About a quarter of a billion people spend time every week inside some kind of virtual world (like World of Warcraft, or Second Life, or IMVU). That’s one of the arresting statistics in an extraordinary talk on virtual worlds given by Rohan Freeman last November, reproduced in full at the end of this post.
Freeman doesn’t like the term ‘virtual’ to describe what he terms the ‘metaverse’, arguing that “it is meaningless in this context. These ‘virtual’ worlds are real. Just as an MP3 file is real, a phone call is real and the intellectual property vested in a Gucci handbag is real. Ideas are real. People are being found guilty of real crimes in real courts if they steal ‘virtual goods'”. Above all, the relationships forged in the metaverse are real:
Let me give you an example from personal experience. When I first started to investigate virtual worlds I bought a small piece of land and I had a neighbour on each side. My neighbour on one side was a single mother, living in a town in Scotland. She was on income support, living in council accommodation, she had no qualifications and was struggling to keep her two sons from playing truant. My neighbour on the other side was a Director of The National Physics Institute. And they knew each other. And she was reading some papers of his, talking about plans they have to create a constellation of satellites that can better measure climate change.
Two years ago, by her own statement, she spent her days watching Ricky Lake. One year ago she was playing online bingo. Now she lives in virtual reality. She could have found his papers on Internet anyway. She could have gone to the library and requested them there. But the reason she was reading his papers was; she met him. They literally struck up a conversation over the garden wall. The presence of their avatars in a shared space changed things psychologically for both parties.
One of the most significant things about the metaverse, he continues, is how effective it is at creating trust – so much so that people fall in love there, the whole time. This is different from other social networking technologies. “People don’t fall in love on Facebook. It’s not really that easy to fall in love on the phone.” Why? In a nutshell, he argues, because of bandwidth. That’s why, after all, people still like to meet face to face:
When we meet face to face and communicate with each other we inevitably give away thousands of things about ourselves; thousands of tells, our body language and the direction of our eyes, how we respond to the space occupied by other people. Other people pick all this up, both consciously and unconsciously. And this is the basis of trust. We know we all give things away about ourselves when we meet. And that allows us to evaluate each other and take a decision; I trust this guy with my life. I don’t trust him with my life but I trust his opinions on Japanese cinema. I wouldn’t trust him to find his own arse with both hands.
Move that process to the telephone and it’s harder. There is considerably less unwitting information on which to base a decision. Move it to an email it gets harder still. Reduce the bandwidth that dramatically and you necessarily reduce the information on which to base decisions of trust.
But a live 3D metaverse? Very different story.
It’s live; so if someone starts spouting off about what the don’t like about a movie, for instance, then people can gather round if they want and respond in real time. And if I want to be a part of that, the first step to engagement is so low that anyone can take it. I just need to stand near them and listen. I don’t even need to say anything to begin to feel like part of the discussion. I might, after a few minutes, volunteer a ‘”LOL”when someone else says something funny. Maybe I’ll chime in on a comment with others. I might just stand around and take it all in.
The entry barrier being much lower, far greater social liquidity and subtlety is created. It may not seem like I contributed a great deal to the conversation by chipping in with a “LOL” half way through. But my presence, my attention, my occasional displays of alertness created context for everyone else. I was part of what brought other people over to hear this guy. They saw me and a few others. And he was encouraged because he could see people like me paying attention and laughing. I can only repeat; it’s all real.
Virtual Worlds; The death of geography and the end of privacy
The Reform Club Science and Technology Group
Rohan Freeman 25th November 2009
Introduction
Good evening. I have to say I was astonished when Stuart asked me to speak. Particularly as my original reason for getting involved with the group was as an attempt to address my almost total ignorance of science, which is perhaps not the best profile of a potential speaker to a science group.
When I think of the other speakers we have enjoyed; Martin Rees, Steven Jones, Steven Minger, it is amazing to think in just a few short years standards have fallen this far. I am not a scientist. Nor am I a technologist. So my talk will not be strong on reason, logic or evidence. The only profession I have ever plied is as a journalist, so in the fine traditions of that craft I will base my talk on speculation, misquotation and rabid hyperbole.
