The year 2005 marks the end of the first decade of the digital network. And what a ride it has been! From the early days of the Mosaic web browser and excruciatingly slow dial-up connections, we now have over 600 million internet users, more than a billion wireless devices and blazingly fast internet connections. The internet has become an integral part of our lives. It is difficult to imagine how we searched for information before Google, shopped before Amazon.com, communicated before e-mail, chatted before instant messaging, and traded collectibles before eBay. The mobile, digital, networked world has transformed how we work, shop, play and learn. To varying degrees, we have embraced a new networked lifestyle.

While these developments have been profound, they pale in comparison to what lies ahead. We have taken but a few faltering steps in our journey towards a true networked lifestyle. As the relentless march of semi-conductor, software, networking and computer technologies continues, we will see developments over the next decade that we find hard to imagine today. Our lives will be transformed to such a degree that the networked lifestyle in the year 2020 will sound like science fiction. But the science fiction of today may well be the technological reality of tomorrow. As the famous science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke noted: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Imagine presenting a visitor from 1970 with a high-speed wireless multimedia phone with full-motion video and a camera. Or imagine showing a visitor from the 19th century a commercial airliner that can fly 350 people, 10,000 miles in the air. Similarly, the visions of the future may sound fantastic and unbelievable today, but they may well become as commonplace as web browsing and wireless phones are today.

So, what will the networked lifestyle in 2020 look like? To think about the lifestyle of the future, let us think about the key activities that define our lives. We like to communicate. We like to be entertained. We like to shop. And we need to learn. So, let us fast-forward to 2020 and see how these activities will be transformed by the network and digital technology. Incidentally, the projections that I am making are based more on fact than on fantasy. Many of the technologies that will enable the networked lifestyle of 2020 already exist in crude form in the laboratories of leading technology and media companies. Some early examples of the applications I present are also beginning to emerge in early versions. So, fasten your seatbelts and come with me as we take a flight of fancy into the future.

By 2020, interactive multimedia will evolve into participative media-entertainment experiences designed by consumers, where consumers will become an integral part of immersive entertainment experiences. Today, we have 'video-on-demand' where you can order any movie you want from your cable or satellite company. By 2020, this idea will have evolved to multisensory 'experiences-on-demand'. We will be able to act out any fantasy in any place, and at any time of our choosing. Clad in full-body suits with force-feedback sensors and virtual-reality headsets, we will be able to walk the hallways of Hogwarts instead of merely watching Harry Potter on a screen. We will be able to visit the Bahamas or walk on the Great Wall of China, with sights, sounds, even smells that will create immersive, multisensory experiences. And yes, we will be able to have extremely realistic 'cybersex' with real people or with virtual people of our choosing over a network. In fact, the 'real thing' may be a poor substitute for virtual sex for many people, without all the complications of real relationships!

Interactive games will become so real that the distinction between virtual reality and actual reality will become blurred. Global virtual communities of gamers will evolve into parallel 'worlds', with distinct cultures, rules for membership and codes of conduct. We may spend a significant amount of our lives in these virtual gaming communities, and we may identify ourselves in terms of our affiliation and membership in these communities. Digital animation will advance to the point that we will not be able to distinguish between computer-generated characters and real actors. We will be able to insert any digital actor into any movie, and have them reproduce the emotions, mannerisms and behaviours of actors long dead. We may even be able to insert ourselves into a movie and arrange the script to produce the emotions that we would like. Music will become 'mood-aware'. As we move from room to room and mood to mood in our homes, our music systems will sense our feelings and create music that not only is customised to our preferences, but also to our mood. Entertainment experiences will become very personal, deeply immersive and very addictive.

The classroom in 2020 will be global, virtual and personalised. The university and the school will come into our homes. Advanced telepresence will allow us to experience learning as if we were participants, not mere observers. No longer will we need to study the history of Egypt or Mesopotamia in words and pictures. We will be able to, as the song goes, 'Walk Like An Egyptian'. Museums will be interactive and immersive-we will be able to have conversations with people from ancient civilisations, walk inside ancient monuments, and even participate in battles of times past.

