if I could turn back time
the observers are coming
I enjoy thought experiments where you take some random idea and extrapolate it to absurd extents, following logic at all times. I call these journeys endpoint experiments.
A good endpoint experiment changes the way you look at the world.
An example. A recent technological advance, rejoicing in the name Gaussian Splats, captures a realistic three-dimensional “photograph” of a scene, including all reflections, refractions, lighting, and materiality. The video below is an interactive navigation, post-capture, of such a "3D photograph”, the viewer is able to move freely about the scene.
View this ‘photograph’ through a VR headset and you are, quite literally, transported back into the scene.
Right now, generating a single still capture like this takes a few seconds. But as the technology improves, we can imagine a device that is able to capture and store a stream of many such ‘photographs’ per second - in effect, a three-dimensional movie of reality. Let’s call this 3D movie a trace.
And let’s call this type of device an Observer.
telepresence
The first “killer app” that Observers enable is telepresence: the ability to transport your awareness to somewhere you’re … not. Just view an Observer’s trace, live, through your VR headset.
You could live vicariously through others - lie on tropical beaches, jump out of planes, walk down red carpets, scale cliffs, drift across the treetops of the rainforest. Meet virtually, in real spaces. Or just share space with friends and family that you can’t be with.
You could mount one on a remote-controlled drone, take it with you when you go camping, and fly free through nature like a bird. The possibilities are endless.
Call it a hunch - something tells me that telepresence is something that people are going to want to do, a lot.
time travel
Observers can also enable a restricted form of time travel. Record the trace from an Observer and you can revisit that time and place whenever you like.
Seed public spaces with networks of Observers, and anyone can travel back to anywhere in time and space (they can’t change things, of course, just observe).
Record your own personal traces to a private database, and you can capture your personal, private history, to hand down to your children.
Another hunch: something tells me that time travel, however limited, and whether public or private, is something that people are going to want to do, a lot.
proliferation
If people decide they like telepresence and time travel, the number of Observers is going to increase. They’re just going to get smaller, cheaper, more numerous and more mobile, until the world is populated by trillions upon trillions of dust-mote-sized Observers, drifting on currents of air.
I said this we were going to take this idea to an absurd extent. But we’re on the way there.
This is a research prototype of a fingertip-sized drone:
everybody get up and do your thing
I went to a Madonna concert last night (I’m in Vegas, she’s in Vegas, we hadn’t checked in for a while, so I wandered down) and was struck by the thought that actually, maybe Observers have been here for a while already: we just didn’t recognise them for what they were.
Everyone’s carrying one around in their pockets, and busily filming everything that happens around them.
So, what would happen if the audience got together and pooled all their videos and stills, so we could turn them into one gigantic trace of the whole event? A sort of collective memory that we could revisit and re-experience, whenever we wanted?
Actually, there’s precedence for this idea: none other than august personages the Beastie Boys, with this amazing collage video of a live show compiled from 50 fans’ cameras.
I love this video because it does such a great job of conveying the actual feeling of what it’s like to be at a great concert: it’s not the stage, ya dummies, it’s the audience.
This does, of course, raise the interesting possibility that a future AI or inspired hack could gain unauthorised access to every video and photograph ever taken on a phone, all handily time- and GPS-stamped, and build a decent-enough-for-disco phantom copy of the past. The data’s out there.
it’s all about control
So if we accept the proposition that Observers are already here and are only going to proliferate, there’s some really important questions to sort out about privacy, rights, ownership and control. Chiefly, whether we control the traces our observers produce; or whether we cede that control to someone else.
You might be fine with attending a concert and being filmed - but would you be that blasé if you knew you’d become part of a detailed 3D record of the event, and future viewers could “walk” right up to you (or rather, your digital echo) and stare at you from a couple of inches away?
Who owns the rights to the footage you shoot on your phone?
Should you get paid for contributing your footage to the public record?
Should you be able to control who gets to see your face in the record?
Is there a way to anonymise or tweak your face so you can’t be recognised, if you should want that?
If so, how do you enforce that?
How do you prevent your conversations from being recorded and transcribed by some future AI?
One can of course create theoretical frameworks until the cows come home, but theory, as Yogi Berra famously pointed out, is different from practice. Nor, I propose, is it acceptable for us to shrug our shoulders and leave it all to the big advertising-funded tech companies - I think we all know, by now, where that will lead.
We have to actually build this stuff and try it out for ourselves.