My talk is about the metaverse, which is a much better term for what is more commonly thought of a virtual reality, or augmented reality.
I came into this area of technology about 4 years ago. I now run a small metaverse technology company based here in London and in Shanghai.
We do two things. We create and sell virtual goods directly to the public all over the world. That means we deal directly with millions of people who spend time in virtual worlds, and have been able to observe what they are doing and draw our own conclusions about why.
We also write software, including some of the core components of the 3D internet. That brings us into some of the planning cycles of large technology companies and of the kind of people you find in Silicon Valley and Tokyo who struggle to identify organic objects clearly and have what is fondly known as a Screen Tan. So we have some insight into what is coming in the next 24 months.
I want to put all my own disparate thoughts and half formed ideas into some context. So first I want to review with you the analysis of some people far more intelligent than me.
Exponential growth in technology
There is a mathematician and computer scientist in the US called Ray Kurzweil, who specialises in analysing exponential growth curves in technology evolution. His analysis, and I cannot second guess it, suggests that by 2020 a chip performing 10×15 (I think that’s 100 trillion) calculations per second will cost $1000. That is the same processing power as the human brain. By 2045, $1000 will buy a chip performing 10×25 parallel calculations. That is the processing power of all the human brains on the planet, operating in one coherent fashion.
This kind of growth is driven by multiple exponential curves in the power / price ratio of different technologies. The most famous of these is Moore’s Law. The number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years. Reports of the death of this trend are greatly exaggerated. It was widely reported a couple of years ago that silicon was reaching the end of it’s potential as a platform for computing and that any further major advances in power would depend on a move to biochips or some other as yet unproven material.
Some people may have noted that Intel reported in mid September this year it had built it’s first chip with transistors at 22 nanobillionths of a meter; as distinct to the 45 nanobillionths currently in production. The new 22 nb chips go into production in 2011. Moore’s law continues unabated. I noticed that this announcement was followed by a huge rally on the stock markets both in the US and Europe – a correlation worthy of a journalist if not a scientist.
What does Moore’s Law mean in terms we can get our heads round? Well that growth in the number of transistors on a chip translates pretty directly into things like parallel processing power. Or, for instance, into the number of pixels in your digital camera.
Of course the number of transistors on an integrated circuit and the speed at which they operate isn’t the only part of the world’s core technology landscape that is accelerating exponentially.
Look at the growth in magnetic memory. (see chart.) This is a totally different technology. But it’s growing at comparable, exponential speed.
Or take the growth in broadband, another totally separate technology. 8 years ago most people in London accessed the Internet with a 56k modem. Virgin is now offering 50 Mbps broadband. 8 years. 56 kilobits… to 50 megabytes per second. That’s 1000 times bigger, in 8 years. And I promise you the next 8 years will see that exponential growth accelerate not decelerate.
If you think that forecast is wishful thinking on my part then consider the interests of every technology hardware company, every telco and every software company in the world. And then reflect on the fact that in the US, for instance, these companies represent more than 10% of domestic GDP – that’s considerably more than the oil industry, by comparison.
The impact of all of this technical strengthening is compounded by the growth in deployments. Not only is every transistor’s power to price ratio expanding exponentially, but the number of those chips we are embedding in the world around us is exploding too.
And of course all this expansion does not just result in things happening on a home PC. Most of the astonishing things we see happening in science and technology around us are a function of the information revolution. Biotechnology and genetic medicine, for instance, are dependent on computing power. So is space exploration. So is the modelling of the 26 dimensions of string theory.
To illustrate the point about the consequence of exponentially accelerating technological power, look at the genome project. When the human genome documentation process began critics said it would take thousands of years to complete. It was actually completed more than a year ahead of schedule. At the start in 1990 the cost of sequencing one base pair was around £7. When the project finished in 2004 the cost of sequencing a base pair was just over 1p. Similarly, one can look at the list of things artificial intelligence was supposed never to be able to do and see the speed at which items are being crossed off.
