Futurism-Isms
Ok I hit a rabbit hole. Which is tenuously linked to VR.
I was delving around trying to find the origin of this chart:
Which led me to two little interesting reads:
- On Measuring Technolgy Diffusion Rates
Regardless, no matter how you cut it, the more modern and the less regulated the technologies, the quicker they get to market. Here’s a couple of my recent charts illustrating that fact. The first shows how long it took before various technologies reached 50% household penetration. The second illustrates the extent of household diffusion over time.
And the ever intriguing Kevin 'Wired' Kelly waxes lyrical here on tech spread, and the 'third order effects' that you get when one 'supersaturates':
- Increasing Ubiquity
In his sunny-side-up view of tech, we shouldn't really worry about 'have nots' as new techs emerge, because they're really 'have laters', who will benefit from a more refined tool. But he's not above pondering the downsides:
Don’t worry about those who don’t have a car; worry what happens when everyone has a car. Don’t worry about those families who cannot afford genetic engineering; worry what happens when everyone is engineering. Don’t worry about those who don’t own a personal teleporter; worry what happens when everyone has one. Most of the unintended consequences that so scare us in technology usually arrive in ubiquity.
And most of the good things as well. The trend toward embedded ubiquity is most pronounced in technologies that are open-ended: Communications, computation, socialization, and digitization.
A fun case study in there is his look at cameras going from a pro tool to the 'sousveillance' of today:
But something strange happens with ubiquity. More is different. A few automobiles roaming along a few roads is fundamentally different than a few automobiles for every person. And not just because of the increased noise and pollution. A billion operating cars spawn an emergent system that creates its own dynamics. Ditto for most inventions. The first few cameras were a novelty. Their impact was primarily to put painters out of the job of recording the times. But as photography became easier to use, common cameras led to intense photojournalism, and eventually they hatched movies and Hollywood alternative realities. The further diffusion of cameras cheap enough that every family had one in turn fed tourism, globalism and international travel. The further diffusion of cameras into cell phones and digital devices birthed a universal sharing of images, the acceptance that something was not real until it was captured in a camera, and a sense that there is no significance outside of the camera view. The further diffusion of cameras embedded into the built environment, peeking from every city corner and peering down from every room ceiling forces a transparency upon society. Eventually every surface of the built world will be covered with a screen and every screen will double as an eye. When the camera is fully ubiquitous everything is recorded for all time. We have a communal awareness and memory. That’s a long way from simply displacing painting.
I met a fellow many years ago who spent ten years wearing a tiny camera in front of his left eye. This head-mounted camera captured everything that happened in his life and transmitted it back to his website. When Steve Mann started his experiment of recording and broadcasting his life as a grad student, he was a lone eccentric. While he was standing there talking to you, with one eye open and the other filming, his unconventional approach to documentation seemed like performance art. One could not really object to it, because, well, he was such an outlier.
In the course of his years of living ordinary life as a one-eyed camera, going shopping, to school, to events with his friends, Mann discovered that ironically the more surveillance cameras a particular store, plaza, or gathering place had, the more their guards objected to individuals like him recording their own view. The watchers hated to be watched. Mann calls his inverse surveillance, sousveillance, a word coined by replacing the French “sur” for above, with the French “sous” for below, as in watching from the bottom up.
After he graduated from MIT, Mann became a professor and his grad students used the next generation of smaller circuitry to craft their own miniature sousveillance gear. Some were tiny enough to fit unobtrusively into sunglasses. The students would record each other. In the meantime, cell phones sprouted hi-res cameras and video cams connected to the net, which performed the same sousviellance actions. Suddenly, there were millions of public eyes watching each other. Sousveillance had gone from a node of one to near ubiquity. A few years ago when all this sousveillance was new, a girl on a Korean subway let her dog crap on the floor without cleaning up the mess. Her transgression was captured by several sousveillance phonecams and eventually broadcasted on national TV. She was shamed into apology by a new ubiquity.
One thousand live cameras always-on make downtowns safe from pickpockets, nab stop-light speeders, and record police misbehavior. One billion live cameras always-on serve as a community monitor and memory; they give the job of eyewitness to amateurs; they restructure the notion of the self, and a billion cameras demote the authority of authorities.
TLDR: I still can't find where that Forbes chart comes from
But it all adds some interesting structure to pondering an 'Augmented Reality future'. A 20 year one, with tiny kit, meshing all of the above complicit elements ('communications, computation, socialization, and digitization'), and adding its own spin.
I don't know if this generation of tech will be the bootsrappers to make it. (I kinda think the stage is set, and they are the forerunners. But guess we'll see
)
EDIT: Some ponderings:
Just thinking about the live gig examples in earlier posts. I can't really imagine such things being as good as the real thing. But then I wouldnt, would I. I'm attached to the sights and sounds of the nights that I've had, of dancing with my partner and friends. Hell I'm even attached to the smells. And the care and chaos that happen afterwards.
But what if you could get a lot of that from a networked VR show? The dancing in sync, seeing the band's expressions up close, hearing the sound all around. But now it's all tied into visuals that aren't tied down to screens. And you can always mosh to the front if you want, or view from wherever you fancy. Your mates can always come, no matter how far away. You can be in Tokyo by 5pm and a Manhatten after-party by 10. Yeah, why not, this stuff could work
But then what happens to fame, in such a ubiqui-gig world? When the numbers you can fit into a gig veer towards infinite. What happens to public spaces? To familiar faces? To the old limits, if not of time, then of place. And on it goes. There's a load of obvious 'second order' questions raised by the saturation of such a tech. And the third order ones are still out there too
. I do wonder what they'll be...