CHOCOLATE printers.

Corporate "health meters" based on the Facebook posting of employees.

Wearable devices that jolt wearers with the functional equivalent of an electrical shock when they do something harmful to their long-term health.

Ask 60 or so entrepreneurs, executives, policy makers and other experts to imagine what the connected world might be like 20 years hence, and those are some of the ideas you'll hear, along with many, many more.

The occasion for the brainstorming was a day-long conference, "After Broadband: Imagining Hyperconnected Futures," held in April at Wharton's new San Francisco campus.

Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, described the purpose. While there has been tremendous progress in network speeds in recent years, he said, "We are still having the same conversation we had 15 years ago, before the broadband revolution." The conference was designed, Werbach said, to help nudge that conversation along, with participants hopefully developing "new, concrete ideas that are actionable."

Attendees were assigned to one of eight break-out groups covering a range of topics: education, recreation, commerce, health and more.

Each group was charged with developing a scenario for what their field might look like in 10 years, when fast networking and connected devices of all sorts would be globally ubiquitous.

Before they began, conference-goers listened to short presentations, dubbed "provocations," designed to provide a foundation for their later discussions.

Some of the most provocative comments were provided by Bran Ferren, a Hollywood special effects veteran now with Applied Minds, which provides consulting services to businesses.

Ferren predicted, for example, that in 250 years, traditional reading and writing will have ceased to be part of daily life, but will instead be a historic curiosity, much like Latin is today.

After these presentations, attendees joined smaller groups.

Over several hours there was lively and constantly-morphing discussion, with topics ranging from personal anecdotes about technology to philosophical musings about where it is taking us - with small doses of science fiction thrown in now and then for good measure.

Sample comments:

1. The parents in the room noted that their young children often don't understand why they can't use their fingers to move around pictures in a magazine or on TV, the way they can with their iPads.

2. Several participants expressed curiosity about avatars, and wondered why people choose the avatars that they do. One parent mentioned that her daughter, when treated rudely by another member of an online community, responded with the same real-world tears that she did when she was pushed on the (non-virtual) Saturday soccer field.

3. Some wondered if the web wasn't becoming too much of a presence in home life; that with dad, mom and the kids all face down in their respective gadgets, families might not be sharing the same sort of common experiences they once did. Some also commented that many parents these days need to text their kids to get their attention, even if they are simply in the next room.

4. A few wondered how the "Occupy" movement might change as technology changed. Would it be possible, for example, to "Occupy the cloud?" And if so, how would that be different from an old-fashioned denial of service attack?

5. The group talked about real-world communities and virtual communities, and worked through different permutations of how the two might interact.

As virtual worlds grow in importance, with people living more of their lives online, would there be any impact on what has been a lengthy global trend towards urbanization? What if a real urban area had a "sister city" relationship with a virtual city? What if there was an emergency in a virtual community and a real world community came to its rescue?

Printing chocolate

As the conversation continued, a theme developed, involving the notion of uniting the virtual and physical worlds. That is where chocolate printer comes in.

One of the participants described the new breed of 3D printers that are able to make a growing list of objects, including chocolate. (Technically, the printers don't actually make chocolate, which is lengthy hands-on process beginning with raw cacao beans, but instead melt pre-made chocolate blocks into whatever shape the user might select.)

Suppose, the group wondered, that you could press the equivalent of a "Like" button on Facebook, and, courtesy of a 3D printer at the other end, have a chocolate gift appear automatically to the person you've liked. That would be different from simply ordering a Valrhona gift-pack for someone on Amazon, they said, because it would be utterly "frictionless," done instantly and with a push of a single button.

The name they gave to this vision was "Chocolate Happens. It was meant not so much as a specific business plan, but instead a blue-sky vision of a world in which the distinctions between physical and virtual are blurred.

Balkanized Internet?

In the final session, participants expressed concerns about whether the Internet might become "balkanized" as different countries adopted varying levels of censorship in their efforts to control political discourse.

The much-maligned US patent system came in for its usual share of abuse; one participant listed it as the No.1 threat to the health of the American economy. Cyber-security was also source of concern. Several speakers worried whether the cable and phone companies, which provide most US Internet access, have the financial incentives to build the same high-speed networks being developed in many Asian countries.

In that spirit, Blair Levin, a former federal policy adviser who is now executive director of Gig.U, which works in high-speed networking for universities, said he was concerned that without widely available high-speed networks to serve as test beds and sources of inspiration, America might lose whatever innovative edge it might have in technology.

"Great innovation always comes with excess bandwidth, but today, no one is over-building," he said.

In an interview following the session, Werbach said, "We're clearly at a fork in the road, but it's not really clear yet what the branches are."

Adapted from Knowledge@wharton, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. To read the original version, please visit: http://bit.ly/JycrhR