A map of part of Second Life, the green dots representing avatars
“In the next industrial revolution, atoms are the new bits”, Chris Anderson said a while ago in Wired Magazine. He referred to examples such as micro-factories producing cars on the basis of open source and crowdsourcing.
Since I read that article, I found many examples where the boundaries between the physical and the digital or virtual world become very blurred.
- Print pages which can be bookmarked and shared easily, using augmented reality techniques.
- Techniques of displaying the identities and online activities of people you meet in physical spaces.
- Localizing where people are, what they are up to, where they came from and where they’ll go next using location based social networks and augmented reality applications based on those networks.
- Logical next step: seeing where in the physical space there are concentrations of friends/acquaintances or of people sharing similar interests.
I’m sure I forget many other examples. What strikes me is how things we’re used to in virtual environments become features of “meatspace”.
- Those concentration of green dots, representing avatars, in places where events take place will soon enough become representations of people in the physical space (see picture for the Second Life image).
- Clicking on avatars to check their profile will find an application in the physical space, taking a snapshot with your smartphone and matching the image with some database.
The opportunities for marketing, for networking etc are obvious, but so are the dangers. In a virtual environment one may accept the fact that those governing that environment can monitor everything, but that same possibility in the real world reminds us of totalitarian regimes.
Apocalypse
In a previous post we explained how military futurists are very worried about big cities and how drones are being used now already to monitor cities in the West.
This makes the idea of a monitoring and all-knowing Big Brother even more tangible. In the post Singularity’s flaw Caleb Booker develops a grim vision: if knowledge and technology develop at a rate which is supposed by singularity-thinkers, it means that many people will get extraordinary powers at their fingertips (because of ubiquitous enormous computing power and knowledge).
This power could be used for destruction and a horrifying race would take place between organizations trying to prevent this from happening by monitoring and analyzing as much as they can, and those forces wanting to destroy and disrupt as much as possible. This evolution, I believe, is already happening.
Even if one does not believe in an continuing exponential increase of computing power and knowledge, it’s not difficult to see that advances in biotech, information technology and nanotechnology carry risks as well as promises. The blurring of boundaries between the real and the virtual is part of this unstoppable evolution.
Roland Legrand
