal writing goes, I do believe we'll lose the subtle inflections and wordplay that come from a widespread knowledge of formal rules. I don't know how many people nowadays can appreciate all the ways Dickens sculpted language, for instance, but I think there will be fewer in the future than there were when Dickens rolled out his novels.

But let's not get stuck on the aesthetics of any one period. Dickens drew on a writing style that was popular in his day. In the next century, Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov wrote in a much less formal manner, but each is considered a beautiful stylist in his or her own way. Human inventiveness is infinite and language is a core skill in which we we all take pleasure, so we'll find new ways to play with language that are appropriate to our age.

I believe there will always remain standards for grammar and expression that will prove valuable in certain contexts, and people who take the trouble to learn and practice those standards. As an editor, I encounter lots of authors with wonderful insights and delightful turns of phrase, but with deficits in vocabulary, grammar, and other skills and resources that would enable them to write better. I work with these authors to bring them up to industry-recognized standards.

Will those in GenY share as much information about themselves as they age?

I really can't offer anything but baseless speculation in answer to this question, but my guess is that people will continue to share as much as they do now. After all, once they've put so much about themselves up on their sites, what good would it do to stop? In for a penny, in for a pound.

Social norms will evolve to accept more candor. After all, Ronald Reagan got elected President despite having gone through a divorce, and Bill Clinton got elected despite having smoked marijuana. Society's expectations evolve.

Will our relationship to key institutions change?

I'm sure the survey designers picked this question knowing that its breadth makes it hard to answer, but in consequence it's something of a joy to explore.

The widespread sharing of information and ideas will definitely change the relative power relationships of institutions and the masses, but they could move in two very different directions.

In one scenario offered by many commentators, the ease of whistleblowing and of promulgating news about institutions will combine with the ability of individuals to associate over social networking to create movements for change that hold institutions more accountable and make them more responsive to the public.

In the other scenario, large institutions exploit high-speed communications and large data stores to enforce even greater centralized control, and use surveillance to crush opposition.

I don't know which way things will go. Experts continually urge governments and businesses to open up and accept public input, and those institutions resist doing so despite all the benefits. So I have to admit that in this area I tend toward pessimism.

Will online anonymity still be prevalent?

Yes, I believe people have many reasons to participate in groups and look for information without revealing who they are. Luckily, most new systems (such as U.S. government forums) are evolving in ways that build in privacy and anonymity. Businesses are more eager to attach our online behavior to our identities for marketing purposes, but perhaps we can find a compromise where someone can maintain a pseudonym associated with marketing information but not have it attached to his or her person.

Unfortunately, most people don't appreciate the dangers of being identified. But those who do can take steps to be anonymous or pseudonymous. As for state repression, there is something of an escalating war between individuals doing illegal things and institutions who want to uncover those individuals. So far, anonymity seems to be holding on, thanks to a lot of effort by those who care.

Will the Semantic Web have an impact?

As organizations and news sites put more and more information online, they're learning the value of organizing and cross-linking information. I think the Semantic Web is taking off in a small way on site after site: a better breakdown of terms on one medical site, a taxonomy on a Drupal-powered blog, etc.

But Berners-Lee had a much grander vision of the Semantic Web than better information retrieval on individual sites. He's gunning for content providers and Web designers the world around to pull together and provide easy navigation from one site to another, despite wide differences in their contributors, topics, styles, and viewpoints.

This may happen someday, just as artificial intelligence is looking more feasible than it was ten years ago, but the chasm between the present and the future is enormous. To make the big vision work, we'll all have to use the same (or overlapping) ontologies, with standards for extending and varying the ontologies. We'll need to disambiguate things like webbed feet from the World Wide Web. I'm sure tools to help us do this will get smarter, but they need to get a whole lot smarter.

Even with tools and protocols in place, it will be hard to get billions of web sites to join the project. Here the cloud may be of help. If Google can perform the statistical analysis and create the relevant links, I don't have to do it on my own site. But I bet results would be much better if I had input.

Are the next takeoff technologies evident now?

Yes, I don't believe there's much doubt about the technologies that companies will commercialize and make widespread over the next five years. Many people have listed these technologies: more powerful mobile devices, ever-cheaper netbooks, virtualization and cloud computing, reputation systems for social networking and group collaboration, sensors and other small systems reporting limited amounts of information, do-it-yourself embedded systems, robots, sophisticated algorithms for slurping up data and performing statistical analysis, visualization tools to report the results of that analysis, affective technologies, personalized and location-aware services, excellent facial and voice recognition, electronic paper, anomaly-based security monitoring, self-healing systems--that's a reasonable list to get started with.

Beyond five years, everything is wide open. One thing I'd like to see is a really good visual programming language, or something along those lines that is more closely matched to human strengths than our current languages. An easy high-level programming language would immensely increase productivity, reduce errors (and security flaws), and bring in more people to create a better Internet.

Will the internet still be dominated by the end-to-end principle?

I'll pick up here on the paragraph in my answer about takeoff technologies. The end-to-end principle is central to the Internet I think everybody would like to change some things about the current essential Internet protocols, but they don't agree what those things should be. So I have no expectation of a top-to-bottom redesign of the Internet at any point in our viewfinder. Furthermore, the inertia created by millions of systems running current protocols would be hard to overcome. So the end-to-end principle is enshrined for the foreseeable future.

Mobile firms and ISPs may put up barriers, but anyone in an area of modern technology who tries to shut the spigot on outside contributions eventually becomes last year's big splash. So unless there's a coordinated assault by central institutions like governments, the inertia of current systems will combine with the momentum of innovation and public demand for new services to keep chokepoints from being serious problems.

(Typo fixed in previous paragraph--see amusing first comment below from Details Matter.)

Update, February 19, 2010: Pew Research has now released its report along with a large bunch of the comments they received during their survey. Along with areas where people lined up on each side, reaching a kind of consensus on each side, there are many interesting maverick observations. The only response of mine that I regret Pew did not use was about our move away from a Hedda Gabler world.