The great debate

I was at a party this evening with some people who have no connection at all with the work that our lab is doing in “future reality”. But of course, like everyone, they are acutely aware of the changes in everyday life wrought by the recent succession of information technologies, from the Web to Google to Facebook to SmartPhones to Twitter and beyond.

We found ourselves engaging in what I have come to think of as “the great debate”: Are these advances in information technology merely iterations in a state of being that will always be pretty much the same — humans having social interactions with other humans — or will there come a time when some sort of “cultural singularity” occurs?

When having such conversations, I am fond of telling people that two hundred years ago, in Jane Austen’s time, the idea that you could converse with a person who is somewhere else on the planet would have seemed like black magic. Now, of course, the telephone has been in existence for so long that we have trouble realizing how truly remarkable it is.

But what about two hundred years in the future? When we no longer need to perform a conscious act to look something up on-line — when merely the thought of a topic will flood information from the Cloud directly into our brain — will that fundamentally change how we think, and therefore the fabric of our social reality?

Or will we stay pretty much the same as we’ve always been, and wonder what all the fuss was about? After all, it may very well turn out that my great great great grand nephew, using futuristic brain implant technology in the year 2215, will mostly choose to download cat videos.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *