The Future is Augmented Reality

The future really is human, computer, and Internet integration. Somehow, I’ve failed to truly realize this sooner, but this awareness is being increasingly hammered into my consciousness. It’s also easy to understand why the awareness of what is increasingly apparent is so relatively low, and I’ve been just as at fault as many. I say this even as someone who was amongst the first generation of Internet users. I picked my first screen name, nontoxic, off of a crayon box. I mean, the Internet began when I was a kid.
To previous generations, the Internet was interpreted as a digital reference medium and a hub for chaos. Even in junior high, my school rarely allowed students to even use the Internet as a resource for writing papers: too many crazies distributing asinine and misleading information. To many, the Internet was pure noise: mere static. My friends and I hacked into computers for fun and printed silly things off random people’s printers. It was like a chaotic playground where nobody knew what was going on, and it was neither real nor tangible. It followed that the Internet was perceived as an alternate reality outside of the real world. Real work, jobs, and education are in the ‘real world’, and excessive Internet use was considered unhealthy.
But what is the Internet, really? Fundamentally, it’s just a network medium to transfer “1″’s and “0″’s, and not even literal 1’s and 0’s. These are simply interpretations of electric switches and pulses. When this chaos is organized and able to be stored, however, it means the potential culmination of all written knowledge and information accessible to anyone who can, or has a device to, make sense of the information. Epic, really.
So what if you had a device in your brain that told you a substantial amount of information about any phenomena which you stumbled upon? If you ended up stranded on an Atlantic island all alone, with the device you have sudden information about proximate transportation, edible flora and fauna, weather patterns, coordinates, etc. If that device in your brain can communicate to others with the device in their brain, you’re rescued. Even without modern technology, a lone sailboat could get to you. And guess what.. it already exists. The Internet is much more than a reference device, it’s the greatest communication device ever realized.
Okay, duh, so you were probably aware of most of this and thought, “Wow, crap, that’s really cool,” years ago, but like me, didn’t grasp the repercussions. Economically, it means a truly global economy, a recension of regulation, and a boom of new trade. Historically, and presently, society’s preferred careers are the product of intellectual capital. Medicine, law, engineering, history, philosophy, government all required substantial study, and knowledge. With the Internet, anyone in the world has access to better information than the doctors of the past millennia, and this isn’t from increased knowledge alone. Many of their studies are literally obsoleted to digital resources, and they have, at best, personal connections and anecdotes which resources don’t. A student doesn’t have to go to school anymore to gain knowledge, as it’s already at everyone’s fingertips.
Socially, academically, and business-wise, it also means no need to gather for many exchanges, and much quicker exchanges as well. It acts a catalyst in anything run through it. Evolutionarily, it finally means humans are smarter than whales in every way. Of course, despite having smaller mental capacity, humans had textbooks, but whales still had superior navigation abilities before our GPS’s.
This new exponential growth of knowledge means that the Internet itself is an unconscious body of conscious awareness. You, yes you, have now become augmented, as you’ve been connected to a giant brain outside of your own. This growing body acquires the awareness of its inputs, but cannot fully output, as we as outputs have less capacity. We can, and now do, rely on a giant, easily-accessible brain to think for us quite frequently. Hopefully, this beast of unconscious brain will help us make good political decisions as well as push us forward technologically.
The human-Internet integration has really just begun, and silly enough of us, we mostly don’t grasp what’s to come. The physical world is going to be truly augmented through the digital one. Get ready, because anywhere you will happen to be will have an information database associated with it. Your digital tools will be able to interact with those resources in a highly portable manner. If you want to start capitalizing on this, you can now, as it’s inevitably a massive future market.

This is great video of Wired Editor Kevin Kelly’s TED speech on the future of the digital integration in our reality. Good stuff:

These are a few enlightening thoughts from game developer Will Wright: