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.

What follows is a brief introduction to the emergence of the Metaverse and the beginning of the Great Vanishing.

A quick trip up a steep mountain

After DVD players became available to consumers in March 1997, they quickly became the fastest selling technology in human history. At their peak, 20 million DVD players were being sold a year in the United States alone. Including DVD drives for computers or those in gaming consoles, many hundreds of millions of DVD players have been sold to date around the world.

Other consumer electronics have now sold at a faster pace, though few have reached the same staggering overall totals. According to Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker, Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch together reached sales of 57 million only two years after launch, outpacing Nintendo’s Wii and DS, Sony’s PSP, Apple’s iPod, and RIM’s Blackberry. (Slides from Meeker’s October 20, 2009 Web 2.0 Summit talk can be found here.)

More consumer electronic blockbusters are certainly coming. The technological infrastructure will be there. Scaling trends like integration level, cost, speed, power, compactness, and functionality as tracked and extrapolated in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) lead to components that are smaller, less expensive, faster, more efficient, and more capable than the components they replace. Sometimes separate components are combined into one unit, or a single component gains new capabilities. Here are just two recent examples:

• STMicroelectronics announced at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show the availability of new MEMS accelerometers that include temperature sensors yet are smaller and more energy efficient that previous, less capable accelerometers.
• Apple recently filed a patent application for adding capacitors to individual LCD pixels, which could lead to thinner and more accurate touchscreens.

The materials will be there. According to the ITRS, the semiconductor industry will reach the 16 nanometer lithography node and smaller later this decade. For scaling trends to continue at the same pace, new materials and processes will need to be in place for these nodes. Transistors significantly different than existing transistors will need to be built from new materials as quantum effects become impossible to ignore. The resulting nanoelectronics are expected to be orders of magnitude smaller than existing components. In turn, consumer electronics built from these nanoelectronics will be smaller and thinner while gaining new capabilities and complex multimodal interfaces. Perhaps as soon as 2018 a new generation of consumer electronics enabled by nanoelectronics constructed using these new materials will lead to powerful computation and networking in form factors like paper-thin folding tablets, wallscreens, LCD facades on buildings, glasses and contact lenses, wearable computers, ubiquitous sensors, and truly smart homes and environments.

The buyers will also be there. A burgeoning global middle class, successful infrastructure leapfrogging, and more rapid “trickling down” of technologies suggest a global audience for emerging consumer electronics measured in the billions over the next two decades. This expanded marketplace will benefit the consumer electronics industry tremendously. There will be record sales, penetration rates, and rapid turnover of products as consumers seek out the latest, greatest, and most capable devices. The consumer electronics industry will deliver.

It is difficult to imagine a peak in consumer electronics from our current vantage point in 2010. At the time of this writing two million Apple iPads have been sold far more quickly than iPhones sold upon their introduction in 2007. HP announced they would purchase Palm, suggesting a software power play to better compete with Apple’s iOS platform. The mobile web enabled by cloud computing and 4G telecommunications networks will be a goldmine for companies participating in the transition away from monolithic personal computers and toward personal, portable and ubiquitous mobile devices.

Eventually the consumer electronics industry will be awash in smartphones and tablets and there will be other paradigms in the mobile device space. There will be surprises, including new companies starting from scratch that grow to unbelievable heights after shaking up the marketplace. Eye wear, wall screens, and other advanced consumer electronics will have become widespread when the consumer electronics industry hits its peak sometime within the next twenty years.

A fast fall off a cliff

Soon after this peak, however, three emerging technologies will come together almost overnight, and when they do, they will render consumer electronics obsolete.

The first emerging technology will be the next-generation internet. The internet will become a monolithic computational substrate made local by becoming orders of magnitude more ubiquitous than it is today. This global spanning physical topology will be accessible from any point on the planet’s surface. The next-generation internet is already being built, as evident in the migration of digital media, software, and IT into the Cloud, the “Internet of Things” research project, and the proliferation of mobile internet devices:

• Apple, until now relying on local storage of digital media, recently purchased streaming music company Lala.
• Netflix’s recent agreement with Warner Bros. and other movie studios to delay new DVD and Blu-ray rentals includes improved access to catalog titles for streaming. Netflix expects streaming to become their dominant business in only a few years.
• Arriving in summer 2010, services like OnLive and OTOY will attempt to replace aging gaming consoles by providing streaming high definition games to a variety of devices, including mobile devices and televisions, using centralized data centers and supercomputers.
• Aaron Levie of Box.net recently wrote a post for TechCrunch about “The Coming Tornado” and the expected embrace of the Cloud by enterprise IT.

The next-generation internet is evident in the size and proliferation of data centers. According to Data Center Knowledge, leading data center companies are housing more than 50,000 servers, while companies like Google are rumored to have hundreds of thousands of servers and growing. Other companies like Apple are building huge new data centers. OTOY is taking a horizontal approach to spreading supercomputers into data centers with the goal of revamping the entire digital mediascape.

