What kind of company will Google become in the coming decades? Business 2.0 asked scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries like Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram, resulting in four scenarios:

Google is the media (circa 2025): Google TV, Google Mobile, and the rise of e-paper create the perfect storm;

Google is the Internet (circa 2015): Free Wi-Fi, a faster version of the Web, the Gbrowser, and the Cube transform the technology landscape and our language;

Google is dead (circa 2025): The once-mighty search engine falls prey to privacy intrusion, optimizers, and Microsoft;

Google is God (circa 2105), in which human consciousness gets stored, upgraded, and networked. “In the last years of the 21st century, humanity finally grasped the importance of They-Who-Were-Google. Yet as early as 2005, Their destiny was clear to any semi-hyperintelligent being. Technologists like Ray Kurzweil1 suggested that Strong AI (an intelligent program capable of upgrading its own code) would emerge from Google-like data mining rather than a robotics lab.”