IBM has just announced the invention of the PAN — Personal Area Network — a set of devices that use humans as conductors to relay detailed textual information from one person to another, simply by touch. It is a relatively small conceptual step from the PAN processor that relays a written message through one’s body by a shake of the hand to a microcell sensory transmission system that relays ideas and sensations directly to and from the most powerful processor in the world, the human brain.

    Within a few decades, PAN-type research will transform the Internet into the Life Net, a comprehensive sensory environment for human habitation. Our minds will be afforded wireless direct sensory interfacing with other people and various databases. A dramatically enhanced version of what we now call virtual reality will become as common as air conditioning. Telephones, TVs, PCs, and other media will be replaced by wireless sensory feeds from and to communal microcells.

    Pecple return to the Internet each day not from addiction, but because they can craft a new identity for themselves — any identity they choose. Or they can participate in experiences that are otherwise beyond their reach. Consider the impact of a technology affording a lifestyle in which you can go wherever you want to go and be whoever you want to be.

    Today’s office and service workers have diminished physical capabilities, but are better educated. The Life Net will accelerate this trend. The need to survive while spending weeks, months，or years on the Net would be drastically reduced.

    Resource depletion resulting from overpopulation will cease to be a major issue when we are subsisting on 600 calories a day in a sensory reality where we can eat all we want. Our mansions will be built in our minds，and our future Ferrairs will be driven along the roads of our collective imaginations. Our minds will work and play in ways now beyond our conception.

    Time constraints dissolve when we can communicate effortlessly anywhere in the world. Humans will require less sleep, since we will need only the time to file and store the information that our brains have collected，and not to rest physical bodies. The physical body will deteriorate to a state where a return to robust health would take months — if possible at all.

    These technologies will be inexpensive. Life Net participation will consume far fewer resources than an automobile, and reduce our housing and other needs. This will help the Life Net expand into Third World countries. The equipment required for the microcellular sensory transmission technology will be modular, redundant, and like that for the Internet, incrementally inexpensive. Countries with overcrowding and famine would embrace the Life Net. Their resources would be extended, and planners would likely program the system to minimize the population's reproductive drive.

    People will still have jobs. There will be lots of work to do. People will want to consume the newest experiential sensations. Some food will need to be prepared, and equipment manufactured. Government will be divided into Geographical, Physical and Communicative. The responsibilities of the geographic governments will be to defend land masses and keep order in the physical world as much as they do today. The responsibilities of the communicative governments will be to administer, regulate and defend cyberspace.

    The communicative government will also be responsible for maintaining the input-output microcells. Various online services are already functioning as a form of communicative government today — with their monthly fees as taxes. As they mature, these communicative governments will develop better defenses against cyberspace terrorism, which may come from large and potentially violent anti-technology cults.

    Some people will have to remain physically active and strong, because of the nature of their labor. Tools and equipment will always break down and need repair, and some operations and experiments will require a hands-on approach. Manufacturers, natural resource harvesters and explorers of all sorts are likely to be visitors to the Life Net, rather than residents.

    Manufacturing will be dramatically reduced, because few people will need cars, clothing，physical tools, or countless other physical objects. Natural resource harvesters will work in every field from farming to mining. Yet as with manufacturing, the need for harvesting will decrease.

    Fifty years from now, reality will consist of some wonderful things, some beautiful things, and some deeply frightening things.