From the introduction:
“Within twenty years, a new mass medium – the Metaverse – will emerge to take advantage of a global computing, communications, and sensing platform – the next-generation internet. The Metaverse will quickly subsume all other mass media and internet-enabled services, including the web. The consumer electronics industry will enjoy unprecedented success by providing to billions of people around the world a bewildering number of Metaverse-enabled consumer electronics. The industry will abruptly collapse, however, with the advent and mass consumer adoption of brain-machine interfaces and other deeply integrated biotechnologies. By 2030, the “Great Vanishing” of consumer electronics and other physical human artifacts will have begun as their capabilities are threaded into our biology.”
“The Great Vanishing” seems to me the logical outcome of decades of progress in consumer electronics, in which:
- devices have generally decreased in size even while converging and gaining powerful new capabilities;
- consumers have adopted them in greater and greater numbers;
- physical media has been replaced by digital media; and
- digital abstractions have increasingly virtualized reality.
Brain-machine interfaces are also undergoing rapid progress, albeit mostly in laboratories and in animal models. As biotechnology advances mount, it is becoming clear that while humans have always adapted to their technologies, their technologies are increasingly adapting to them. Humans touch, speak, gesture, emote, and think with almost universal ease; typing and clicking as with the keyboard and mouse require steeper learning curves. More recent input methods like multi-touch, voice and gesture recognition, and brain-machine interfaces are much more intimate and easy to learn. These innovations are allowing consumer electronics to spread more quickly to more people, including people who are younger, older, and more varied in their physical capabilities and literacy levels.
I have been exploring this progress for a long time and I always want to better understand the consequences for individuals, families, societies, species, and the planet. What happens when technology becomes this easy, this integrated? What happens when it is as close as our skin, or closer? What happens when the physical and virtual worlds merge via technologies that abstract the distinctions away? What happens when technology becomes so widespread that “Luddite” becomes a misnomer? The Great Vanishing website will explore the consequences of technology “vanishing” into our bodies by providing a detailed description and argument for this thesis, a roadmap to the future (whether inevitable or not), and a central resource for related topics.
