Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt made a striking prediction: that the “Internet will disappear.”

But don’t stop paying your broadband bill yet. Schmidt actually meant “disappear” in the sense that something becomes so prevalent that people do not even notice it anymore.

“There will be so many IP addresses…so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it,” said Schmidt, according to Tech Week Europe.

What Schmidt is actually referring to here is the so-called “Internet of Things” that tech observers have been predicting for awhile now. The term describes a world where your TV pauses a show after its cameras see you get up to go to the bathroom; or your home air conditioning turns on once your car notifies it that you are on your way home.

As more and more everyday devices, from watches to cars to thermostats, come online, the Internet of things becomes less an airy concept and more a concrete reality.  And this complex network of gadgets will only become more extensive in the next decade.

“Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic,” Schmidt elaborated, according to Mashable. “And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room.”

It is an exciting potential future, but also a worrying one. After all, more interactive devices means more potential for surveillance. Indeed, also at Davos, the AFP reports that Harvard computer science professor, Margo Seltzer, warned, “we live in a surveillance state today…. We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism.”