Towels are a good idea.

So I've finally decided to join interweb two dot oh. I've always held the belief that blogs are pointless and stupid, but lately my point of view has changed, and I'll explain why. I've had a bit of a cognitive surplus lately (kudos to Clay Shirky for that phrase, check it out at here), and I've been thinking a lot about communication.

Your cellphone and laptop is a pretty powerful communications tag-team. These two pieces of electronics allows you access to a wealth of communications and information options that even the CIA couldn't dream about ten years ago. We can "google" anyone in the world and find out information on them, we can contact people we know we are halfway around the world. For the first time in human history, our ability to communicate is not limited by the medium. The medium of communication, of information dissemination between one person or a group of people, is what has shaped our world.

Think of our social structures: towns, states, provinces, countries. These were founded in an era when the speed of the message was limited by how fast a horse could run, or a ship could sail. This one limitation determined the size of countries. It's no surprise then that many European countries are the same magnitude of size. We drew borders at the edges of our communication envelopes, and these are the same borders which stand today. America was founded in a time when electronic communication was just around corner, when mail could be delivered at the speed of train. Thus, America stretches the length of the North American continent. China was not unified until the 20th century when modern communication made unification possible.

So what am I getting at?

We're on the event horizon of something extraordinary. I predict that in the next century, the old models of government, economics, and society will either evolve so as to be unrecognizable, or disappear entirely. I'm not saying that society will devolve into anarchy, far from it. What we view as the "virtual" world, the one in which World of Warcraft, Second Life, Xbox Live, online colleges, Facebook, eBay, Craigslist, blogs, and Myspace all exist, will become much more prolific, to the point that we will no longer consider it to be virtual. A person's electronic existence will be just as important as their physical existence. Anyone who's ever been locked out of their Facebook or Myspace account before has firsthand experience that this is already happening.

The concept of "nations" will change in this new world. We will still draw boundaries in the electronic world. Humans love boundaries, they serve to separate and insulate. However, these new boundaries will be drawn based on ideas rather than geographical locations. This difference will allow electronic nations to be far more efficient and effective than their physical counterparts. They will be more stable as the citizens of electronic countries will share common principles and ideas. They will be more specialized and more hierarchically flat. They will practice truer democracy than anything we as a society have ever experienced. They will be smaller than current nations, and be highly willing to trade with other nations who are specialized in other fields. People will be able to belong to as few or as many electronic nations as they want.

Eventually, technology will reach the point such that we will be able to be plugged into the social network all the time. This is when the idea of the virtual world truly drops away, every human being then lives in a duality of existence. The important question I've been asked is "How will people keep their two lives separate?" My answer to that is simple: They won't. Just like Schroedinger's Cat in a box argument, we cannot simultaneously exist in two places at once. Instead, think of navigating the electronic world as adding extra dimensions to our physical existence. I've long postulated that higher level thought occurs in dimensions far greater than the 4 dimensional physical world we perceive (i.e. our brains are fully capable of processing data in high dimensional spaces, called "manifolds", despite the limited 4-dimensional data that our senses feed it; in fact I think our brains map our sensory inputs into a much higher dimensional space to compute before mapping it back down to 4 dimensions for output, we just don't realize it). If you buy this argument, then living in a higher dimensional world, navigating a world defined simultaneously by 3-d physical topography, 1-d constant temporal displacement, and n-d thought topography presents little problem to our cognitive abilities, with the only danger being some initial disorientation.

Eventually (and all you AI and ML people, you knew this part was coming), this leads to what's known in the cottage AI industry as a "singularity", or collective awareness and consciousness. Actually, each electronic nation will be its own singularity. I'm not saying this is good or evil, but I am convinced it's going to happen.


So here we find ourselves, at the edge of a great social event. This is a paradigm shift on the order of the invention of fire, the construction of the first cities, and the industrial revolution. It may even be greater than all of those events, because we are now able to expand and redefine the "human experience."

So I've joined the web 2.0 revolution, but with the realization that even the internet as we know it is a bit of an experiment. And experiments sometimes fail. Actually, experiments usually fail. Nonetheless, critical mass has already been reached. The human race is too connected now to every go back to the way it was. We've already crossed the event horizon, past the point of no return.

I hope you brought a towel.