Vernor Vinge doesn’t create a world as much as he augments our own – and in this way we experience a differently mediated augmented-reality like the citizens of 2025 San Diego. Technology is such that the world is experienced through digital interfaces and much of what we’ve talked about regarding web 2.0 is woven seamlessly into the everyday lives (and clothes) of every citizen (with few exceptions among technophobes who opt out of those experiences).
In this reality the concept of literacy shifts so that those who are most capable with technology are the most literate which contrasts well with our protagonist who stands as a fading relic of what was once considered the apex of literacy. Robert Gu is an interesting main character with some dynamic experiences: a world-renowned poet who’s mind decays and voice is silenced by Alzheimer’s until he is eventually called out of his coma and hyper-healed by the kind of technology that makes him as irrelevant as he was while in his coma. After some resistance (and clinging to a 30+ year-old operating system) he finally begins to embrace and enjoy the technology that he once feared (even making advancements in certain areas) – reclaiming his literacy.
For me, the most interesting themes in the book were those that seem to be nearest: superintelligence and augmented reality. Superintelligence might seem a long way off, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t being actively pursued. In the Nick Carr article that we had to read, he included some quotes by the founders of Google:
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Augmented reality, on the other hand, already exists in very primitive forms. In some sense our ability to experience locations through check-in programs like Foursquare, Facebook, or Google augment our reality in various ways. Applications like Google Goggles give us a digital lens through which we view the world and gather information about it. Furthermore these programs often give various awards for using them which encourages users to experience digitally-mediated realities.
This is a far cry from the kind of augmented reality that Vinge describes (which reminded me of Minority Report in a lot of ways), but there are early attempts at more significantly augmented realities. Lego and Sony have experimented with augmented reality and have come up with some pretty interesting results. And, under the banner of creepy coincidence, the University of Washington is workingon HUD contact lenses and they are testing them on… rabbits(!).
I surely hope that Karl Pilkington isn’t right about the rest his ideas for the future:
UPDATE: Here is a deeper look into the AR contact lenses: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/0
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