When information is everywhere

It takes a certain amount of work to point your phone at something, isolate a particular physical object of interest, and read information about that object on your phone’s screen. This is true even if you have an easy-to-use app installed for this purpose.

But when SmartPhones are replaced by SmartGlasses, the same operation will take no work at all. The entire process will be so seamless and automatic, you won’t even think about it.

When that happens, all objects will be information objects. Furniture, houses, people, food, whatever you look at will contain information that is instantly available.

This will fundamentally change the nature of our relationship with the world around us. We will stop thinking of information as something different than physical reality.

The next generation of kids will grow up without any inherent separation between physical reality and digital information about that reality. Because of this, they will think about things in a way that is in some ways fundamentally different from the way you or I think about things.

They will grow up to develop ways of reasoning, of going about their day, of work and of play, that are hard for us even to imagine. And they will tell their children of a long ago time before information was everywhere you looked.

To their children, that ancient time will seem like a distant fairy tale. They might wonder what it must have been like to live in such a strange world.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.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