In 2020, learning will be a lifelong endeavour, freed from constraints of time, space, and certification. Physical presence on campus will become unimportant, which will allow 'virtual campuses' to become truly global

We will learn biology from the perspective of the ant, learn oceanography by diving deep below a virtual ocean, and visualise space by floating weightlessly on a spaceship. Surgeons will learn surgery by performing remote surgery on virtual patients, just as pilots today learn to fly on simulators. Simulations will become an important mode of learning, especially for disciplines that emphasise learning by doing. Each of us will have our own personal 'teacher bot'-a virtual teacher who will understand our personal learning needs, and will constantly assemble material that we should be learning in school or on the job. Learning will be a lifelong endeavour, freed from the constraints of time, space, and certification. Universities will largely serve as content-creation hubs and data centres. Physical presence on campus will become less important, which will allow 'virtual campuses' to become truly global. Even the essential social experiences on campus-parties, dating and casual conversation-will move to cyber-communities that may be spread across the world. Language will be no barrier to learning because real-time simultaneous translation will have been perfected. Professors and teachers will no longer be purveyors of knowledge. Rather, they will act as movie directors-assembling content and learning experiences that students can assemble to create a personalised learning agenda.

By 2020, digital convergence will have proceeded to the point where communication will become independent of location, device, platform or network. Artificial distinctions between wired and wireless devices, voice and data, computers and phones, or satellite and terrestrial channels will disappear in an all EOIP (everything over internet protocol). Converged devices and converged networks will allow us to have access to personalised, high-speed multimedia communications wherever we might be. Mobility will mean much more than being able to take a device with us wherever we go. Instead, we will be able to transport the entire context of our communications-our applications, our data, our personal preferences and our digital persona-wherever we go. Instead of reaching a device with a phone number, we will be able to reach people with one universal number. Communications will become context-aware and mood-aware. Communication devices will know where we are, what we are doing and how we are feeling. Based on this, the devices will know who should be able to reach us and what mode of communication we would prefer. Personal communication devices will become so small and so portable that we will wear them on our person. For people who want to be truly connected all the time, it will be possible to get implants that will embed communication devices in our ears. Communication devices will become intelligent enough to recognise us and even recognise the emotions and feelings in our voice. Keyboards will be a thing of the past, because we will talk to communication devices and computers. It will be possible to carry out a casual conversation with your computer, asking the computer to perform routine tasks, prioritise your schedule and search for information on demand.

Our ideal shopping experience is a store where you are greeted personally by a salesperson who knows you by name, knows your preferences, knows what you are looking for, and can even anticipate what you might like even if you don't know that you are looking for it. Today, the closest we can come to this experience is to have a personal shopper assist you with shopping in a department store. By 2020, we will all have our own "personal shop bots"-our agents who will search, evaluate, and bargain for us. Our routine shopping tasks like buying groceries will be completely automated, because every item in our pantry and our refrigerator will announce its presence through RFID (radio frequency id) devices. We will authorise our supermarket to continually monitor the inventory of groceries and household supplies, and to automatically replenish our paper towels or our milk before we run out.

Promotional offers will be highly personalised, and we may initiate requests for promotional offers by instructing our shop bots to go find the best deal for the products and services that we need. Will we still visit stores? Indeed we will, because shopping is a pleasurable experience. But stores will focus on marketing 'experiences' rather than products. The supermarket of the future will no longer need to stack paper towels and cleaning supplies-rather, they will focus on displaying products with sensory appeal, like ready-to-eat meals and fresh bakery products.

Neils Bohr, the famous physicist, observed: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." It is almost impossible to predict ways in which the network and society will evolve over the next 15 years. And as we look back at similar predictions made in the past, the track record of futurists is highly dubious. So you should take all my predictions with a pinch of salt. As Richard Bach's book, Illusions, says on the last page: "Everything in this book might be wrong." While this might well be the case with my flight into the future, I hope it was a fun and somewhat scary ride nevertheless.