Pew survey - "Future of the Internet"

I'm late to the party regarding commenting on the Pew survey / "Future of the Internet". I am apparently one of the "Many top internet leaders, activists and commentators participated in the survey" (they said that, not me!). So I'm self-interested in pointing out that if one goes beyond the prefabricated punditry of the press release, and digs into the details, a lot of smart people can be found quoted in the report. Sure, there's the Usual Suspects who say we are about to enter a New Era where we'll go down a rabbit hole, err, I mean a black hole, and enter Wonderland, umm, the Singularity. But there's also another perspective to be found, such as the following:

Scenario Two: English displaces other languages

And Seth Finkelstein, anti-censorship activist and author of the Infothought blog, wrote that this scenario is "much too ambitious. There will still be plenty of people who will have no need for global communications in other languages, or who choose to communicate only within their local community."

Scenario Three: Autonomous technology is a danger

Programmer and anti-censorship activist Seth Finkelstein responded, "This is the AI bogeyman. It's always around 20 years away, whatever the year."

Scenario Four: Transparency builds a better world

"Between 'agree' and 'disagree' I'll pick 'agree,' but I think it's more accurate to say it could make the world a better place overall," wrote Seth Finkelstein, EFF Pioneer Award winner. "The difference between the Open Society and the Police State is political, not technological."

Think of it as the "balance" journalistic structure applied to futurism ("Are We Going To Live Forever? Opinions Differ.").

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)