I haven’t posted in a while because I am currently heads down in a book I must finish before next fall and also taking a course on rationality. But the themes of this blog must continue and I have a thought I don’t want to lose. So forgive me for dropping a half-baked point.
Halloween in pagan traditions is a point of close contact between the world of the living and the world of the dead. There are countless traditions that accept an immaterial world that coexists with our own yet is hard to access. We may see it in dreams or see the effects of actions in that realm but it remains unknowable. This obviously is in contradiction with logical positivism. But once you begin to see what is happening with our information society, I hope I might be able to convince you this is a profitably lens with which to view what is happening.
in Ireland there is a facility called the Digital Manufacturing Ireland. Strange name but interesting enterprise. What caught my eye when I scanned it is the enthusiasm they have for digital twins. The concept has continued to mature and now it appears it is a strategic advantage for this facility. It deserves more research than I can devote at the moment. What is a digital twin but an immaterial shadow of a real world object?
There is an opportunity in the future of augmented reality to exploit this. Instruction manuals, user guides, most any kind of meta object that exists to help you use some real world object is an information object attached to a digital twin. When we scan a QR code to see a menu or walk through an architectural rendering, we are piercing that veil between our physical world and that immaterial cyber realm. I view any “metaverse” as just a concept that exploits that and normalizes the relationship between the two realms. When we strap on an augmented reality headset we are becoming Ghost Hunters. Some spirits and ghosts can help us. But there may be dangerous spirits out there.
The point I keep driving toward is what this digital future means as it begins to swallow the physical world and us with it. It took me a while to connect the dots but we are literally creating a new world from scratch. Perhaps creating is the wrong word since there is no creator. It is emerging un-designed from the actions of many players with well understood objectives behaving in self-interested ways but with consequences that no one can predict. I am trying to predict what I can.
The immediate conclusion i come to is that someone will OWN this world. Right now it is 80% amusement park, 19% work tool and 1% art project. And right now it is far too big and diverse to be owned. Yet i predict that like the bits of the T-1000 in Terminator movies these currently isolated bits of this thing will converge and any attempt to prevent complete convergence is likely to fail. Who will own the constructed thing? In an advanced capitalist world economy, what does this mean? If we cannot live in the economy is this going to replace (add to) the things we are already dis-intermediated from like food, water, and shelter? What assurance do we have that the owners will be beneficent if we have no choice but to join in?
So that’s the extent of my thought for the day. Sorry to leave it hanging like that. I will return to push this idea to see where it goes.
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