So these growth curves show why new technologies emerge in the public domain, heralded as things that are going to change the world, then some time later after quite slow growth people start thinking “Oh, it was a false alarm / dawn… nothing is really changing and then all of a sudden you look around and realise you don’t know a single person who doesn’t have at least 1 email address and a mobile phone. Not to mention a Facebook page and Twitter account and a Skype account and gtalk and AIM and so on.
It was announced last month that in the UK online advertising is now a greater proportion of overall advertising spending than television. As recently as 2004 less than 5% of advertising spend went on digital. The Internet has overhauled the world’s most successful and penetrative communication tool in about 5 years. We practically have Google in our underpants today and it hasn’t even started yet. I promise, it really hasn’t started.
Unreal?
I’d like now to return to that forecast by Ray Kurzweil;
– by 2020 a chip performing 10×15 (I think that’s 100 trillion) calculations per second will cost $1000. That is the same processing power as the human brain.
– In 2045, $1000 will buy a chip performing 10×25 parallel calculations. That is the processing power of all the human brains on the planet, operating in one coherent fashion.
At some point between these two, and this forecast tracks back to the point about the pixels in your camera, it will become impossible to distinguish between fantasy and reality. We will have the processing power and all the other required technologies to present to your unconscious and conscious mind a model of the world that is indistinguishable by you from the real world.
Actually many tech people at the moment think that this particular event horizon is most likely to be driven by foglets; intelligent nanobots working in concert to render objects in front of your eyes. Fantasy and reality simply cease to be meaningful terms in this context. Neural implants are the other obvious and much discussed route. I note that it is now possible to embed light sensitive DNA from algae onto specific neurons in the brain and then trigger those neurons with a beam of light.
But these technologies throw up issues we find hard to rationalise before experiencing them. So to help us think about how fast this is coming, let’s just think about it in terms of the human eye.
The human eye is digital. It contains 130 million rods and cones. That means a screen with an aspect ratio of 11,000 x 11,000 would have the same resolution as a human eye. On my desk in the office I have an Eizo screen; it’s a pretty fancy computer screen used for game developers. The resolution of that is 2560 x 1600. That’s 5% of the way to the same resolution as the human eye. It’s easy to foresee that, at the rate technology is improving, a 20 fold increase in pixels per dollar could be with us in the next… 5 -7 years? Why not?
Let’s return to where we are are now, and to the early virtual worlds we see today. In 2007 Steve Prentice, a senior guy at the respected and very serious tech analysts Gartner provoked a huge slew of investment in this space when he suggested that by 2011 there would be 50 million users of the virtual worlds.
There are currently (November 2009) around 250 million people spending time every week inside some kind of virtual world.
That might be an MMOG like World of Warcraft where the social dynamic centres around joining tribes and going off on campaigns. It might be something like IMVU, a hangout for teenagers with about 40 million users listening to music and buying bad postures and emaciated skin tones. Or it might be Second Life where millions of people are building their fantasies, visualising scientific datasets and recreating bits of the real world.
What do all of these places have in common? And why are the important and categorically different to the text based Internet that we are already familiar with.
What is the metaverse?
First perhaps I should define my terms.
Virtual worlds; virtual reality; 3D Internet; Metaverse; augmented reality, etc. etc.
I would like to discard the word virtual. It is meaningless in this context. These “virtual” worlds are real. Just as an MP3 file is real, a phone call is real and the intellectual property vested in a Gucci handbag is real. Ideas are real. People are being found guilty of real crimes in real courts if they steal ‘virtual goods’. I will return to the real nature of the metaverse in a moment.
A better term than virtual world could be digital world, but the line between analogue and digital is not clear, as we have already established when considering the rods and cones in the human eye. DNA code, written in a quartenery base. Neural activity in the brain is either on or off – the neuron fired or it didn’t. In this context, the notion of digital may not be a useful distinction. So what are the other defining characteristics?