This proliferation of data centers belies the conceit that they are centralized; they are instead getting closer and closer to our homes and businesses. Data centers will soon become a part of city planning, where vast and local computing nodes are tied together into a platform the likes of which we have never known.

The next-generation internet is evident in how quickly the borders between academic, industry, and government computing resources are being crossed. Government agencies are turning to industry data centers rather than building their own, helping to make the industry more competitive and speeding up the rate of progress and acceptance. Scientific computing grids and storage arrays are being linked together to support the incredible demands of scientific projects like the Large Hadron Collider. When these data centers have storage and computation time to spare, companies begin offering the excess to third parties, creating new cloud offerings for “rent”.

Finally, the next-generation internet is evident in the communication speeds across the internet’s backbone, over new and improving cellular networks, and across fiber optics heading deeper into neighborhoods and sometimes directly into homes, schools, libraries, and businesses. New deep-sea fiber optics cables are being deployed to improve communications with under-served geographic locations like the Middle East and Africa. New spectrum is being released for use by wireless services, and the available spectrum is being used more efficiently all the time. Fourth generation cellular capable of broadband-like speeds to mobile and moving devices is rolling out around the world with widespread coverage expected from 2014 forward. Even in the United States, where connection speeds are significantly lower than many other developed countries, the largest cities are finally seeing 50 and 100 mbps offerings from the cable and other telecommunications companies. Even ignoring the proliferation of computational nodes like data centers closer to our homes and businesses, with increasing communications speeds the location of computation begins to matter less. The emerging computational substrate will make all processing seem local.

The second emerging technology will be the Metaverse. The Metaverse will arrive to take advantage of the power of the next-generation internet described above. The Metaverse will not be the evolution of the web. It will not be the 3-D Web, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, or any other name given to the evolution of the web. The Metaverse will be a new mass medium, at least as different from the web as the web is different from books, radio, and television. The distinction between the two is just this:

The web is a platform for the creation, storage, distribution, and presentation of digital documents and digital media. The Metaverse is a platform for the creation, storage, distribution, and presentation of data projections.

The web is itself a data projection, a particular approach to displaying data to humans (and, increasingly, machines.) There are other data projections and new ones will emerge when the Metaverse has been fully realized. These include mirror worlds, virtual worlds, augmented reality, lifelogs, spime shadows, avatars, “magic mirrors”, intelligent agents, disembodied voices, Metaverse-enabled robots, and Artificial General Intelligence. The Metaverse will become known for the algorithms, filters, intelligent agents, and other active agents that not only dive into data but construct useful projections and new knowledge from these data. If the web is a book, the Metaverse is a thriving and bustling city.

The difference between the web and the Metaverse can be illustrated by how status updates such as those on Twitter might be represented in both. On the web, status updates are presented as an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) enabled list of short posts on a webpage. AJAX makes static webpages more dynamic by adding a level of interactivity and background updating of information. The user scrolls through these Twitter posts – “tweets” – while AJAX occasionally updates the top of the list with newer tweets. Filtering of these tweets is limited to keywords and lists, each of these presented in yet other webpages. Twitter apps on mobile devices add additional capabilities such as scrolling via a touchscreen, but the digital documents that result remains basically the same: vertical and somewhat dynamic pages that users scroll through.

In the Metaverse, tweets could be projected in the same way, but they could also be projected in many alternative ways. For example, tweets about an earthquake might consolidate into an overlay of Google Earth that automatically plots the extent of the damage and reports of injury. This is not a digital document but a mirror world updated in near-real time with real-world data. Real world rescuers might be kept apprised of hazards by another team exploring at the same time a dynamic virtual representation of the affected region built up from tweets and other sources of information. This virtual reality walkthrough could be stored for later use to improve future disaster response efforts. In the Metaverse we will not be limited to reading digital documents or passively watching digital media. We will converse, interact, engage, walkthrough, and experience data as an endless variety of projections.

With the unparalleled computing substrate of the next-generation internet and a new mass medium called the Metaverse, it will appear at first that for consumer electronics the sky is the limit. Glasses, contact lenses, vast thin displays on walls and other form factors will become available to serve as high resolution displays that track our position in 360-degrees and overlay virtual components on physical space. By then there may be gear that provides haptic information, and perhaps even taste and smell. These consumer electronics will plaster our environment and our bodies, new skins that bring us more completely into the emerging Metaverse.

Visual and audio data will flow through consumer electronics into our eyes and ears, not just as digital media but as mixed and virtual reality realms that respond to our actions. 3-D displays and multimodal interfaces including haptic feedback will increase the level of immersion. Like the world depicted in Vernor Vinge’s novel Rainbows End, people will begin to interact physically with mixed and virtual realities. A walk down the street will be a walk through a fictional realm, sold by television and movie studios trying to adapt to the rapid change in entertainment. Games and movies will merge until we can explore Pandora from “Avatar” at our own whim and pace rather than be limited by the linear limitations of cinema.

