The Immersive Internet and Kevin Kelly’s “5,000 days of the Web”

by Sam Driver and Erica Driver. 

On July 29th, Technology, Entertainment, Design published a TEDTalk video titled “Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web.” Kevin Kelly has been the publisher of the Whole Earth Review, executive editor at WIRED, founder of nonprofits, and writer on biology and business and “cool tools.” The title of this TEDTalk caught our attention because we figured that in a discussion about the next decade and a half the topic of virtual worlds and other immersive environments would come up. But it didn’t, really, other than briefly in passing. So below we’ve added our Immersive Internet perspectives to Kelly’s thought-provoking talk.

Kelly’s vision is that in the next 5,000 days one single, global machine will evolve that has the Web as its operating system. He estimates that today’s Web has about the complexity of a single human brain and by the year 2040 it will exceed all of humanity in its processing power. The whole will be more reliable than its parts and will run uninterrupted. The machine will be intelligent and anticipate what we are doing. It will be personalized and know us. It will be ubiquitous. Every word processing document and spreadsheet ― every bit of data ― will be on the Web; no bits will live outside it.

The Web of the future (the machine) will be embodied

• Kevin Kelly: The digital will be embedded in the physical. Kelly foresees a future defined by convergence of the atomic and the digital ― as do we. The model he thinks is most likely to take root is embedding the digital nature of things into the material world, rather than the material world being projected into what he thinks of as a disembodied virtual world. His take is that all handheld devices, laptops and PCs, cameras, phones, microphones, and sensors will be connected to the machine. These devices will give physicality to ― will embody ― the machine. The machine will become an Internet of connected things and even humans will become extensions of the machine.
• ThinkBalm: The physical will also be embedded in the virtual – it will go both ways. As Kelly described in his talk, the digital will certainly be embedded in the physical through Internet-connected chips, RFID tags, GPS devices, etc. But the physical will also be embedded in the virtual. Physical objects connected to the machine (say, a building’s security system, a server in a data center, or a camera) will have virtual 3D replicas that are accessible – even operable – in a virtual world. Early examples include IBM’s 3D data centers and Implenia’s 3D remote facilities management environment. (For a camera example see the ThinkBalm article, “First life” versus “fake life” – when realism is important in the Immersive Internet.) This extends to people, as well. Via graphical avatars that contain our personal identification information, people will literally go inside the machine. In immersive virtual environments we will network and meet, teach and learn, rehearse business activities, visualize and collaborate on information and documents and products ― even operate real-world facilities, systems, and vehicles. All while feeling “as if we were really there.”

We will restructure the Web’s information architecture

• Kevin Kelly: The semantic Web will link data to data. The Internet linked computers together and the Web we know today links pagestogether. In the next stage, Kelly says, the machine will link data directly to other data. We will link from one idea (or word) on a page to another idea or word, rather than just link from one page to another. Every person will have a unique ID and every item (the example Kelly uses: a particular commercial airline flight ― in fact, a particular seat on that flight) will link to a specific representation of that idea. That physical thing (the seat on the flight) becomes part of the machine. In another example Kelly gives, the Web will be able to actually read itself and know that Pacifica, California is the name of a place. It will have its own longitude, latitude, and population. You’ll be able to carry around all your information, and your relationships with your friends, with you on the Web.
• ThinkBalm: We will understand the machine through our senses. One characteristic of human civilization is the ever-increasing complexity of our means of cataloguing. We gave things names to help us understand and communicate about them, invented numbers to count higher than our fingers, and created written language to store ideas and pass them on over time. As the Web progresses toward the machine, people will be connected to an unimaginable magnitude of information inputs from all those connected devices and databases. How will a single person be able to make sense of something that has more processing power than the sum of all humans put together? Won’t our cataloguing systems break down? The Immersive Internet gives us relief from all this, allowing us to step back from the complexity and regress back to our lower, older brains, which interact with our environment primarily through our senses. This is possible only as a result of an increase in complexity of the underlying system ― the semantic Web Kelly touched on in his talk. The Immersive Internet will give us the ability to visualize anything, including complex data; communicate with each other and even devices connected to the machine via voice and video; and increase our sense of immersion with haptic technology.  

Kelly reminds us that today we cannot imagine ourselves without alphabet and writing, that we are totally dependent on it. And that it will be the same with the machine ― we will not be able to imagine ourselves without the machine being there. He’s right on. We’re not sure exactly how we’re going to get from here to the machine we will be living with 5,000 days from now. We just have a vision for what “there” might look like. Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” from his book Profiles of the Future seems fitting right now. And who doesn’t need a little magic in their life?

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.