A decade from now, Google won't make us "stupid," the Internet may make us more literate in a different kind of way and efforts to protect individual anonymity will be even more difficult to achieve, according to many of the experts surveyed for a look at "The Future of the Internet" in 2020.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center asked nearly 895 technology "stakeholders and critics" about their expectations for the Internet 10 years from now. Among those queried: representatives from the Institute for the Future, Association of Internet Researchers, professors, Internet law and privacy experts, Internet pioneers and those in the business world.

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Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said just as in society at large, "a lot of the people in this expert group do feel some level of stress by the volume of the information that’s flowing into their lives, and the ways in which they skim over material as they are browsing."

Yet, he said, "when they think 10 years from now, are we going to be collectively smarter or not, the answer is pretty overwhelmingly that they do think so, that perhaps individuals will lose their way, but that as a society, we’ll get smarter collectively.

"We measure intelligence in a certain way now, and maybe the whole nature of intelligence will be changing 10 years from now," he said. "It won’t necessarily be how much you can retain, how much your hard drive can hold in your head, but it’ll be the way you can assess information, that you can think critically, that you can synthesize information."

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