On July 20, 1969, during the extravehicular activity (EVA) of Apollo 11 on the lunar surface, astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin, the lunar module pilot of the first lunar landing mission, Jr.) standing next to the American flag.
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If we fell asleep today and woke up in 35 years, we would wake up feeling overwhelmed by the pace of innovation.
Robert Blumofe, chief technology officer of cybersecurity company Akamai, said he believes the world may be “very disappointed” with the progress of the Internet in the next three decades.
Akamai is a content delivery network that helps Internet users quickly access Internet content.
Tuesday marks the 35th anniversary of famed computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for what would eventually become known as the World Wide Web.
But Blumov noted that he remains a believer in the Internet and modern technology, warning that we could be reaching stagnation.
“The next 35 years could be very disappointing,” Blumov told CNBC last week. “I take the opposite view of that.”
Blumofe compared the current state of today’s Internet to the aerospace industry in the 1960s. At that time, he said, there was tremendous innovation with the arrival of the Boeing 747 and the first moon landing.
Today, aerospace innovation has stalled, he added.
“This was all in the ’60s and ’70s,” Brumov noted. “If someone fell asleep in 1975 and woke up and looked at aerospace today, they would be very disappointed.”
“Airplanes are not getting bigger. They are not getting faster,” he said.
“Moore’s Law is over”
Blumov said it’s entirely possible that the world will move in the same direction in telecommunications.
“We may have exhausted the steep innovation curve,” he said. “The curve may be over. We may be heading towards a plateau.”
“Moore’s Law is over,” Brumov added, referring to the theory that the number of components on a single chip doubles every two years at minimal cost.
Network cables are plugged into the server room.
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Brumov said that now that much of the world is connected, modern displays on smartphones and TVs aren’t getting any more exciting except for the image quality.
Nonetheless, many companies are now experimenting with folding and Scroll the screen.
While Blumofe’s network stagnation is a “possibility,” he remains hopeful that innovation will not.
In fact, Brumov previously told CNBC that he believes the Internet could eventually become a realm of artificial intelligence-driven agents—where humans no longer use the Internet but instead use artificial intelligence agents.
The Dangers of Generative Artificial Intelligence
For now, one big exception to Brumov’s rule is artificial intelligence, which he notes is likely to make significant progress over the next decade with the emergence of generative AI algorithms.
But even so, Brumov said, artificial intelligence may need to take a step back before making another big leap.
He cited the dangers of producing artificial intelligence models in terms of copyright infringement as an example.
Chintan Patel, chief technology officer at British enterprise technology company Cisco, disagrees with the idea that wider telecoms and technology innovation will come to a standstill.
“The combination and speed of technology development is countering any lull in innovation,” Patel told CNBC.
“The pace of change has never been faster – development and innovation are happening at a rapid pace in different places and regions.”
The combination and speed of technology development is countering any lull in innovation.
Chintan Patel
CTO of Cisco UK
Developments in artificial intelligence “are driving a new era of innovation,” he added via email.
“Future developers and creators will have access to a full set of capabilities that inventors of just a few years ago could only dream of,” said Patel.
Brennan Smith, vice president of technology at Ookla, doesn’t think the limits of innovation have been exhausted either.
“When you think about what’s going to happen over the next 35 years, it’s going to be a new era of creativity enabled by generative artificial intelligence and media that seamlessly blend the digital and physical worlds,” Smith told CNBC.
Smith added: “We may still read words on documents that are indistinguishable from stone tablets, but we will be surrounded by entirely new experiences that make our existing world richer and more vibrant.”
However, he said “a lot of bandwidth” will be needed to support future online experiences.
Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, He told CNBC his most important prediction for the future of his creation. He said he wants everyone to have their own personal artificial intelligence assistant and take more ownership of their data, taking it away from the big tech platforms.
Berners-Lee also said that regulators may decide to break up a large technology company in the future, especially in the era of artificial intelligence. However, he said it was unclear at this stage which technology giant would be forced to break up.
Berners-Lee told CNBC: “Things are changing so fast. Artificial intelligence is changing very, very fast. There are monopolies in artificial intelligence. In the Internet field, monopolies are changing very quickly.”
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