Author: admin

In the last few days I have visited labs within both Facebook and Google where my colleagues are doing cutting edge work in VR technology. In both cases I signed NDAs, so I can’t tell you (or anybody else) what I saw.

But I can say that I am thrilled and delighted to see that so many smart people are pouring so much intelligence and serious engineering chops into advancing the field. Things are moving forward by leaps and bounds, and future reality is indeed rapidly becoming reality.

One thing that always strikes me when I visit such places is the culture of the campus. You need to pass through security to get in, but once you are inside, it fees like you’re a kid in a candy store. They treat people very well at these places. Exercise rooms, massages, snack bars, mediation centers, plentiful and delicious food any time of day, and of course fancy high-tech coffee bars wherever you go.

Each corporate technoplex is a sort of endless summer camp. But a summer camp for extremely smart and hard working people. On the other hand, maybe “work” is not the most accurate word for it, given how much people at these places seem to love what they are doing.

Many interesting thoughts have come from my conversations with various people over these last months. Here is one of them:

After future reality reaches its tipping point (as I described yesterday) new forms of entertainment will emerge. Just as movies create a demand for popcorn vendors, restaurants create a demand for waiters and dance parties create a demand for disk jockeys, new sorts of services will start to exist.

For example, if we are all hanging out together in a party situation, and we want to have a fun experience together, we might organize some sort of theater game, perhaps a kind of 21st century version of Dungeons and Dragons, with one participant as designated Dungeon Master.

Except that this experience of thing won’t be limited to Tolkienesque fantasy worlds. We might decide to be characters in a Wild West movie, or space pirates, or dolphins swimming together as we explore an ocean reef.

In all of these cases, the experience can benefit from having somebody at the controls, just as in a dance party a good disk jockey will sense the mood and pick just the right next song to play.

As we gain in understanding about these sorts of experiences, better and better tools will be developed to operate those controls. Eventually some users of those tools will get sufficiently proficient that others will be willing to pay them.

This is completely in line with recent trends in which new economies are being created by combining interactive experience with social networks. For example, a top ranked gamer can already make a decent living on Twitch.

Over time, a new class of professional will emerge, somewhat parallel to the disk jockey or video jockey. Maybe we should call this person an experience jockey.

I’ve been having lots of conversations over many months with friends and collaborators about what experiences of “future reality” might be like, as technology continues to progress. When I say “future reality” I mean, essentially, more advanced versions of the way we already live now: Everyday social reality becoming progressively more mediated by technology.

As Sally has pointed out, drawing from her work with her collaborators on “PolySocial Reality”, this progression is a continuum. Written language, photographs, telephones, movies and television, the Web, mobile phones, these are all examples of social reality being mediated by technology.

But I am thinking about a particular tipping point along this continuum, when technological mediation of our everyday visual perception becomes the social norm. There will come a point in not too many years when people will take it for granted that they can just put on a pair of lightweight glasses in order to see and interact with a rich socially shared world of information in the physical space around and between them.

“Virtual reality”, “mixed reality” and “augmented reality” are phrases that mainly emphasize the means by which this may happen, rather than on the resulting social transformations that would ensue. This is why I prefer to use the short-hand phrase “future reality”: I am more interested in conversations that focus not on the technology itself, but rather on its social impact.

A friend was telling me today about a storytelling class he took. It ended up being a much deeper experience than he was expecting, because it turned out that you couldn’t just get up and tell stories.

Rather, the teacher insisted that each story needed to come from a true, personal, and emotionally significant experience in your life. At first, my friend said, most of the students didn’t think they had much to tell.

But after some digging, it turns out that everyone had quite a few such stories. And finding those stories, then finding a way to tell them out loud, invariably turned out to be rich and powerful experience for everyone.

Hearing this got me to thinking. Suppose you were to go through the effort to dig up your own personal stories — the ones that were most deeply powerful for you. If you really did the work needed to call them up, you would probably end up with quite a collection.

And then suppose you could choose just one among them — the one personal story that meant the most to you, the one nearest to your soul. That would probably be quite a story indeed.

If we were to take everyone’s chosen story, and we collected all those stories together into a single book, it would make for one hell of a book. I don’t know about you, but I would love to read that book.

Today a friend told me that her daughter, who goes to college not that far from San Bernardino, phoned her after the horrific terrorist attack there, to say she was extremely upset and frightened. Which is not surprising.

But something about that got me thinking about the event in question. In some ways it was like the also horrific terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere. But it also felt like an act apart, different in some essential way.

Eventually I worked out why it felt different: This was a terrorist attack by people upon their own neighbors. The couple that perpetrated this act lived right next door to people who had no idea there was any danger. This act of madness and terror was not inflicted by terrorists outside the community, but by terrorists inside the community, who had been infected with a destructive apocalyptic ideology, as though by a virus.