However, when all processing seems to be local and data projections can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, then consumer electronics can at best only serve as windows and interaction devices to the Metaverse. At first this will not be much of an issue for most people, but the end of consumer electronics will arrive when their usefulness is leapfrogged.

The third emerging technology will be brain-machine interfaces (BMI) and other deeply integrated biotechnologies. These biotechnology “threads” will integrate our central nervous system with the Metaverse and next-generation internet. Data projections will flow along pathways made common by biotechnology and the capabilities of physical artifacts like consumer electronics will be integrated into our bodies.

BMI are already allowing people without the use of some or all of their limbs to interact with computers and a new generation of prosthetics. The first successful brain to brain via computer experiment has been reported [YouTube video] and non-invasive helmets are bringing mind control to toys and games. BMI will continue to improve so that data can bypass our sensory organs completely and be input directly into our nervous system. This is something consumer electronics just cannot do. They sit outside a barrier, providing data only through our outward facing biological “windows.” The first BMI and other deeply integrated biotechnologies widely adopted by consumers will provide complete immersion into the Metaverse. Integrated with a vast computational substrate, humans “threaded” with these biotechnologies will interact with the virtual and real in equally intimate ways.

The Great Vanishing

These three emerging technologies – the next-generation internet, the Metaverse, and deeply integrated biotechnologies – will eventually render consumer electronics obsolete. When this happens, the consumer electronics industry will abruptly collapse and by 2030 the “Great Vanishing” of consumer electronics and other physical human artifacts will have begun as their capabilities are threaded into our biology.

To an outside observer, it will appear as if consumer electronics existed one moment and then abruptly vanished. Without these visible electronic artifacts, it might seem that people were in the process of abandoning technology altogether. The capabilities that consumer electronics previously provided will become threaded into our biology. The last consumer electronics will wind up discarded and forgotten, mined for their component elements or marking geological time beneath our feet. By the end of this century, all physical evidence that consumer electronics ever existed could very well be erased from the face of the planet.

Take a look around you. See your computers, keyboards, and mice; headphones and microphones; televisions, speakers, and the devices that provide them content such as radios, receivers, physical media players, cable boxes, and game consoles; cellphones, smartphones, tablets, and other handheld mobile devices; cameras and camcorders; wireless routers and modems. Extend your view beyond consumer electronics to include the wires that connect everything; the displays on appliances; thermometers, clocks and watches; musical instruments; little indicator light bulbs, and perhaps even room lights themselves. Include all the physical media you see like books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, comics, paintings, paper, notebooks, phone books, cards, and even art like paintings and sculptures. Add in book shelves, computer desks, and entertainment centers. All of these will vanish. Between threaded senses and smart environments enabled by the next-generation internet, the Metaverse, and deeply integrated biotechnologies, humans will have no more need for these physical artifacts.

The impact of threading humans with biotechnologies that integrate our biology with our computing infrastructure on the rest of our physical infrastructure will be staggering. We should expect a massive razing and reconstruction. Will we even need to move around physically if our minds can simply explore our surroundings, real or virtual, through data projections in the Metaverse computed by a still improving computational substrate? Will our minds vanish into the Metaverse as a technological infrastructure emerges to take care of our animal bodies? Or will we become even more active, superhumans with incredible new capabilities for exploring the real and augmented world? Will the internet expand throughout the solar system so that we can take our Metaverse with us as we explore new destinations in person? What impact will the emergence of new data projections like intelligent agents and AGI have on our new virtually-enhanced reality? Will the technological infrastructure continue to shrink and take evidence of our very existence with it? Perhaps the solution to Fermi’s Paradox is the Great Vanishing, the point where all civilizations of sufficient technological capability suddenly vanish from view in the physical universe, existing at efficiencies hidden in the background noise of physics.

It is clear that there will be a Great Vanishing of consumer electronics and other physical artifacts as their capabilities are threaded into our biology. The event will become a milestone in the history of humanity, when our macroscopic technological clutter vanishes into our biology and reshapes our relationship with our planet and the material universe.

Most of the rest of this document will be devoted to providing a detailed description of and argument for this thesis and a roadmap to the future (whether inevitable or not). First, however, it is important to summarize where we are today, provide some useful definitions, and build the necessary foundation for understanding technology and technological progress. Although the web will play a surprisingly minor role in this story, we will start there. Apple announced in 2007 a new product called iPhone. When Apple introduced a third-party app development platform for iPhone in 2008, the web became tiny. This shrinking of the web set the stage for the emergence of the Metaverse and sounded the first warning that consumer electronics would in just a few decades vanish forever.