In the "awe" stage of the late 1980s and early 1990s, internet stakeholders and skeptics predicted the new tool would bring the death of privacy, an end to the current concept of "property", a paperless society, 500 channels of television, world peace, and the extinction of the human race after a takeover engineered by intelligent machines. Pervasive networks are changing our lives, and smart people are motivated to act by the ideal that better social choices can be made if the coming impact of the intersecting of humankind’s knowledge is pre-assessed as accurately as possible. The more intelligent preliminary analysis we elicit, the better our chances of good outcomes.

"Imagining the Internet" is an initiative led by Elon University and the Pew Internet & American Life Project to gather prescient statements into a collective repository for use by everyone concerned about the future. From the public internet’s earliest days, select theorists, philosophers and scientists saw it as merely an early manifestation of what is to become a collective consciousness, a neobiological civilization with a global mind or godmind. Even today, those concepts go far beyond what most world citizens would acknowledge as the future of artificial intelligence; most people don’t understand the potential ahead, necessitating better exposure of informed predictions on as many platforms as possible.