The metaverse tends to be rendered in three dimensions. In guess this is the optimal way to present the information to brains that have spend millions of years evolving an understanding of three dimensional landscapes. Compared with, thankfully, relatively little time spent evolving to understand excel spreadsheets. Actually I don’t mean that. There is something magical about pivot tables. One might actually expect a 4D metaverse to emerge soon, the fourth dimension being time; perhaps represented as a slider at the bottom of the screen.
The metaverse also tends to contain avatars; animated representations of your presence in the space. For me this is the most important distinction between the current, text-based Internet and the emerging metaverse. The presence of avatars also alters the 3D space, from being merely a static 3D representation of data to a shared space in which people actually live out part of their lives, embed their memories and build real relationships.
These then are broad defining characteristics of the 3D Internet, or the metaverse that we see emerging today. But there have been other metaverse projects in the past, which also shed light on what is happening right now. John Wilkins “An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language.” is an early, perhaps the earliest formal attempt to establish a universe describing itself; ontological, hierarchical, normalised metadata. Johson’s dictionary is another example.
Seen in this light, the emerging digital metaverse seems to have clear associations with our most basic assumptions about consciousness. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The metaverse unsurprisingly has a significant overlap with metaphysics. Neurologists and other brain specialists are coalescing around the idea that what we are all constantly building models of the universe in our minds. And all our forms of communication and art are attempts to communicate what is modelled in our minds; to share that model or part of a model with someone else.
The 3D metaverse we can see on the screen today seems to represent an incremental step in that process, perhaps because it brings; the consciousness and the communication together in a shared space.
The metaverse today
OK well that’s some kind of definition, or array of defining characteristics. Why am I trying to pin down this emerging trend, if it is a single trend? What is categorically significant about ‘metaverse’ or ‘virtual world’ over the rest of the Internet? Why is it important?
One simple and clear way to look at it is through the economist’s prism. This is not the whole picture but it’s a clear model of what’s going on. In it’s first wave, let’s say from 1995-2005 for convenience’s sake, the Internet had one overriding impact on multiple areas of trade and business. It created transparency in supply chains, dis-intermediated middlemen, stripped out margins, passed value to consumers. It is axiomatic in business that profits march to zero. In many verticals the Internet beat that march at breakneck speed. Music, travel agents, estate agents, newspapers, television, financial services have all been dramatically touched by the web and the net result for all has been a dissolving of profits, into the hands of their customers, as each corporate entity fails individually and each sector fails collectively to stem the tide of commoditization sweeping over them.
This hasn’t been bad, then. Lots of sectors have thrived with extra usage and evolved new models to take advantage of free distribution. But the trend has been a clear one.
Today’s high penetration of broadband does not, though, represent a simple continuation of that trend. Broadband actually sends the pendulum swinging back the other way. From a historical high point. Broadband represents more capacity, more space, for rich, deep, detailed, subtle, complex, multifaceted, emotional, visceral, potent and undoubtedly luxurious and high margin interactions. It is a Hollywood studio’s wet dream. Endless capacity to offer new levels of sensation, a million forecast-able price increments keeping you ahead of the competition for as long as you sponsor the R&D.
It used to be that step changes like Glorious Technicolour and Dolby Surround Sound and High Definition were once a decade events. Now the next step up in detail and expense can be scheduled on a weekly (daily? Hourly?) basis and subscribed to automatically. Presumably we won’t pay for any service that stands still; it will instantly be a commodity. We’ll only pay for advances, and for co-presence at live events.
That pendulum swings back and forth in all markets, at varying speeds with varying extremes; the direction of the swing is what is known to an economist as a ‘flight to quality’ and it’s reflected in things like Murdock committing Newscorp to offering paid only news content. It’s significant too that platforms like Facebook, that now have over 300 million active users, are building micropayment systems, knowing that new income can be generated from digital candy bought by the public, when advertising spend is deeply commoditised and finite. This super-liquidity of small transactions is a step toward value, away from the nether reaches of a $2 CPM. In China micro-transactions already generate more revenue than online advertising.
