Lausanne World Pulse – The Internet Missionary Society of 2020
By John Edmiston
The Internet began to affect our lives in 1994 with the creation of the World Wide Web and the Mosaic web browser. Shortly after that, Christians began to share their faith with others in cyberspace; Internet evangelism and cybermissions were born. In this article, I would like to jump ahead to 2020 and consider what Internet evangelism and cybermissions might look like in thirteen years.
The Internet is rapidly moving from the personal computer to the cell phone and it is predicted that the number of Internet users will go from the current 1.14 billion to over three billion by 2010, mainly due to this growth of Internet-capable hand-held devices (e.g. cell phones, PDAs and the Blackberry). Indeed, Microsoft has just announced Phone+, an initiative to bring television (as well as everything else) to your cell phone.
Hand-held devices will soon have really useful screen sizes. The May 2007 Popular Science magazine showcases a five-inch Polymer Vision flexible screen that “rolls-up” inside the unit. By 2010, this flexible screen will be larger, in color and capable of handling web browsing and video. Of course your hand-held device will also dock with your wide-screen digital television, your laptop or any other viewing platform. The included video camera will be augmented by higher processing power and bandwidth to enable quality video conferencing from your lounge room.
Sophisticated, computer-generated personalities known as “avatars” will be capable of sharing the gospel with hundreds of people at once.
So we see that highly sophisticated content will be downloadable to three billion personal handheld devices by 2010. The personal communication device will be how people interact with friends, family and colleagues and likely the first place they turn to find information about the gospel. It will likely be the main way people accept information into their lives and therefore the main way we will have to communicate the gospel. The hand-held device will allow streaming video (or text or audio) of gospel presentations. Enquirers will be able to contact the mission agency via the Internet, or by SMS (text), email, fax, VOIP (voice over internet protocol, e.g. Vonage or Skype) or by normal mobile or landline voice call. Progress in information technology is exponential. The famous formulation of this, known as Moore’s Law, is named after Gordon Moore of Intel who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost was doubling every two years. This has largely held true since then and processing power per $1000USD is now doubling every twelve to eighteen months. If this continues to 2020, the first glimpses of artificial intelligence will be taking hold in our lives.
Tech guru Ray Kurzweil (inventor and author of books such as The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near) uses this exponential curve to predict that a super-computer will emulate human intelligence sometime around the year 2013 and that a $1000USD computer will emulate human intelligence in 2029.
Previously difficult problems such as image recognition, speech recognition, handwriting analysis and language translation are rapidly being solved. A prototype of a translating telephone that automatically translates between English, French and German was unveiled in San Francisco (California, USA) in April 2007; also unveiled was a DARPA software project translated between English and Arabic at the level of professional translators. Some have predicted that before 2015 cell phones will contain automatic translation software (probably at first in a dozen or so major languages) and that soon after we will be able to use our personal communication device to talk to practically anyone in the world. This, of course, will revolutionize the task of missions!