Because the future has just started
If you were to read the Wikipedia “about today” page faithfully every day, eventually you would see the names of nearly all the famous people. For example, today I learned that it’s the birthday of both E. B. White and Robert the Bruce.
Theoretically you could follow all of the links, and use the Wikipedia to learn about the lives of the famous people. By the end of a year, when the cycle repeats, you would have learned quite a bit.
I wonder whether that would make you a better person.
The central mystery of human existence is faced by every individual sooner or later. The mystery is this: We do not know when we will die, but we know for certain that we will.
Think about how much philosophy, literature, and religious thinking has circled around this one basic fact of our existence. We will never completely come to terms with this mystery, but we will always be in mutual orbit around it.
There is a reasonable chance that in number of years from now, everyone you know will be looking into virtual screens that only they can see. You will be too.
Some of these screens might be visible all the time. Others might just pop up as needed, such as when it’s time for an appointment, or to show the way to a subway entrance around the corner.
So you will know that other people are seeing things that you cannot see. And they will know the same about you.
I wonder what sorts of social protocols will evolve around this capability. Perhaps there will be some movement of your head, or some flicker of your eyes, to indicate “I’m not actually looking at you right now, I’m looking at a screen.”
But it might be something else entirely. I guess we won’t know for sure until it happens.
Let’s extrapolate forward to A.I. assisted interaction. Eventually we get to a place, for better or worse, where your personal A.I. assistant knows both your entire personal history and the contours of your particular way of thinking.
It is reasonable to infer that such an A.I. will eventually be able to prompt you to remember anything you might have forgotten. We’re talking birthdays, business plans, bank passcodes, quotes from books and songs, street addresses, favorite movies, foods and drinks of family and friends — in short, anything.
Eventually the interface to access this info will become so seamless that it will be essentially instantaneous. The moment you begin to ponder that particular memory item, the answer will appear to you. The entire process of remembering, from start to finish, will be visible only to you.
I wonder whether this will be a good thing.
Every once in a while, in spite of myself, I really notice reality, in all of its strangeness and beauty.
In those moments I am filled with awe, and I wonder why it is that I spend so much of my life not noticing reality.
In the last year we have seen an enormous leap in consumer-facing A.I. For example, products such as Dall-E2 and MidJourney are able to create realistic images and art from natural language descriptions.
Soon these techniques will allow each person on the planet to have a personal custom tutor. Any new knowledge or skills that you wish to gain will be presented to you in a manner that is optimized for your own individual knowledge base and learning style.
When such technologies become mature, people will be able to acquire new skills with an ease and facility that will be remarkable by today’s standards. It will not yet be Trinity learning how to fly a helicopter, but it will be a lot closer than anything we have seen until now.
If the advent of the Web advanced our superpower of being able to immediately access vast stores of information, the advent of the smartphone about 15 years later catapulted it into hyperspace. Suddenly we had all that information at our fingertips wherever we might happen to be in the world.
And now, roughly another 15 years later, I believe that we are on the cusp of another great leap forward in ease of information access. We are getting closer and closer to Trinity’s helicopter.
More tomorrow.
The astonishing thing about that moment in The Matrix is the sudden connection between Trinity and a whole new world of knowledge. But isn’t that what all literacy ultimately leads to?
When we humans transitioned from oral lore to written language, we enabled individuals to access generations of knowledge that had proceeded their own lives, far more easily than ever before and without transcription errors.
And each time we have leveled up our media technology, we have increased our access to knowledge. Sometime in the 1990s I was having a telephone conversation with a colleague, when we both realized that we were looking things up the Web as we were speaking, both of us increasing our knowledge base during the course of our conversation.
At the time, this seemed shockingly new. Now it is an occurrence that we simply take for granted.
More tomorrow.
There is a moment in “The Matrix” that jumps out at me. It’s when they need to fly a helicopter and Neo asks Trinity if she knows how to pilot a chopper.
Her reply is “Not yet.” Then she has her team quickly download this expert knowledge into her mind, and off they go.
It has occurred to me that this is an apt metaphor for the power assist we get from any information technology, whether past, present or future. It started with the very first legible scratchings on a cave wall. That’s when people began to be able to store knowledge outside their brains, to be retrieved later by someone else.
More tomorrow.
I’ve noticed something about my process when I am creating interactive programming systems: When and where I spend my time and effort is highly non-linear.
I will write large swaths of code in a very short amount of time, building in lots of capability with a broad brush. But then every so often, I will get to a particular design element and slow way down.
In my mind, it feels as though that particular detail represents the soul of the entire endeavor. If I were to gloss over it, then all would be lost. But if I manage to get that detail just right, it will redeem and elevate the entire enterprise.
And for all I know, that could be exactly true.