This economic landscape; of increased richness combined with deeper and more liquid engagements, extends across almost all areas of human endeavour; far more than is directly measured in dollars or even in-world credits. Because the emerging 3D Internet creates space for people to meet each other, from all over the world.
Let me give you an example from personal experience. When I first started to investigate virtual worlds I bought a small piece of land and I had a neighbour on each side. My neighbour on one side was a single mother, living in a town in Scotland. She was on income support, living in council accommodation, she had no qualifications and was struggling to keep her two sons from playing truant. My neighbour on the other side was a Director of The National Physics Institute. And they knew each other. And she was reading some papers of his, talking about plans they have to create a constellation of satellites that can better measure climate change.
Two years ago, by her own statement, she spent her days watching Ricky Lake. One year ago she was playing online bingo. Now she lives in virtual reality. She could have found his papers on Internet anyway. She could have gone to the library and requested them there. But the reason she was reading his papers was; she met him.
They literally struck up a conversation over the garden wall. The presence of their avatars in a shared space changed things psychologically for both parties. I shall explore why in a moment.
The very real nature of these relationships reminds me of a conversation that occurred in this room with our first speaker, Baroness Greenfield, who was at the time vehemently and publicly opposed to computer games and their influence on society. It was lost on her that virtual worlds are not a replacement for reality; they are part of reality. But they are a replacement for television. And the move from passive to active; from one-way to two-way; from consumer to creator and socialite and performer and raconteur and hero… must surely be a good thing?
There is an expression I have heard; The tyranny of the generations. The notion, well substantiated with numerous independent research programmes over the years, that people who grow up with highly educated parents are very often well educated themselves, and people who grow up with very poorly educated parents, who perhaps have no interest in learning tend to grow up less well educated. It’s really not rocket science. But it is easy to imagine now that any child living in that environment can sit in the bedroom, log into the matrix and find themselves sitting next to, and chatting with a professor of archaeology from Tokyo University.
Greenfield remained unconvinced. Surely these people are divorcing themselves from the world around them and isolating themselves? It’s not healthy! But if someone spent a few years buried in books, or painting in their studio, we would not feel the same queasiness. I can see no reason to treat time spent in front of a screen differently; if the applications you are using enable you to create, share and engage with other people.
Networked humanity and the drivers of trust
The most amazing thing about the emerging metaverse is that people are falling in love inside it.
Take these two here, for example. He is a 23 year old developer living in India. She is a woman in her late 30s living in Colorado in the USA. They are in love. They spend more time together than practically any couple I know. They have real rows, and real reconciliations. If you go to their virtual house you will see on the walls in the lobby they have framed pictures of their life together; screen grabs of special shared moments; a gala opening they went to, the day he came home with his hair on upside down, the fancy dress ball all their friends turned up to wearing the same outfit…
This story is most remarkable for not being remarkable. It happens all the time in the metaverse. People falling in love can be seen as a peak on the curve of different social bonds built in the metaverse. All of which are, essentially, bonds of trust.
Those extraordinarily high levels of trust are clearly one of the most significant things about the metaverse. People don’t fall in love on Facebook. It’s not really that easy to fall in love on the phone. The metaverse facilitates this depth of engagement because it provides a shared space, shared experiences, shared histories and shared memories.
But beyond the notion of shared spaces there is another, perhaps even greater facilitator of trust which the metaverse. It is perhaps best defined by the notion that all communication between people contains witting and unwitting testimony.
Why do people meet face to face? I work in virtual reality. I am currently building a virtual world for a client of ours in Mumbai. I flew back from a series of all day meetings in Mumbai landing this morning to give this talk in London this evening. Why did I bother? Surely I could have logged in from bed to meet my clients in virtual reality to discuss everything for our meeting and then broadcast to you all, perhaps from my dining table, with all of you at your dining tables as well.
Well people meet face to face because it is very high bandwidth. And when we meet face to face and communicate with each other we inevitably give away thousands of things about ourselves; thousands of tells, our body language and the direction of our eyes, how we respond to the space occupied by other people. Other people pick all this up, both consciously and unconsciously. And this is the basis of trust. We know we all give things away about ourselves when we meet. And that allows us to evaluate each other and take a decision; I trust this guy with my life. I don’t trust him with my life but I trust his opinions on Japanese cinema. I wouldn’t trust him to find his own arse with both hands.
