Adding or Subtracting?
Way back in the Eighties and Nineties, I used to work at an R&D lab in Cambridge (that’s the real Cambridge, not that upstart in Massachusetts). Mostly I worked on artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, but I also got to play around with virtual reality and a lot of what was going on involved augmented reality. By the time I left Cambridge in 1994 and went off to work in Zurich, AR had become a hot field among the industrial R&D folk. I remember having a long conversation with the then head of EuroPARC about what he felt were the two big research directions of the day and they were “wearable computing” and augmented reality. As it happens, I think we’ve just reached the point where the technology is able to give us some of what R&D people like me were dreaming of twenty years ago.
If you want to play with AR right this minute, you don’t need to run a year-long R&D project, you just pick up your Android smartphone and launch the Layar app. Or, if you’re one of those first penguin types who has all the toys, reach for your Google Glass specs. The technology is pretty crude still, but it’s here and it will get better.
In parallel, there have been recent strides in interfacing digital electronics to human neural tissue. This is terrific news for people with disabilities as it is enabling all kinds of sensory prostheses (like retinal and cochlear implants) and direct mental control of mechanical prostheses (like wheelchairs, legs, and arms). Again, it’s all very crude but it will improve. And when you put neural implants together with augmented reality, you really are starting to reach a place where cognitive prostheses are possible (like direct mental access to information, direct mind-to-mind communication, and the real-time manipulation of sensation to re-paint reality as you please).
It will make iPhones look like stone axes, and it isn’t very far away.
As a science fiction writer, it’s my job to look at this coming world and ask what it might mean for us, to try to imagine how these technologies might be used – and abused. In the case of augmented reality, I’ve been looking at what is gained and what is lost when AR is as commonplace as smartphones and TVs. It really could be an amazing world to live in. On the other hand, the technology doesn’t only offer opportunities for medicine and entertainment, it could also leave us exposed to a whole new world of deception and corruption. Just as email brought us Nigerian conmen, and mass media brought us Rupert Murdoch, ubiquitous augmented reality will also have its villains.
And that was the inspiration for my new novel, Heaven is a Place on Earth. The question at the heart of the book is, will augmented reality add more to our lives than it takes away?
