Hannah Morgan, Innovation Lab's agent in Silicon Valley, is blogging home from last week's Ten Year Forecast event at Institute For The Future (IFTF)

Something is happening to the Internet.

Director of the Technology Horizons Program Lyn Jeffrey from Institute For The Future lets us in on the future of language.

Something is happening to language. Things like Google Translate allows people to understand complex, foreign texts in their own native language.

Over 20% of the world’s population are illiterate and have therefore been excluded from taking part in the Internet and the digital revolution.
We now see apps that can translate speech into text – and translate that text into speech in your native tongue. Print is becoming audible, real time speech is being translated to text and search engines based on speech are being developed. This means that something is happening to the human knowledge.

Until recently only Latin letters could be used when typing in an URL. This of course is because the computer and the Internet is a Western invention. So far it has made sense as 65% of all Internet users in 1992 were American. However the online crowd is getting bigger and more diverse. In 2008 15% of all Internet users were American and over half of the world’s Internet users didn’t have Latin letters.

The above innovations and technologies will bring knowledge, education and perspective to even the most deprived people of the world.

This means that something is happening to the human race.