Move that process to the telephone and it’s harder. There is considerably less unwitting information on which to base a decision. Move it to an email it gets harder still. Reduce the bandwidth that dramatically and you necessarily reduce the information on which to base decisions of trust.
I’ve spoken of trust as it is manifest in deep personal relationships. It is perhaps easier to quantify and model if we look at a greater number of smaller, perhaps shallower relationships. Amazon.com has defined the basic model for online retailing to date. Amazon recognised early that it’s role was to bring the buying public together. 90% of the content on Amazon.com is a reflection of this. Customer reviews; “People who bought this also bought…” “My top 10 horror movies…”
This is because Amazon knows that people seek reassurance in further information when they are on the brink of making a purchase; moving from browser (a cost) to buyer (a profit). There are three potential suppliers of that purchase-dependent information. Firstly, the retailer. But Amazon themselves cannot provide the required information; Amazon knows very little about the vast inventory of products on its shelves. Secondly the producer of the product. Well they do provide specifications and their sales pitch. But it’s just that. And customers know it’s a sales pitch. That defines the extent to which we trust what the producer says about the merits of his product over the competition. Lastly, most preciously, there is the opinion of the other people who have bought that, or another similar product. People trust other customers. Perhaps most interestingly, Amazon found that a product with bad reviews sells better than a product with no reviews.
But when someone scrolls through the reviews their ability to make a purchasing decision is limited by the form structure of text; the written word. I buy lots of DVDs on Amazon. If I find myself looking at a film by some unheard of Japanese director I will scroll down to the reviews. I might see that every review says “5/5… great movie… must see….”
But that only gives me half the information I am looking for. I am also scouring the prose to draw out the unwitting testimony. Are these reviews being left by 10 year old boys? By Iowa house wives? By university graduates?
When you migrate this purchasing environment into a live 3D metaverse two things change. Firstly, the shared space dramatically reduces the barriers between people. It seems perverse to say that the existing Internet contains high barriers to information sharing, but in some ways it does. If I come across a movie on Amazon.com that I know and love, and I scroll down to the comments and see the last review is a damning one, I might be moved to do my bit to set the record straight. But before I can do so, I have to scroll back through all the 8 pages of previous comments to see if I am about to boringly repeat what has already been better said by others. And then I have to have the self confidence to really believe I can articulate my opinions clearly in a few succinct paragraphs. I get worried that I’m just going to make a fool of myself in front of a load of strangers. It’s not easy.
Compare that with a virtual world. It’s live; so if someone starts spouting off about what the don’t like about a movie, for instance, then people can gather round if they want and respond in real time. And if I want to be a part of that, the first step to engagement is so low that anyone can take it. I just need to stand near them and listen. I don’t even need to say anything to begin to feel like part of the discussion. I might, after a few minutes, volunteer a ‘”LOL”when someone else says something funny. Maybe I’ll chime in on a comment with others. I might just stand around and take it all in.
The entry barrier being much lower, far greater social liquidity and subtlety is created. It may not seem like I contributed a great deal to the conversation by chipping in with a “LOL” half way through. But my presence, my attention, my occasional displays of alertness created context for everyone else. I was part of what brought other people over to hear this guy. They saw me and a few others. And he was encouraged because he could see people like me paying attention and laughing. I can only repeat; it’s all real.
Greenfield’s response to me was that it “Wasn’t real. It couldn’t be healthy because those people… don’t really look like that! They are living a lie and trying to escape reality.”
But that is not the case. No one is lying. This is what they look like, in this context. No one is pretending they look like that in meatspace.
Pretty patterns
Although I notice that in meatspace too we chose surround ourselves with consciously rendered intellectual property. We are no more than, lest we forget, a bunch of monkeys, sitting under a pile of rocks. But we cover our bodies, with precisely designed clothes. We brush our hair according to shared concepts that communicate complex and subtle principals and social assumptions. We smear our faces with makeup and we shave. There are no ends to the lengths we will go to, to consciously represent ourselves to the rest of the world.
