Jana Millstone, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, wears Google Glass to view artwork titled "Viewpoints of Billions" by artist David Datuna,  on Saturday, December 7, in the Design District neighborhood of Miami during Art Basel. The piece is the first of a series which combines art and technology using Google Glass to create an interactive experience.
How tech helps beat social barriers
08:47 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: Irene Chapple of CNN and Alanna Petroff of CNNMoney are at Le Web, Europe’s biggest tech conference, in Paris December 10 to 12. Follow Irene and Alanna on Twitter and see all their coverage here.

Story highlights

Ten years ago we carried flip phones, now mobiles help us through our daily lives

In the future, smartphones are set to evolve into something that's an extension of ourselves

Le Web, Europe's largest tech conference, is exploring what the next 10 years will bring

Futurists say we expect a world where we were be entirely intertwined with technology

CNN  — 

Ten years ago we were carrying flip-screen mobiles, Evanescence was top of the charts and just 11.4% of the world was online.

Internet giants like Google and Yahoo were already changing the way we explored the world, but sites like Facebook and Twitter were yet to upend how we communicated online.

Now, nearly 40% the world is online, according to International Telecommunication Union statistics. Our mobile devices are powerful computers which help guide and inform our daily lives.

Read more: Key moments in Twitter’s history

It’s a theme being explored by Le Web, Europe’s largest tech conference which is taking place in Paris this week.

Speakers at the conference include venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who invested in Twitter and Tumblr, Hugo Barra, the former Google executive who now heads Xiaomi’s product portfolio, and Nick D’Aloisio, founder of artificial intelligence company Summly which was bought by Yahoo.

As Le Web founder Loic le Meur identifies in his slideshow of Silicon Valley trends, we’re entering an era where human mindfulness and the sharing economy develop alongside wearable technology, driverless cars and artificial intelligence.

Read more: Internet gains are serendipity’s loss

Speakers and attendees will outline how software is becoming rapidly smarter and technology is being woven into our everyday wear. Now, the mobile market is being deconstructed as traditional smartphones re-appear in our glasses, courtesy of Google, or on our wrists, as revealed by Samsung.

Futurists say the next 10 years will see an acceleration in the advancement of such technology. And every bit of data we exchange will be tracked.

Augmented reality will become the norm, and predictive software will deliver the answer to scientific, medical or personal queries for which we seek answers.

Read more: I’m the original voice of Siri

The Internet of Things – in which machines are interconnected, intuitive and predictive – will become the reality of our everyday lives.

As TheFuturesAgency’s chief executive Gerd Leonard puts it, we may start feeling like a machine lives inside us – or we live inside a machine.

But alongside the exponential growth in technology, more community-minded trends have emerged.

Online letting market AirBnB, car-sharing service Lyft and online education outlet Coursera are tapping into a desire to share intelligence, space and journeys in the real world.

Read more: Twitter co-founder who plans to reinvent

And that real world may become more attractive that it has been before: Digital detox (there are apps for that) will help you kick that grab-the-smartphone twitch.