Reading the future ...

During the morning drive, I turned the radio on.  It was not about tRump.  Phew!

Source

What an interesting segment it was!  So interesting that I couldn't wait to return home and place an order for the book.  I added another book to the order.  The two books will reach my doorstep in a week, and just in time for the winter break.

I wonder, however, for how long books will continue to be printed.  Consider music, for instance.  It is mostly streamed.  When was the last time you bought music as a tangible CD or vinyl?  They don't even sell cassette tapes anymore, right?

Even now, quite a few purchase the e-version of books instead of the bound paper.  For how long will books continue to be printed on paper?

An even more troubling question is this: Will books be around?

Book maybe dead by 2039, the futuristic commentary argues.

How long did it take for vinyl to be replaced by tapes.  And then tapes by CDs.  How long did CDs continue to sell?

It is absolutely fascinating that printed books have survived this long.  Why 2039 for that commentary?

In 1439, an eccentric German goldsmith cast the Latin alphabet in lead, smeared the letters with oil-based ink and squashed them beneath a wine press. Johannes Gutenberg hadn’t invented the ink, the paper, the press or the alphabet, but by combining their powers, he built the first printing press and printed the first mass-produced book: a 1,200-page Bible printed on vellum and bound in pigskin.

The rest was history.

Soon, even books will become history in the coming "post-book world"?  Of course, rumors of books ending have been spread for a while.  "Until now. Or more accurately, until 2031, when the Verse arrived, and humanity discovered a new way to tell its stories."

As troubling as the commentary is, it seems entirely plausible.  If video killed the radio star, virtual reality (VR) killed the book authors:

By the mid-’20s, V.R. was sleeker and cheaper, but still posed no danger to Cinemark or Barnes & Noble (both of which declared bankruptcy in 2036). But the rise of cheap neural threads led to the first generation of V.R. implants, and in 2031 Google’s Daydreamer, Netflix’s ReelLife and Microsoft’s much-mocked Awegment were joined by Amazon’s Universal Experience, popularly known as the Verse.

What a clever piece of writing there, right?  Can't you already see those brand names?

The author makes an important point that it was never about the books per se.

"The stories." That's what the books were about.

And stories existed long before 1439. Stories are shape-shifters, infinite and immortal: They’ve been painted on the walls of Chauvet Cave and pressed into clay tablets; sung by griots in the streets of Old Mali and cut into the Peruvian desert; danced and drummed and whispered, spun like spider-silk across the Atlantic and painted on the undersides of overpasses. In the context of human history, the book was nothing but a format, a brief technological quirk in the history of human storytelling, younger than theater but older than soap operas.

Read the entire commentary. Maybe you will welcome that future.

As for me, 2039 neatly coincides with another landmark, and I hope to live with books as we know them!

In your head

Consider the following paragraph:

Some time ago I went with my six-year-old nephew Matan to hunt for Pokémon. As we walked down the street, Matan kept looking at his smartphone, which enabled him to spot Pokémon all around us. I didn’t see any Pokémon at all, because I didn’t carry a smartphone. Then we saw two others kids on the street who were hunting the same Pokémon, and we almost got into a fight with them. It struck me how similar the situation was to the conflict between Jews and Muslims about the holy city of Jerusalem. When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings. There is no holiness anywhere. But when you look through the medium of smartbooks (such as the Bible and the Qur’an), you see holy places and angels everywhere.

What a wonderful analogy!  No wonder the author is a celebrated thinker, futurist!

I have quoted the author, Yuval Noah Harari, in a previous blog-post.  I am now all the more convinced that Harari is now my go-to-guy to think about the future.

So, yes, those strange critters are invisible to me because I don't play that game, even though I carry a smartphone.  A technological approach to understanding maya too?  Nah, I don't want to digress.

If it were not for those religious "smartbooks" the stones of Jerusalem will be mere stone and nobody would fight over them.  Of course, this fight over the stones is not a new insight.  What is awesome about Harari's essay--read it in full because I am doing injustice to it by excerpting to tell my own stories--is how he compares religions to multiplayer virtual reality computer games:

What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions such as Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat the same prayers a set number of times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody from your own gender” and so forth. These laws exist only in the human imagination. No natural law requires the repetition of magical formulas, and no natural law forbids homosexuality or eating pork. Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain points in their favorite virtual reality game. If you pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray, you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game (aka heaven).

Can one get addicted to such a virtual reality game that religion is?  Harari has thought this through:

n Israel, a significant percentage of ultra-orthodox Jewish men never work. They spend their entire lives studying holy scriptures and performing religion rituals.

Talk about game addicts!

Harari's essay is awesome.  Lemme say it again--read the entire essay.  Do not base your thoughts on whatever I have excerpted for my own selfish reasons.

Harari's point is that in the near future, when computers/AI will make more and more among us unemployable--the useless class, as he calls them--sophisticated video games will keep them busy and entertained, just like how religions have forever kept humans busy and addicted.

