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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gabriel Rene
Read between
October 17, 2021 - January 11, 2022
We are digitizing the physical and “physicalizing” the digital. Clear boundaries between the real and the virtual are dissolving.
In Web 3.0, we will not only create a “Digital Twin” or soft copy of our world and everything in it, but a Smart Twin of everything, with its own unique ID, interaction rules, and verifiable history capable of being linked and synced to its physical counterpart, spatially.
In Web 3.0, all of these get “connected” into the Internet of Everything.
We need a specification that is capable of laying the foundations for a web that natively supports universal values of privacy, security, trust, and interoperability by design, by default, from the foundation up—a specification designed to become a universal standard for people, things, and currency to seamlessly move between spaces, both real and virtual.
STACK
Web3 stack
Three significant “Ages” define human interaction with information at scale: the First Age was the shift from spoken language to the invention of writing. The Second Age was triggered by the invention of the printed word (from written to printed). And the Third Age was the screen (from physical to digital). Each of these Ages radically shifted our economics, politics, and society. You may recognize these eras under the more familiar terms of the Agricultural, Industrial, and Information Ages, respectively.
VR is programmable imagination. It is unlimited in its experiential applications.
We’ve entered the fourth wave of the Industrial Era. The first was powered by steam, the second by electricity, the third by
computing, and the fourth by integrated networks of sensors, beacons, actuators, robotics, and machine learning. These “cyber-physical” systems—a central feature of “Industry 4.0—will power the smart grids, virtual power plants, smart homes, intelligent transportation, and smart cities of tomorrow.
Cognitive Computing is the digital application of the adaptive, contextual learning and logic systems modeled from our understanding of human cognition. These bring “smartness” into the physical world to analyze, optimize and prescribe activities in the Spatial Web.
Smart Contracts are “contracts as code”—they are programmable, automated, and self-executing software that removes legal contracts from the realm of documents that require constant human involvement and instead self-execute and self-enforce
enforce agreements between parties, provided the terms are met. If the program executing the contract is trustworthy, it’s unnecessary to trust that the other party will fulfill the terms.
This integral partnership launches the fields of law and software into an entirely new dimension. In the context of digital assets, smart contracts and AI can provide for the terms of use, payment, ownership transfer, and location-based terms or conditions automating entire supply chains including their transactions and segmentation of analytics for the data marketplaces of tomorrow.
Edge Computing is another distributed computing paradigm. With Edge Computing, computation is largely or completely performed on distributed device nodes known as smart devices or edge devices as opposed to primarily taking place in a centralized cloud environment.
From the siloed office database of the pre-web era to the globally accessible web servers of Web 1.0, to the mobile accessibility facilitated by the cloud infrastructure of Web 2.0, and on to the Distributed Ledger and Edge Computing that will secure AR information and power the IoT in Web 3.0, the evolutionary trend of the Data Tier is one of increased decentralization and democratization of data. At each stage, we have increased access and a “circle of trust” to include more and more participants at greater scales. This is the inherent value created by decentralized and distributed systems.
For a bit of context, a typical Web 2.0 identity problem would involve someone gaining access to the username and password of your Twitter account, but a Web 3.0 identity problem is when someone gains access to a complete, hyper-realistic replica of your face or voice or even biometric self. You can see the precursors of this type of digital impersonation with recent technologies like Deepfakes.
In order to achieve a secure, unified digital and physical Spatial Web, we need a standardized way to identify People, Places, and Things (universal identity), a way to locate People, Places, and Things (universal address), a way to validate what we see and who we talk to (trusted data records) and an easy way to pay for goods and services anywhere we go across physical or virtual worlds (digital currency and web wallet). Most importantly, we need a way for all these things to seamlessly communicate together (a spatial programming language and protocol) that no one person, corporation, or
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transactions.
Spatial web stack
From the physical postal addresses that we use to correspond, navigate, ship, and receive mail and packages to the digital addresses that allow us to email, make phone calls and navigate between websites, none of them have a meaningful relationship to each other and present no method for integrating the physical and digital worlds. All current network-based address systems do not do a sufficient job at authenticating and networking people, places, and things.