One thing that I find frightening about all this is how much it feels like a zombie movie come to life. Your friends and neighbors become infected by the virus, which turns them into creatures that kill. In the process they seem to lose the essential sense of shared humanity that causes us to cherish human life, and to recognize what a terrible tragedy it is when that life is taken away.

I’ve always thought of “zombie apocalypse” as merely a way to describe a genre of fiction. I never thought, until now, that it would become an apt description of a real-world ideology.

This evening, after a day-long professional meeting, I am dining out with the group at a traditional Brazilian restaurant, chosen by our host.

You might think this is not the optimal place for a vegan. All through the evening waiters bring skewer upon skewer of meat, as yet another piece is sliced off and deposit upon my colleagues’ plates.

On the other hand, the salad bar is amazing. 🙂

I have been posting daily to this blog every day, without fail, since January 1 2008. I’ve managed to post from India, China, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, all sorts of locations in Europe, and somehow made it work. The number of posts have added up, by my count, to 2899, counting through yesterday.

Today was supposed to be my 2900th post. Because I needed to catch an evening flight, my plan was to take the A Train to JFK Airport, go through security, then write my post at the gate, while waiting for my departure. It’s a ritual I’ve followed many times before. Because I fly out of JFK all the time, I know just how long everything takes.

But I had become overconfident, and fate was not kind. Today the AirTrain was broken, so everybody had to take a shuttle bus, which takes much, much longer.

Once the bus finally arrived at the terminal, I raced to the departure level, whereupon a very nice man from JetBlue got me expedited through security. When I arrived at the gate they were just about to close the doors. I made it with no time to spare.

As the plane took off, I thought to myself that finally, after all this time, I had failed. Alas and alack, I had missed a day. Because this flight would not be touching down until hours after midnight NY time, my perfect streak was ended.

But then, to my surprise, the flight crew announced, after we were up in the air, that JetBlue now has free Wifi. Which I am using this very moment.

And so this blog continues, uninterrupted and undeterred. My odd little run of perfect attendance, quirky as it may be, lives on to see another day.

Continuing the theme from yesterday (sort of), let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Republican National Committee is wrong, and that ISIS is not performing horrific and brutal acts of mass murder around the world just to get gun control repealed in the U.S. So if that’s not it, then just what is it that people like that would want from the U.S.?

I’m sure they would be very disappointed in Obama’s recent speech. Instead of fiery rhetoric, calls for violent retaliation, and blaming all Muslims everywhere for the actions of a small band of extremists, our president is calling for careful steps and well coordinated multi-national response. Total buzzkill, right?

But from the perspective of ISIS leaders, there is one American politician who is doing everything right: Calling for immediate and violent military response, universal registration of Muslim Americans, and banning of travel by any Muslim to the United States.

I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

From the perspective of an ISIS leader (as well as we can ever understand such a perspective) the Donald is perfect. He is giving them absolutely everything they want, on a silver platter. The eerie accuracy with which he says exactly what ISIS would most want an American politician to say is uncanny, breathtaking in its precision, eerily efficient in its potential for helping to encourage new recruits to join their insane cause.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say that Donald Trump is working for ISIS. The alignment between his words and what ISIS wants American politicians to say is just that uncannily good.

But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I think he’s just incredibly stupid and irresponsible. Although I wouldn’t be completely surprised if it turned out that there was a hidden ISIS mind control device underneath the man’s hairpiece.

I mean, think about it logically: Why else would anybody wear something like that on their head?

I figured something out that had been puzzling me, and the answer came as a surprise.

President Obama made a speech in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre. During that speech he called for everyone to keep cool heads and not respond by giving in to irrational fear and hatred. It seemed like a sensible, if obvious, thought: Let’s not give ISIS the very thing they want (and in fact, have been saying they want).

I didn’t understand why there was so much vitriolic dislike for the speech from the Republican party, until I actually read the official response of the Republican National Committee. It seems that they believe ISIS is murdering innocent citizens around the world in order to advance a very specific goal: Repeal of gun control in the United States.

I know that sounds crazy. Why would a radical theological sect bent on mass genocide care about our domestic policies half way around the world?

Apparently, according to the RNC, ISIS is killing people in order to goad the U.S. into taking away the rights of its citizens to bear arms. The RNC concludes its argument with these words: “To react by trying to limit the rights enshrined by our Constitution would be a terrible mistake.”

Wow.

This evening I had dinner at Kajitsu, right here in Manhattan. I had not eaten there in years, and I had completely forgotten how amazing it is.

There are meals, and then there are gourmet meals, and then there is Kajitsu. All the food is in the traditional Japanese Shojin style — a unique cuisine that was first developed centuries ago by the Zen Buddhist monks in Kyoto.

A meal at Kajitsu is expensive, but it is completely worth it. There is really nothing that I could say here that would properly describe the experience. All I can say is that you should go there at least once in your life, and prepare to have your mind blown.