This evening, under a beautiful New York summer sky, I took a walk with a friend along the Hudson river, starting from West Houston and proceeding down from there. When we got to Battery Park we stopped a while, just to sit and soak in the beautiful sight of Lady Liberty across the water.
I started thinking that if a friend happened to be standing under the Statue of Liberty, they would appear much too small to see clearly. But one day in the future, when people possess cyber-enhanced eye implants, they will be able to see that friend just by looking. Then they could zoom in to get a better look, and proceed to have a face to face conversation.
This may all sound like crazy science fiction. Yet two hundred years ago the “super power” of being able to talk to another person at a distance would have seemed just as crazy. Now we don’t even stop to think how amazing it is that we can casually chat with somebody thousands of miles away.
Which is why I am interested not in how amazing such experiences will be, but in how ordinary. Once every child grows up in a world where she can zoom in and have a face to face discussion with somebody who is clear across a room, or a stadium, or a river, the whole notion of personal space will shift.
After it becomes possible to have intermediate states between “in person” and “on the phone”, social norms will adjust accordingly. It’s hard to know what such an enhanced everyday reality will feel like. But with properly designed empirical research, perhaps using shared VR to simulate the experience, we just might get a glimpse.