A contractor finds the 3D model of a building in AR and projects it into space where the building will be built to act as a real-world guide. Workers are guided through step by step spatial instructions. The completion of each task automatically fulfills a spatial contract. After the construction is completed, the foreman checks the model against the building structure and confirms it was built to specifications, down to the bolt, and the inspector confirms it was built to code. The contractor and associated parties are automatically and instantly paid upon approval of each step and phase.
Example spatial programming
This allowed companies like Google to capture the “states” or series of events that users left as a function of their search index just as Amazon did with its sales index and Facebook with its social index, enabling them to monetize user actions, attention, and behavior. This caused trillions of dollars of value to consolidate around the application or logic tier and the service providers that enabled it. Users did not receive any of the commercial value they contributed to the network, nor were the developers of the web itself able to meaningfully monetize their creation.
Distributed Ledger technologies
DLT
A stateful Spatial Web enables smart digital twins of people, physical spaces, and objects to be reliably and securely linked together, spatially. The effect of this is that when an object or person moves into or out of any physical or virtual space, a Spatial Contract can be executed automatically, subject to a set of spatial permissions set by the owner or approved entity triggering a record of the action and/or initiating a transaction. This makes the Spatial Web a trustworthy network for any form of interaction, transaction, or transportation. With Smart Spaces and Smart Assets, Artificial
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The Protocol Suite can be described in five components: Smart Spaces, Smart Assets, Smart Contracts, Smart User Accounts, and the Spatial Protocol.
Identity is the first step of every transaction between two or more parties. Over the ages, the majority of transactions between two identities has been mostly viewed in relation to the validation of a credential (‘Is this genuine information?’), verification
Does the information match the identity?’) and authentication of identity (‘Does this human/thing match the identity? Are you really who you claim to be?’). These questions have not changed over time, only the methods have changed.” In the era of the Spatial Web, a historical opportunity has emerged that radically shifts the center of gravity concerning whom we are going to ask these questions to and who we will trust to answer them.
The Spatial Web blurs the lines between our well-understood concepts of physical and intellectual property rights, contractual rights, monetization, geo-fencing, and tradeability of digital goods in a way that requires us to reconsider their definitions and enforcement.
When we buy a digital product like a song, a video, or an app, the online store manages the database with our inventory. The product
is licensed from the company and often limited in use to its proprietary platform of origin. The terms of their license and/or user agreement may mean that not only do they own the product, they also own all of our data associated with its use. In comparison, if an individual purchases a Smart Asset, the individual owns it. Like physical products, the ownership is completely independent of the store it was bought in. A Smart Asset can be yours forever, and no one can take it away.
cryptocurrency (or crypto currency) is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets. Cryptocurrencies use decentralized control as opposed to centralized digital currency and central banking systems.
Digital Twin is a 3D digital replica or representation of the data associated with a physical asset, process, or system. Arguably, any digital representation could be considered to be a part of a Digital Twin—from text-based diagnostic information to 2D blueprints, schematics, and pictures, to a complete 3D replica that represents all states, conditions, and history of any item (or even a human). However, most descriptions today trend toward a 3D or spatial representation. They are a part of the industrial and enterprise Digital Transformation evolution.
Digital twin
Think of a Digital Twin as a highly detailed virtual model that is the exact counterpart (or twin) of a physical thing. The “thing” could be a refrigerator, a vehicle, a human heart or even an entire system made up of a network of parts like a factory, retail store, or an entire city. Computer vision and connected sensors on the physical assets collect data that can be mapped onto the virtual model, allowing the Digital Twin to display critical information about how the physical thing is performing in the physical world, presenting current real-time state and activity as well as historical
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The Smart Twin is THE “killer app” of the Spatial Web because it uses all of the Web 3.0 stack of technologies.
Smart twin
The implication of a Smart Twin for every person, place, and thing, every process, and state of all interactions, transactions, and movements across the planet integrated into a single interconnected network could lead to a 1:1 scale Smart Twin of the entire planet. A planetary-scale Smart Twin would be able to represent all of the uses of Earth’s resources, the flows of all of its energies, all of the activities of its physical, economic, and social systems, all of the activities of its inhabitants—their hopes, dreams, attempts, failures, and successes. In the Web 3.0 era—“The World Becomes
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The Internet is a Decentralization Engine, not only technologically but socially, politically, and now... economically.
