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In our near future we’ll have the option to record as much of our conversations as we care
Remixing—the rearrangement and reuse of existing pieces—plays havoc with traditional notions of property and ownership.
For the most part our legal system still runs on agrarian principles, where property is real. It has not caught up to the digital era. Not for lack of trying, but because it is difficult to sort out how ownership works in a realm where ownership is less important.
The entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks.
what should the new laws favor in a world of remixing? Appropriation of existing material is a venerable and necessary practice. As the economists Romer and Arthur remind us, recombination is really the only source of innovation—and wealth. I suggest we follow the question, “Has it been transformed by the borrower?”
Transformation is a powerful test because “transformation” is another term for becoming. “Transformation” acknowledges that the creations we make today will become, and should become, something else tomorrow. Nothing can remain untouched, unaltered. By that I mean, every creation that has any value will eventually and inevitably be transformed—in some version—into something different.
In 30 years the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.
Virtual reality (VR) is a fake world that feels absolutely authentic.
A simulated environment that you can enter at will is a recurring science fiction dream that is long overdue.
The goal for VR is not to suspend belief but to ratchet up belief—that you are somewhere else, and maybe even somebody else.
Two benefits propel VR’s current rapid progress: presence and interaction. “Presence” is what sells VR.
Within a decade, when you look into a state-of-the-art virtual reality display, your eye will be fooled into thinking you are looking through a real window into a real world.
But while “presence” will sell it, VR’s enduring benefits spring from its interactivity.
Presence will draw users in, but it is the interactivity quotient of VR that will keep it going. Interacting in all degrees will spread out to the rest of the technological world.
We are equipping our devices with senses—eyes, ears, motion—so that we can interact with them. They will not only know we are there, they will know who is there and whether that person is in a good mood.
Embedded microphones, cameras, and accelerometers inject some Africa into devices. They provide embodiment in order to hear us, see us, feel us.
A future office worker is not going to be pecking at a keyboard—not even a fancy glowing holographic keyboard—but will be talking to a device with a newly evolved set of hand gestures, similar to the ones we now have of pinching our fingers in to reduce size, pinching them out to enlarge, or holding up two L-shaped pointing hands to frame and select something.
A person mumbling to herself while her hands dance in front of her will be the signal in the future that she is working on her computer.
One consequence of increased interaction between us and our artifacts is a celebration of an artifact’s embodiment. The more interactive it is, the more it should sound and feel beautiful. Since we might spend hours holding it, craftsmanship matters.
You may have seen this coming, but the only way to get closer than wearables over our skin is to go under our skin. Jack into our heads. Directly connect the computer to the brain.
In the coming decades we’ll keep expanding what we interact with. The expansion follows three thrusts.
More senses We will keep adding new sensors and senses to the things we make.
More intimacy The zone of interaction will continue to march closer to us. Technology will get closer to us than a watch and pocket phone. Interacting will be more intimate.
More immersion Maximum interaction demands that we leap into the technology itself. That’s what VR allows us to do. Computation so close that we are inside it.
VR technology offers one more benefit to users. The strong presence generated by VR amplifies two paradoxically opposing traits. It enhances realness, so we might regard a fake world as real—the goal of many games and movies. And it encourages unrealness, fakery to the nth degree.
the Stanford professor who devised this experiment and uses VR as the ultimate sociological lab, discovered that it usually took a person only four minutes to completely rewire the feet/arm circuits in their brain. Our identities are far more fluid than we think.
Passwords are easily hacked or stolen. So what is the better solution than passwords? You, yourself. Your body is your password. Your digital identity is you.
Our interactions will become our password. Degrees of interaction are rising, and will continue to increase.
Interacting demands skills, coordination, experience, and education.
In the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.
We are opaque to ourselves and need all the help we can get to decipher who we are. One modern aid is self-measurement.
What to call this cultural drift? Gary pointed out that by relying on numbers instead of words we were constructing a “quantified self.”
The average normal is not very useful to you specifically. But with long-term self-tracking, you’d arrive at a very personal baseline—your normal—which becomes invaluable when you are not feeling well, or when you want to experiment.
The achievable dream in the near future is to use this very personal database of your body’s record (including your full sequence of genes) to construct personal treatments and personalized medicines.
The problem with an N=1 experiment (which was once standard procedure for all medicine before the age of science) is not that the results aren’t useful (they are), but that it is very easy to fool yourself.
All this talk about numbers hides an important fact about humans: We have lousy mathematical intuitions. Our brains don’t do statistics well. Math is not our natural language.
In the long term this is the destiny of many of the constant streams of data flowing from our bodily sensors. They won’t be numbers; they will be new senses.
By taking this information and feeding it back not in numbers but in a form we can feel, such as a vibration on our wrist or a squeeze on our hip, the device will equip us with a new sense about our bodies that we didn’t evolve but desperately need.
Self-tracking is much broader than health. It is as big as our life itself. Tiny wearable digital eyes and ears can record every second of our entire day—who we saw and what we said—to aid our memories.
There is an equally important domain of tracking that is not conscious or active. This passive type of tracking is sometimes called lifelogging. The idea is to simply, mechanically, automatically, mindlessly, completely track everything all the time.
An embrace of an expanded version of lifelogging would offer these four categories of benefits:
A constant 24/7/365 monitoring of vital body measurements. Imagine how public health would change if we continuously monitored blood glucose in real time.
An interactive, extended memory of people you met, conversations you had, places you visited, and events you participated in. This memory would be searchable, retrievable, and shareable. A complete passive archive of everything that you have ever produced, wrote, or said.
way of organizing, shaping, and “reading” your own life.
Still, the picture is not big enough. We—the internet of people—will track ourselves, much of our lives. But the internet of things is much bigger, and billions of things will track themselves too.
In the coming decades nearly every object that is manufactured will contain a small sliver of silicon that is connected to the internet. One consequence of this wide connection is that it will become feasible to track how each thing is used with great precision.
Data about customers is the new gold in business, so one thing is certain: Companies (and indirectly governments) will collect more of it.
If you look at the above list of routine tracking today, it is not difficult to extrapolate another 50 years. All that was previously unmeasurable is becoming quantified, digitized, and trackable. We’ll keep tracking ourselves, we’ll keep tracking our friends, and our friends will track us. Companies and governments will track us more. Fifty years from now ubiquitous tracking will be the norm.
Ubiquitous tracking is inevitable but we have significant choices about its character.
The fastest-increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating. It is (and has been) expanding faster than anything else we can measure over the scale of decades.