Harari ends the essay with quite a flourish:

In any case, the end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working. Work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles. Eighteenth-century English country squires, present-day ultra-orthodox Jews, and children in all cultures and eras have found a lot of interest and meaning in life even without working. People in 2050 will probably be able to play deeper games and to construct more complex virtual worlds than in any previous time in history.
But what about truth? What about reality? Do we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws? Well, like it or not, that’s the world we have been living in for thousands of years already.

It is all in our imagination!  It is maya!

Live your life. Do not make your life "live"

Consider this:

Some might think that people already spend too much time on the social network. According to one estimate, most Americans spend the equivalent of two full workdays each month on Facebook. In the future, might they pass even more time? Mark Zuckerberg is hoping so.

Or this:

Facebook has attracted and engaged so many users by engineering features that are highly addictive and relevant to their lives, so people keep coming back for more hits

Yes, the Economist makes sure that the word choices were no accident; the title of that report says it all: Facebook, the world’s most addictive drug

With all the time spent on Facebook and on various entertainment options, is it any wonder we can't get people, especially students, to focus on ... hey, hey, listen to what I have to say and do not open your Facebook messenger window! ;)

We are now living in a world that was imagined in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and EM Forster's The Machine Stops.  Our daily lives are dedicated to watching electronic screens for entertainment of different kinds and we seem to be less and less keen on interactions with the real world as we rush towards virtual reality.

To some extent, Bradbury was wrong when he imagined that the future would include a government department whose responsibility would be to burn books and make sure people did not accidentally read any--it turns out that there is no real need to impose anything like that because ... hey, hey, listen to what I have to say and do not open your Facebook messenger window! ;)

Facebook is expected to announce more plans for turning Messenger, one of its messaging services, into a portal through which people can fulfill tasks, like ordering taxis and communicating with businesses. Mr Zuckerberg is hoping that Facebook will be an even bigger part of the mobile ecosystem in the future. Being both useful and addictive could win Facebook even more friends

As I noted in this post from a mere days ago, Zuckerberg knows well that to keep the addicts on a high will mean increasing the hits, which is where the new "live video" also kicks in.

On Facebook.com, you can now view a live map of broadcasts taking place around the world. And you can now broadcast live to specific audiences, such as those in a Facebook group or those invited to an event, rather than to the public at large. Those watching a live video can send reaction emojis in real time, rather than just liking the video as a whole. When you watch a replay, you’ll see the reaction emojis pop up on the screen at the same point in the video when people sent them. You can also invite friends to join you in watching a live video and they’ll get a push notification linking to the feed. Live, live, live!

It is unfortunate that Facebook has made "live" as it relates to "life" into an obscene four-letter word of "live."  Guess what?  It is delivering hits to the addicts:

the approach seems to be resonating: On average, Facebook says people are commenting 10 times more on live videos than they do on regular videos.

The ruler of this drug empire is thrilled:

“We’re entering this new golden age of video,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”

Hey, selling this addiction has made the young drug-lord worth more than 35 billion dollars!  Are you not entertained?

When worlds collide: The real meets the virtual

I often comment in my classes that the way humans will live in advanced economies towards the end of this century will be practically unrecognizable to those who lived and died in the early twentieth century.  "It will be a sci-fi life to somebody from a mere hundred years ago" I tell them.

Even now it is a sci-fi world in which we live.  We mutter into the air (into our cellphones) and we get an echo from somebody who is somewhere else on this planet.  We are even able to see them.  This will be way freakier an experience to a time traveler from 1816 than was the cliched cigarette lighter to the remote tribes in Hollywood movies.

The cellphone conversation and image is virtual.  Our lives are increasingly virtual.  And these virtual and real worlds are going to merge even more, which is what all the big companies are betting on.

Mark Zuckerberg, who made a surprise appearance Sunday at Samsung's Mobile World Congress press conference to promote VR, believes virtual reality is the next major computing platform after mobile devices to bring together family and friends on the other side of the country or the world.
Zuckerberg wants to capture and share his daughter's first steps using virtual reality.
“Pretty soon we’re going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes as if you’re just there, right there in person,” Zuckerberg said Sunday.

Even now, we live so much of our lives "as if you’re just there, right there in person."  Television boasts about how you get to experience entertainment events "as if you’re just there, right there in person."  Skype is no different. The examples are endless. So, hey, the logical step in this for VR--Virtual Reality.

"They put on headset. You put on a headset. And you can be teleported anywhere you want in the world. It can be fishing. It can be at the zoo. It can be at the museum. It can be in your living room," Facebook's chief technology officer Michael Schroepfer told USA TODAY last year. "After about a minute, it really does feel like that person is there even though they are 1,000 miles away."

The next logical step in the ongoing battle of proxy over proximity, which is one of the themes that I have often explored here.  Proxy is winning big time.

It is bizarre, however, when life is completely redefined in ways that words begin to mean something else altogether.  Consider this, for instance:

“What people care about,” Zuckerberg says, sitting just down the hall from Facebook’s VR room, “is interacting with another person.”