The web wallet of the Spatial Web should be integrated into a Spatial Browser as part of your Personal Smart Account. It should be able to handle transactions with any currency or payment service—fiat, credit card, cryptocurrency, or other. It is possible that a universally accepted native web currency could emerge. Many people feel that this is the promise of Bitcoin. Whether this is the case or another currency assumes this mantle remains to be seen. In any case, a native web wallet built into a Spatial Browser as part of a single-sign-on that works interoperably everywhere would open the
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Think of it as the Economy of Things, the Economy of People, the Economy of Places, and the Economy of Experiences all being networked together. This will be brought about by the creation and then networking of four major trends.
Imagine the “Amazon Go-ification” of every store, just not exclusively by Amazon, but as part of an open standard that any storefront can use, every device can reference, and any wallet be used to transact. For that, you need the benefit of a shared data layer—a single source of truth that can be referenced by anyone with the right permissions for Identity, Assets or Goods, and Payments. In other words, you need a Single Sign-On for the World that comes with its own Web Wallet.
Services today are increasingly being commoditized, is that because of technology, increasing competition, and the increasing expectations of consumers. This situation represents one of the strongest arguments for an economy based on experiences, especially ones that will predominantly be virtual, immersive, and personalized.
Historically, products can be placed on a continuum from undifferentiated (referred to as commodities) to highly differentiated. Just as service markets build on goods markets, which in turn build on commodity markets, so experience markets (and eventually transformation markets) build on these newly commoditized services (e.g., internet bandwidth, consulting services, etc.).
AR or VR, the device is merely a window into a world where multiple layers of content can be overlayed on top of one another. Reality itself then becomes both the actual experience and also simultaneously, the interface for interacting. For example, you may be able to see messages from friends, entertainment published by favorite artists, instructions for a work assignment, all viewable at the same time by any filter or query, similar to tabs on a browser.
The Spatial Protocol specification is designed to become the universal standard able to be adopted by any spatial browser, just as the various web browsers of today all share the same underlying web protocol and programming standards. The global developer community and standards organizations must be engaged in the ongoing development of standards for all Spatial Browser implementations with a special focus on standards for privacy, security, interoperability, and digital payments.
The effective implementation of a seamless and frictionless peer-to-peer global economy that unites the human, machine, and virtual economies together could deliver a level of prosperity that could (finally) enable equitable economic benefits for all of the inhabitants of the planet.
A Smart World is a world where there exists a self-sovereign, universal identity and address for any person, place, or thing, across both physical and virtual domains. Smart payments and smart assets are integrated into smart cities. The Spatial Browser, working across all brands of smart glasses and other new interfaces, enables everyone anywhere to access location-based smart information and objects across real and virtual worlds. And finally, a Smart World is governed by a digital ocean of Spatial Contracts that permeate everything around us, allowing dynamic rules to be automatically
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interactions, transactions, and transportation of assets and users between Smart Spaces.
The UN has identified 17 Sustainable Development Goals to achieve a more sustainable future for all. The SDGs address the social and environmental challenges that must be solved. They provide a blueprint for how we might realize all of the benefits that exponential technologies can provide us. If we don’t address these global challenges, life could become unlivable for large numbers of people.
As mentioned earlier, once we link and sync a 4D visualization of a Digital Twin with Blockchain data integrity and Spatial Contracts, it becomes a Smart Twin.
That is the real purpose and function of our tools and technologies. To extend our bodies, senses, brains, and imaginations into the world. To make our ideas shareable in order to work together to improve them so that we can make our reality and hence our lives, easier, more useful, safer, and more enjoyable.
The human mind has an utterly amazing skill not found in any other species on earth. We refer to it as the “mind’s eye.” We can use it to run advanced and complex 3D spatial simulations
in our mind. Unfortunately, we have not developed telepathy and cannot share these simulations with each other... yet. We must instead translate these multi-dimensional internal models of the world into simpler mediums and protocols such as spoken language, text, or drawings in order to share them. Consider that most of what we want to share together is lost in translation.
