UPDATE: Who better to hold forth on the future of the Internet than a man who presided over the early Web's birth?

Indeed, when Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf talks about what Web use will be like a decade or more out, people tend to listen. Cerf discussed the future of the Internet in a blog post late Sept. 24.

These "future of" posts are very interesting and if you follow them closely, you will see a pattern: Everything seems to be headed away from the PC and onto the mobile device.

No wonder then that Cerf's post closely hews to the post from Andy Rubin, Google's Android mobile operating system guru.

Cerf, who sees the Internet playing out on anything from TVs to Web-controlled washing machines, refrigerators and other household appliances, said nearly three-quarters of the human population will have fixed or mobile Web access at multiple gigabits per second in the next 10 years.

We probably won't be using laptops or PCs much, but, as Rubin is fond of saying, mobile devices and appliances with sensors of all kinds will be the norm, not the exception.

Cerf said many Web-based devices will be more aware, knowing where they are and what their purpose is. Read Cerf closely:

As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well--either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. "Where are my glasses?" you will ask. "You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room," your mobile or laptop will say.

Awareness of simple things like location or radio-connected neighbors is NOT a form of consciousness or awareness of self.

All apologies to Cerf for my misinterpretation. Perhaps all of the Terminator or Matrix movies have heightened my paranoia factor. But he is predicting the next step in smart, alert devices that can become aware of human presence.

That may not be the Hal moment from Stanley Kubrick's seminal sci-fi flick "2001: A Space Odyssey," I originally interpreted it as, but it is a step along that path. The writing is on the wall, or at least, the enabling code is inching closer to appearing in these devices.

There is a certain irony in a computer engineer who worked for DARPA talking about machines moving toward artificial intelligence.

If this is going to be the norm in the next decade, how soon before these more aware devices make their way into the Department of Defense as weapons? What controls will be put in place to ensure that they don't go awry?

Cerf also says video will be transformative, but haven't people been saying this for years? I think most people kind of figured when YouTube blew up that video content would become the soup du jour and beyond.
Slingbox customers.
Cerf says in closing:

Software is an endless frontier. There is no limit to what can be programmed. If we can imagine it, there's a good chance it can be programmed. The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric.