People always ask me where the internet is going. And I must admit I love to watch their facial expressions when I say quite definitively: "It's going away."

The internet is going away in the same sense that electricity and plumbing did in the 20th century - out of sight and out of mind.

When electricity and plumbing first infiltrated daily life, people had to dig their own wells, install their own pipes and generate their own electricity. Today, of course, utilities and licensed practitioners do this for us. Fortunately, the net will evolve the same way.

In the years to come, people will do almost anything they want through simple appliances, hand-held devices and cellphones. And for the first time in the short history of the internet, they will not have to download software or configure devices. This means the act of tapping into the internet will become such a non-event that it will not merit mention.

The net will assume an always-present, behind-the-scenes quality. No longer will you tell a friend "get on the internet and compare air fares to Bora Bora".

You will just say: "Compare air fares to Bora Bora."

Who today ever says: "Activate the plumbing and pour me some water"?

And like plumbing, the internet will be everywhere, but largely invisible.

This vision of the future stands in stark contrast to the one offered by sceptics who say the internet will become an invasive nuisance, something of an annoying gnat of the digital age. They predict the internet will buzz around your face 24 hours a day, pestering you with unwanted queries, requests and data until you are so frazzled that you streak naked into the woods with plans of never returning.

What these sceptics do not understand is that the internet will evolve into a tool that is no more invasive than the electrical socket in your bedroom. Consider that electricity is more prevalent than ever, but we only use it when we want to, and never has it been more user friendly than it is today. No one today ever says: "That electricity is everywhere, and it's driving me nuts".

The internet will assist us only when we've requested help. Otherwise, it will butt out. In many cases, the internet will bypass humans altogether, allowing devices to communicate with each other.

Automation

Your sprinkler system will modify its settings based on weather service data, your dishwasher will search for times when electricity is cheapest before washing a load, and your house will help your hotel room preset the temperature, music settings and TV channels - and you will never even think about it.

In business, the invisible internet may be even more prevalent. Some factory computers, for instance, already update the shipment lists of their suppliers, requiring no human involvement and giving employees more time to tackle other responsibilities.

In other cases, the internet will not actually be invisible, but will seem like it. This is because you will not have to upgrade software, you will not have to hunt down and reboot a PC, and you will not have to wait until you step out of a car to use the net.

The net will pulse through your walls, your dashboards, your mobile phones, your pagers, your refrigerators - all of it out of sight and mind until you need its assistance.

In the global economy, there is a great incentive to make this so. It is called survival. Companies planning to succeed in today's economy are hustling to make their products and services less invasive even as the net becomes more pervasive. They will offer you wireless services that provide assistance based not only on your personal preferences but on your ever-changing proximity to other services.

If you want, for instance, the net will tell you when you are standing a block from a bookstore that is offering a 20 per cent discount on a new novel by your favourite author.

Companies are also making sure that tapping into the web today is not a chore. In a three-year campaign to unchain web users from their desks, for instance, manufacturers are expected to boost yearly sales of web-ready mobile phones and PDAs to 360m units - 35 times more than current levels.

Meanwhile, thousands of families are testing out Whirlpool's web-ready refrigerators and washing machines. Ford and General Motors have announced cars that access online road maps and read you your e-mail. And service providers are creating a world in which you will never think about the software that pulls up your portfolio as you sit in a traffic jam. All of this will make the internet far easier to access and simpler to use.

For consumers, the advantages of the invisible net are monumental. Unless you enjoy spending hours pecking computer script into a PC, the invisible net will spare you from having to deal with operating system installations, esoteric manuals and skyrocketing IT costs. The boiler-room of the internet will hum far away in massive data centres around the planet, tackling most of the IT problems you are forced to address today.

Of course, we are not quite there. The internet has not yet matched the telephone system's level of availability, penetration and reliability. But believe me, that will change.

Every year, general networking and bandwidth metrics improve. And every day, the net grows by 2m new web pages, 200,000 new access devices and 150,000 new users. The portion of companies making more than 10 per cent of their sales online will go from 14 per cent today to 61 per cent in a few years.

All these developments are intensifying the push for an internet that is more consumer-friendly, easier to access and 100 per cent device-agnostic. In other words, an internet that is invisible. And only then will many of us in technology think we have done our jobs.