At the same time, we glory in the efforts of craftsmen who took the rocks and branches that surround us in this library and embed them with… intellectual property. Hitherto, the patterns we hid ourselves in, and hid from the rest of the world behind, happened to be embedded in wool, and silk, and rock and wood. Now they are also embedded in bits and bites. The creation and sharing of patterns and models is real. It is part of human nature. Being digital does not make it a lie, or make it any less noble or beautiful.
In fact when compared with wool or rock, bytes, or to use a metaverse analogy, points in the point cloud, have the merits of being lightweight, with low transportation costs. They can be copied and pasted ad infinitum… so nothing has to be exclusive, like the membership of a private club for instance. They are egalitarian and defy gravity and physics. They are bounded only by the limits of human imagination.
So that is what the expanding technology capacity around is creating – a repository of unconscious as well as conscious metadata.
Geography
I mentioned the death of geography in my title. It was a good headline, suggesting an epic acceleration of the ‘global village’ phenomena. We see this happening everywhere, and as humanity, both conscious and unconscious, migrates into the same open digital networks that simple and unimportant things like the inventories of airlines and bookstores, the output of the music and film industries and most of the world’s money have already gone, I think we can confidently say that geography – huge distances, national boundaries, time zones and language barriers are collapsing. People are falling into each others arms over and through these previously very real, now rather ephemeral barriers.
One example of this is language, which is ceasing to be a barrier. We deal directly with hundreds of thousands of customers in our stores, from all over the world. We have a customer services team that helps people if a transaction goes wrong; if for instance they buy two copies of the same item and want to give one back, or if they buy something and it doesn’t get delivered, or it doesn’t work, etc. etc. Those customers contact us from across the globe but our customer services representatives only speak English and Mandarin. It doesn’t matter as all the bi-lingual chat is conducted through a live Babelfish interface.
Artificial Intelligence translation is a long way from perfect. When you chat to someone through an automated translator you could never believe the counterparty was speaking your language naturally. Sometimes the meaning is so mangled as to be lost and you have to say “Don’t understand” to prompt a new attempt to get the message across. But what has been fascinating for us to observe is that people don’t care.
It has ceased to be relevant that someone is not talking the same language as you. You no longer automatically enquire what language they are speaking. And most fascinating of all, and entirely predictable, as people become used to communicating through live automated translators, they become better and choosing words and structuring sentences in their native language that will be understood and clearly represented by the robot translator. Organically, naturally, languages are aligning; normalising. Put simply, language is ceasing to be a barrier.
But the literal translation of geography is “to describe or write about the Earth (and our place in it).” So perhaps the death of geography is just a good headline. In some ways the metaverse is the dramatic acceleration of geography! And from the moment we became conscious of the model of the universe we each hold inside our heads, we began the process of creating the metaverse.
Privacy
The other bold, unsubstantiated claim in my headline was the end of privacy so I should say something about that before wrapping up.
As the universe describes more and more of itself, in more and more detail, it is already starting to feel like an invasion of privacy. We are all aware of the presence of CCTV cameras all over the place. The press has reported on concerns about Google’s camera vans running around videoing the streets.
At the time Google launched Google Earth there was a quote attributed to a manager of the company, to the effect that their conceptual end goal was a live video feed of everything going on on the planet. Now this was presented only as a thought experiment. The concern immediately raised was that it would represent a massive invasion of privacy. The response was to ask whether it would be better for all this information to be held only in the hands of a privileged few, or whether it would be better for such information to exist in the public domain, available equally to everyone.
On another technical front, my own company is currently working with firms like Neurosky, a Silicon Valley based firm that has produced a US$40 consumer-ready brainwave scanner. You wear it like a pair of headphones. One single sensor touches your forehead. It reads your mind and you use that to control the computer in front of you.
