Really

I finally re-read Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age, something I’d been meaning to do since the Spring Virtual Worlds 07 conference. At the “Virtual Worlds Roadmap – Where is it all going” panel an audience member asked the panelists to expound on the future of the Metaverse, taking it beyond the vision laid out by Stephenson in Snow Crash, towards the world depicted in Diamond Age. Unfortunately, I don’t think the panel had read the book, so the answers tended be along the lines of “more virtual worlds blended with augmented reality” (as I recall).

Diamond Age is a lot less focused on virtual worlds than Snow Crash was, however. The book describes a future where nano-tech has been completely mastered, enabling the cheap and quick (or slow, if the story demands it…) manufacturing of goods, food, and new materials. Information is distributed via “smart paper”, which is interactive, connected, and embedded with sufficient compute power to allow for at least a limited form of AI. Those of us interested in the future of documents can definitely take some inspiration from descriptions of smart-paper workflows like:

“Cover sheet,” Hackworth said to the piece of paper, and then it had pictures and writing on it, and the pictures moved–a schematic of a machine-phase system cycling.

[...]

“Letter fold,” he said to the piece of paper, and it creased itself neatly into thirds.

Virtual worlds do appear in the form of “ractives”; interactive movies which seem to be the main form of entertainment, but are not used to socialize or do business. Ractives are one aspect of what to me is the major technological theme of the book (apart from the nano-tech): using humans as compute engines. Humans are used either for creating believable interactions, not achievable by AI, or as compute-engines linked together into a massively parallel supercomputer (Stephenson seems to believe that the human brain is not a Turing machine).

Using humans as compute engines is pretty standard today (see Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or projects like Galaxy Zoo) , and in Second Life avatars are (mostly) backed by a human brain. Interestingly, there’s been a large number of employment services that have moved into SL recently: KellyServices, Manpower Inc. , Semper International, and Randstad (all claiming to be “first”). Will we see a future where “actors” will take on different roles depending on what currently is in demand (furry male bartender at night, female ninja for a machinima shoot during the day)?

On the nano-tech side of things, we’re seemingly much further away from a reality where we can construct products, buildings, and tools effortlessly (just a small matter of programming). Of course, in the virtual world we have that ability, so now is the time to experiment with and invent the new tools and devices that we want to be able to create as soon as the technology in the physical world catches up.