#futureoftheinternet

As emerging algorithm-driven artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, will people be better off than they are today?

Some 979 technology pioneers, innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists answered this question in a canvassing of experts conducted by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center in the summer of 2018. Here are some of their responses.

This article reviews the thoughts and opinions people have about the younger generation and it's positive or negative implications it will have in the future. Although the people surveyed answered pretty evenly as to if they think it will have more positive or negative effects, I believe being constantly connected through the internet is going to continue to have negative impacts. The article mentions how the ability of multi-tasking and our attention-span is diminishing and I couldn't agree more. I'm currently having difficult writing and completing this because I am constantly tempted to change the channel, check my phone, keep my dog occupied, or re-check the latest Facebook status updates about people I haven't talked to since high school. I never had this much of a distraction problem back in high school before I had access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, a smart phone, and my own laptop. What used to take me maybe an hour to complete now takes me quite a few; I just can't seem to focus and distracted way too easily no matter how hard I try. I can only foresee that this is going to get worse with the younger generation. Kids as young as 8 now walk around with iPhones, parents use iPads to keep their toddlers busy and quiet in public, and schools provide students with laptops or iPads to use for class. The new technology is helping us learn in different ways and making information more accessible, but I also think it's decreasing our ability to know exactly how to find the right answers. Society today is obsessed with instant-gratification causing our patience levels to decrease drastically. What used to take a minute to connect to the internet or download a video now takes less than seconds; heaven forbid it takes longer than that and we begin to get frustrated. Forget yellow pages, dictionaries, road maps and Encyclopedias, today's kids have probably never used any of those because we use Google for our everyday answers. Now, this makes our ability to learn and have access to vast amounts of information at our fingertips more accessible, but I fear it's also making us believe that everything on the internet is true. Is our ability to problem-solve and think cognitively only going to get worse? Will we be able to distinguish the difference between truth and lies? If we can't find the answer right away will we simply give up? 

I'm not saying the internet is terrible, it definitely has helped today's society in many ways, but I think it's only going to continue to diminish our ability to have meaningful face-to-face conversations, and social interaction is going to suffer dramatically because of our need to constantly be connected to what's currently trending as opposed to what is right in front of us in the here and now. It's so frustrating trying to hold conversations with people when you know they're not listening because they're on their phone checking Facebook  It's even more sad to see families or couples out at restaurants and not one of them is talking to each other because they all have their heads down staring at their phones. Majority of this falls to  younger people than older but I think the amount of older people constantly using the internet is steadily increasing as well.