This basic technology has been around for years. It has been used in hospitals since the 1930s. But it used to cost millions. And it used to involve invasive procedures; the sensors needed to be under the skin. Over time it required less sensors and they only needed to touch the scalp. So patients just had to have their heads shaved and have a gel applied, similar to the gel you see used to get an image from a pregnant woman’s stomach.
The result of the technology curve we have talked about is that now we have a product with only one sensor, and no gel and a $40 price point. I cannot speculate on when you will have this functionality in your phone such that you can point it at someone else’s head and get a read on their thoughts… but it is not a far fetched notion. We really are marching toward a world where your thoughts are available to others as you have them. Indeed your unconscious thoughts might be read by others even though they are unknown to your conscious self.
Instinctively we react against such a prospect. We assume that privacy is a right and that our quality of life would be undermined if it was withdrawn. Well that may be the case, but it is an assumption that warrants challenging not just accepting. So let us imagine what the pros and cons of a world where your thoughts are open to be read.
Privacy, along with identity are, fairly modern concepts, linked with the anonymity and social transience of cities. Perhaps we don’t need privacy as much as we think we do. Of course there are private thoughts we chose to collude in; “Thank you for the wonderful pullover Grandma. I do so love brightly coloured jumpers with pictures of dogs on them.” I don’t see all this being threatened. We want to collude in privacy and white lies because it allows us to be kind to each other.
Similarly, the lock on your front door is just a social contract. If someone wants to come in, they will kick the door down. The lock is an invitation not to. It is a symbol of the separation between external and internal. But it only has meaning as a social convention. One might reasonably expect those social conventions to remain in place. If you can have an iphone app that reads my mind, I can have an iphone app that reports on who is reading what. Social bonds may be expected to become tighter and deeper as a result of such intellectual liquidity.
What about the undue power of large entities as regards access to your thoughts. Well multinational companies could attempt to steal your thoughts and patent them. But they can’t claim your IP if you thought it first, because an evidence trail will presumably evince that. So intellectual liquidity could lead to equal levels of liquidity in the monetisation of and remuneration for the production of valuable ideas. That might be a micro-payment of only a few pennies if you confirm early in your mind that you will be buying milk extra next week when your house guests arrive. Or it might be an ongoing royalty connected to the establishment of a new product or service.
Indeed, if one considers the copyable nature of digital information, there is a case to be made such that the only point at which economic value can be extracted in a digital supply chain is the point of origination. Once the thought is out, it is a commodity because everyone has access to it at once.
Such systems could, for instance, evaluate the relative contribution of a multinational pharmaceutical company to the production of a new drug, against the generations of people who cultivated the plant the drug is found in, and evolved an understanding of it’s medical value. A liquid mind market would be able to value past and future thoughts.
So a world without individual boundaries of this nature might also be a world with no hidden externalities in economic supply chains. It might be a world with no repressed guilt, With no exploited underclass. With no political lies and no pre-emptive excuses for war.
Let’s turn it the other way around – what do people crave in modern society? Accountability, transparent pricing, honest governance, access to suppliers, a genuinely level playing field… maybe eroding the borders of the individual will continue the Internet’s process of stripping out middlemen… and maybe it is a price worth paying.
Conclusion
I have no idea what is going to happen over the next 20 years. It is likely that we as a species will take it all in our stride and wonder what all the fuss was about, just as we have absorbed mobile phones and the Internet.
It seems though that every aspect of human experience can be expressed as digital information. All our knowledge, artistic expression, all our scientific and engineering ideas and designs, all our literature, music, pictures and movies. All our DNA is information, and every neural pulse in our brains can be recorded – a neuron either fired or it didn’t. If, as some suggest, consciousness is not just about the electrical activity but is deeply intertwined with quantum states and being conscious is a function of modelling the future and inhabiting an indeterminate position… the very nature of quantum mechanics, as the term quantum suggests, tells us that we are dealing with discrete values.
One could say that the statement should be recast; perhaps we can assert that if something cannot be expressed as digital information, perhaps it doesn’t exist? This, perhaps, is a clear view of the metaverse; a conscious universe, describing itself.
