It's that time of year again when PEW / Internet reports on the not-so-distant future via its predictions for our internet-enabled lives. Here's my take.

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020. Nothing surprising here, compare the number of cell phones to personal computers and we're talking orders of magnitude difference. 2020? That's quite a safe margin. I would place this closer to the 2015 mark, depending on how you define "primary." Are we talking total time spent online, frequency of usage, availibility or an aggregate metric? Either way, the masses of non-PC owning, lower income populations will easily sway this in the favor of the mobile. The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness. I refute that personal integrity does not grow with transparency, in as much that personal integrity to a degree requires transparency. Just look at Obama's tactic of clearly stating his stance on political issues in an easy to access format on the web for everyone to read. Consider the opposite case: could you entrust someone who rarely divulged any personal information?As for social tolerance or forgiveness, I wouldn't suspect these to ever necessarily be tacit outcomes of transparency Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020. Meh, no offense, but this proposition smells as if the researchers were searching for a theory due to lack of standouts. Consider how it is written... these interfaces coupled with internet usage. Of course, these interfaces have been around for sometime. Heck, my current employer made touchscreen kiosk software in the early 1990s that were in fact remotely updated over the internet. Surely, the prevalence of the intersection of "voice and touch interfaces" with "internet" will grow, as this is a fairly new space. The researchers aren't really going out on a limb to state that these will be dominant forces in UX or become mainstream. Or, we could just sum this up as 2 good features from the iPhone and call it a day. Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment. Considering there's been very little grounbreaking enhancements in pircay in the last decade, this is also another non-surprise. Perhaps content producers will sooner realise that piracy, in its current definition, is flawed. Much like the quote that an idea can never be destroyed, content producers should focus on creating revenue streams from their content that don't rely on distribution or consumption (read: middlemen). Sigh. The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations. Completely agreed. As I just tweeted, I am a nanabot. Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch. If you're a fan of software and systems design, you'll know this as an old truth. How often do projects or vendors succeed in ground-up rewrites or masse switches? Without totalitarian control, this is typically a death march. Just look at attempts to ratify HTML 5.0, the lingua franca of the web, let alone rewriting HTTP. In summary, nothing groundreaking. Move along.