If you and I are walking around in some future version of everyday reality, and we are wearing those cyber-glasses that visually transform the world around us, we are going to want some other powers as well. And we will get them.
For one thing, I am going to want to point to an object across a room and then see that object float toward me until it ends up in my upturned palm. But that’s not going to happen by itself.
Instead, there will be an army of invisible robots acting as proxies between us and the physical world around us. Most of the time we won’t see these robots.
It’s not that they will be invisible, but rather that there will be no reason to make them look interesting or to make them part of our constructed visual landscape. When we walk across a room they will get out of our way, so there is no particular reason for us to even know they are there, as separate objects.
This idea of things unobtrusively operating on our behalf in the physical world is far from new. The plumbing that brings water to your tap, the restaurant kitchen that you never enter, the engine inside your car, these are but a few examples of things that work on your behalf in the physical world that you do not ordinarily see.
After a while, people won’t even think about the fact that they are always seeing a constructed version of reality. After all, most of us forget that the concrete sidewalks beneath our feet are a constructed reality.
Everyone will simply have the power to make any physical object float through the air and come to them just by pointing at it and issuing verbal commands. This power will come to seem so ordinary that people of the future will wonder how anybody ever got along without it.