Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has predicted that in the future the internet will 'disappear' from our lives.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Google exec was responding to a question which asked him to predict how the internet would evolve in the future.
In reply Schmidt said that he believed the internet that we know today would simply disappear, “There will be so many IP addresses…so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it,”
Instead Google's Chairmen imagines a world where the Internet of Things has become an integral part of our world, intertwined with all our physical creations from houses to roads, cars, entire towns.
“It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”
The exec also spoke about the future of huge technology companies like Google and even admitted that when predicting the future, there was now way to say for certain that Google would be as big as it is now.
“You now see so many strong tech platforms coming, and you are seeing a reordering and a future reordering of dominance or leaders or whatever term you want to use because of the rise of the apps on the smartphone, all bets are off at this point as to what the smartphone app infrastructure is going to look like.”
The panel, called The Future of the Digital Economy, also included Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg who spoke about the importance of increasing the internet's penetration on the world population.
The Hollywood Reporter points out that only 40 per cent of the world's population has internet access, something that Sandberg is keen to change enthusing, “Imagine what we can do” if that percentage were to increase to just 50 per cent.