Not only will the internet likely no longer exist behind a screen, but it is probable that we will interact with it differently.
We'll manipulate objects using augmented reality (AR), explore virtual-reality (VR) worlds, and meld the real and the digital in ways we can currently not imagine.
And what will that mean for the world of work? We are already transitioning away from the nine-to-five commute, and turning our backs on the traditional office setting. This is thanks to two years of pandemic lockdowns, and a newfound love of, or tolerance for, virtual meetings.
So will the logical next step be working in the metaverse, the planned virtual universe where cartoon-like 3D representations of everyone will walk around, and talk and interact with others?
The metaverse has become an over-hyped term, so it's important to note that it doesn't actually yet exist. And even those invested in the concept disagree about exactly what it will be.
Will rival virtual worlds interconnect in a way that simply doesn't happen at the moment between competing technologies? Will we spend more time there than in the real world? Will we need entirely new rules to govern these new spaces?
None of these questions have answers yet, but that hasn't stopped a barrage of interest and hyperbole as firms see a new way of making money.
We've seen businesses opening in nascent metaverse worlds, from Meta's Horizon Worlds, to games such as Roblox and Fortnite, and newly created lands like Sandbox and Decentraland.
Meanwhile, Nike now sells virtual trainers, HSBC owns land in Sandbox, and Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton and Sotheby's have presences in Decentraland.
The term metaverse was coined nearly 30 years ago by author Neal Stephenson. In his book Snow Crash, the hero finds a better life for himself in a virtual reality world.
Perhaps the boldest move to make that fiction into real technology came in October 2021. That's when Facebook announced it was changing its name to Meta and started to invest billions of dollars turning itself into a metaverse-first firm - a vision very much led by its founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg.
Yet this huge investment has raised eyebrows among shareholders, some of whom recently expressed concern that the firm was spending too much money on VR.
And a report by The Verge website last October, which claimed to have viewed internal Meta memos, suggested that the Horizon Worlds platform had lots of bugs, and was not well used by employees.
Herman Narula, the chief executive of Improbable, a firm that makes the software to build metaverse lands, and author of a book called Virtual Society, is not convinced by Zuckerberg's vision.
"Why would we want an office in the metaverse that looks like our real office?" he says. "The whole point of creative spaces in new realities is to expand our experiences, not to simply replicate what we've already had in the real world.
"But I do think that there will be a lot of jobs in the metaverse - for example, we're going to need moderators."
The moderating - or policing - aspect of the metaverse is controversial, not just because it is technically hard to monitor potentially billions of avatars having live chats across a virtual world, but because of the vast amount of data those avatars may create along the way.
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