Seriously?  People care to interact with another person so much that they prefer to do that not in the real world with people in flesh and blood but in the virtual world?

Of course, Facebook is not the only one rushing towards this brave new virtual world:

In October 2014, Google led a $500 million investment in the augmented-reality startup Magic Leap, a cousin of Oculus-style virtual reality. The following January, Microsoft unveiled its own augmented reality headset, the Hololens. All the while, Google was building its own VR effort from scratch, not only offering a cardboard headset that could deliver VR via your smartphone, but secretly building more advanced hardware. And now, it seems, Apple is doing much the same.

Brendan Iribe, who is the CEO of Oculus, is confident about the direction:

if you look back at the history of most new big technology breakthroughs, there is some element of controversy around what impact is it going to have. Whether it was books or computers or mobile devices. Now it’s virtual reality. I’m really confident that it’s part of the natural concern around new technology, and that VR will become a very big part of everybody’s life in the future.

I can't wait to get the hell out of here before VR completely redefines what it means to be human and what it means to belong to humanity;)

The flawless virtual world is only a few years away?

Could we one day find that when we dip our fingers in virtual water, it actually feels wet?

Maybe I am merely experiencing the old adage that the world we see is the world that we want to see.  And maybe that is why I am coming across one too many essays and news reports on the rapidly advancing technologies and, therefore, the implications for the future.  But then, maybe it is not my bias--it is all for real, which means that you too should be worried.

That quote is from this piece in the Atlantic, on how virtual reality is getting real.  Touching virtual water and feeling our fingers getting wet is apparently one of the examples "known as the haptics problem, to be the holy grail of virtual reality."  Smell, sensations in the skin, taste, are all in this category.

But that doesn’t mean it’s insurmountable. “I’m confident we’ll do it within our lifetimes,” Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, told me. “There are no fundamental physical laws that prevent us from building something that’s almost perfect.” Laidlaw is less optimistic—he thinks that creating lifelike haptics will take 100 years—but he agrees that a virtual world may one day be a nearly perfect simulacrum of the real one.

Oculus is the virtual reality technology leader, for now:

the much-anticipated Oculus Rift headset is expected to arrive in stores in early 2016, followed closely by several other devices.

This is only the beginning, of course.

“Right now, it’s like when you first had cellphones,” Richard Marks, one of the lead engineers working on Project Morpheus, Sony’s virtual-reality headset, told me. “A lot of focus is still on the most-basic things.”

You remember those early mobile phones?  Huge and bulky and awkward?  And how rapidly it "evolved," right?

Apparently all the publications I subscribe to are conspiring to feed me VR stories. Yes, it is all about me! ;)  The New Yorker reports about the latest from "Howard Rose, the soft-spoken C.E.O. of a company that designs virtual-reality environments"

Rose also helped create SnowWorld, in which snowballs, snowmen, and flying fish distracted burn patients during painful wound dressings and stretching procedures.
After asking for a swivel chair and more ice, Rose introduced Cool!, a successor to SnowWorld. A player of Cool! drifts down the path of a river, Rose explained. “It’s a kind of Jungian thing. Nobody asks, ‘Why am I on a river?’ It’s, ‘Oh, I’m going down a river.’ And there are otters: we use otters because otters are endearing—pretty nonthreatening.”

 How powerful is VR?  Rose has a human put her right hand in a real bucket of ice.  

The idea, he explained, was to see how long she could stand it, and then see how long she could stand it while lost in Cool!. Ice ache was standing in for more violent pain.

Get it?  You can already see where this is going.  In the real world versus when being completely drawn into VR.  

For fifty-two seconds, nobody spoke; there was the roar of air-conditioning and, faintly, in the D.C. café, a shrieking toddler. Gummer took her reddened hand out of the ice. Rose warmed it under a heat lamp. He then helped her put on a virtual-reality headset and headphones. ...
After two and a half minutes, Gummer took her hand out of the ice again. Rose said that such a result—three times the resilience—is fairly common in both informal and more rigorous tests.

Such technologies can be put to good use, of course, as in treating patients with intense pain and phobias and PTSD and more, where fooling the brain is a good therapeutic strategy.  But, we know enough from experience that technological advancements are not merely for constructive uses.  Siri to Samantha to Ava are the kinds of examples that I have already discussed in this blog.  Add Oculus Rift and "haptics" to all that.  We will rapidly redefine what it means to be human--the question that I often raise in this blog.

in 50 or 100 years we might develop a brain-machine interface that taps directly into the nervous system.
Perhaps then we’ll find that rather than jacking in for a while and calling it quits, we can, like Alice, move wholly into a Wonderland where the laws of the prosaic world (gravity, aging) no longer apply. Virtual reality could then become akin to the Singularity, a concept described by Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and Google engineer, among others: a way for our minds to separate from our bodies and, uploaded into a digital realm, live on even as our physical selves grow old and die.

A brave new world, indeed!