12/03/2019

Experts Optimistic About the Next 50 Years of Digital Life

This year, the internet turned 50

The year 1969 was a pivot point in culture, science and technology. On Jan. 30, the Beatles played their last show. On July 20, the world watched in awe as Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the moon. Less than a month later, nearly half a million music fans overran a muddy field near Woodstock, New York, for what Rolling Stone calls the “greatest rock festival ever.”

But the 1969 event that had the greatest global impact on future generations occurred with little fanfare on Oct. 29, when a team of UCLA graduate students led by professor Leonard Kleinrock connected computer-to-computer with a team at the Stanford Research Institute. It was the first host-to-host communication of ARPANET, the early packet-switching network that was the precursor to today’s multibillion-host internet.

Heading into the network’s 50th anniversary, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked hundreds of technology experts, including Kleinrock and fellow internet pioneers, how individuals’ lives might be affected by the evolution of the internet over the next 50 years. Overall, 530 technology pioneers, innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists in the nonscientific canvassing responded to this query:

Please select this link to read the complete article from Pew Research Center.