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What can’t the internet do yet?

April 25th, 2017 by Irwin Fletcher Comments

Every day seems to feature no end of new stories that pay homage to the amazing powers of the internet.

And whilst being able to broadcast live video streams of your virtual reality gaming session to your online date’s social media page is undoubtedly the high point of human civilisation, it’s also worth thinking about what the internet can’t yet do.

As our internet connection speeds get speedier and we start to move towards 5G technology, it seems as though we can all enjoy faster data than ever.

But this connectivity has a tendency to be concentrated in wealthy and urbanised areas, and until Google’s Project Loon really takes off, our enjoyment of the internet is still pretty restricted.

Even as we start to enjoy a more democratic use of high-speed internet, it doesn’t mean that web content is going to equal for all. The troublesome aspects of net neutrality aren’t going to away anytime soon, and with the advent of ‘fake news’ it shows that even the most sophisticated tech can’t automatically judge what content is authoritative and which is bogus.

This ‘fake news’ phenomenon plays on the internet’s ability to generate a huge amount of hype relatively easily. And whilst the likes of Bitcoin created a massive amount of news stories about how it was going to decentralise political power and overthrow the corrupt economic systems, it still seems to be mostly made for people who like to obsess over what lies within the ‘dark web’.

Similarly, whilst virtual reality was meant to have transformed all aspects of human life, the sluggish sales and reports of VR-nausea has meant that we’ll all have to stay inside our normal realities for a little while longer.

And although the open-ended universe of games like No Man’s Sky were meant to provide the ultimate gaming experience, it unfortunately became apparent that such games were massively boring. Thankfully some more traditional games like the slots games at Lucky Nugget Casino have proven to be a little more interesting and can show that the internet can turn our homes into a glamorous gaming parlour.

Another big internet trend has been that of online dating. And whilst being able to browse through our potential partners is pretty cool, they’ve still yet to develop a way to dump someone online without it feeling seriously awkward!

Other things that the internet has yet to conquer include teleportation for anyone who finds video chatting a little passé – although a team of Canadian scientists are working on it.

And until Google find a way of helping us live until we’re 500 years old, we’re going to have to fill our relatively short life-spans with the things that the internet can do like online dating and Canadian slots games.

I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.