We Are Digitizing Reality, But to What End?

Relative realities

Recently I stumbled upon a simple but far reaching idea impacting our collective well-being. The idea is that while my dog and I can share the same space-time we are experiencing completely different realities.

On its face this seems obvious. We are different species with different cognitive and sensory abilities. For example, each of us sees the world in distinctly different colors. My dog’s sense of smell and hearing puts me to shame. Our sense of taste is different (he easily accepts mine, but I would not touch his).

The logical extension of this idea is that in our mind’s eye all of us harbors a distinct cognitive reality. More to the point, each of us inhabits a separate cognitive reality beyond the broad penumbra of gender, family, race, culture, nationalism, religion, and other identities that often separates us.

Our separate cognitive realities are, of course, part of what makes clear communication exchanges and interpersonal relationships so difficult and often lead to misunderstanding, tension, disagreement and conflict. Indeed, this reflects the challenge I am now confronting with you as I write — to get inside your head in a way you can see what is in mine; to find a shared cognitive reality.

Rarely, however, do we notice, acknowledge or discuss our separate cognitive realities. Yet, it hardly seems coincidental that our conversations are often peppered with phrases like “you know” or “I mean.” It is as if there is an unconscious awareness of our separate realities and need to dynamically find some shared cognitive reality.

Instead of surfacing our separate realities, what we generally tend to do is to focus on the external physical world and its objects to impute a shared reality. In part this is why “augmented reality” will be so attractive and handy. But, while the external world affords a base platform layer to build upon, we still exist in separate cognitive realities that need to be robustly fleshed out and articulated.

In the end, even what we take for granted as a shared reality is, at best, a shared interpersonal history, which itself is a unique reality; a temporal distortion as a fleeting glance or glimmer of another person’s cognitive reality. In this respect, I have often commented that my epitaph might read, “He spent his life trying to communicate.”

I stand outside myself, looking at myself looking at myself

Science long ago noted how different parallel realities can exist in the same space and time. For example, what see and is observable in visible light — our physical world — is only a small fraction of what can be observed in the rest of the entire electromagnetic spectrum and that most people never know exists.

Nor do most people know about the different realities in physics. How observing objects at the quantum level or macro space-time level of Einstein’s relativity are so radically different. Yet, physicists are obsessed with trying to understand and reconcile how and why such different realities coexist within the same space-time.

In this context, the history of humanity is unique in its quest for a single shared reality as evidenced by the invention of graphic art, language, writing, and other communication techniques. The assumption seems to be that absent such a shared reality there must be something awry.

The fact is that, beyond some basic pre- and post- natal healthcare and primary education, our individual activities and pursuits are continuously diverging to create idiosyncratic cognitive realities. We see this played out daily, albeit often focused on the “other.”

For example, while we are all virtually identical genetically, we incessantly amplify superficial racial, ethnic, religious, class and geographical differences as separate realities. We share a basic economic reality — money makes the world go around. Yet, there is a wide diversity of realities in how each individual understands economics, the role of money in society and civilization, and issues of class and values.

“Mass” media strives to channel a mainstream, shared reality. The masthead for The New York Times, for example, says it has “All the news that’s fit to print.” Walter Cronkite’s signature news signoff was, “And that’s the way it is.” Yet, in today’s world of online media there are endless separate realities and rarely anything approaching a shared reality.

Nonetheless, every politician — from dog catcher to the president — still claims they “represent” their constituency, as if their constituency had a single clear shared reality. Meanwhile, the legal system claims to define a baseline shared reality. Yet, the fact is that the police, judges and politicians regularly change the baseline definition of this legal reality without fully acknowledging it or the implications.

Trouble in paradise

An old friend and the author of the classic books, “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave,” Alvin Toffler used to go on endlessly about the demassification of society that was creating, in effect, more numerous, separate and idiosyncratic realities. Of course, when Future Shock was first released his ideas stood in stark contrast to other ideas about the claimed existence of a shared reality at that time — “Authoritarian Personality” and “One-dimensional Man.” Like Communism itself, both ideas claimed the course of history had already moved us toward a single shared reality. It has not.

The decline of mass media and rise of online media has shown Toffler to have been spot on. Ironically, however, in terms of cultures, societies and civilization as a whole, the amplified visibility of endless separate realities seems to be generating ever more adversarial realities and become a source of greater fragmentation, tension, friction, and conflict — my way or the highway; my country, love it or leave; xenophobia; my god is the only true god. In other words, a tragic geopolitical “Clash of Civilizations” scenario seems to be gaining momentum as a single shared reality.

Today, various separate but competing shared realities — nationalistic, economic, xenophobic, religious, racial and so on — easily escalate in unfortunate ways. All too often this is played out as dog-eat-dog, zero-sum conflicts intended to enforce a single shared reality on opponents. Ironically, all proponents of these single shared realities now employ online media to persuade others their reality (e.g., ISIS, Trump) is the only shared reality and thus a fait accompli.

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear

All of this is strangely amusing. Amusing because, as we are starting to see, the idea of a single, mass, shared reality in politics, religion, law, and security increasingly clash with the separate realities in the online world. In other words, all societies, and civilization generally, are in the process of being demassified.

The strange and curious fact is that not having any shared reality is itself odd. In other words, separate individual realities can — and suggest must — coexist with some shared reality.

Think of the situation this way. If we all had a single travel destination — shared reality — the diversity of roads taken to get there would be of no consequence.

For example, if a group of 100 people in Los Angeles all wanted to go to New York City via a different route, the number of possible different routes that could be taken would be endless. Yet, in the end, the different routes taken would be irrelevant because eventually they would all regroup in New York.

The point is that, as a civilization or as species, we now lack any shared destination — a shared reality — at any level of activity. In part, this is because, as a civilization, we are living through a unique historical time warp. A protracted nonlinear moment in our collective evolution where all scale issues — demographic, economic, technological, political and so on — simultaneously create intense points of friction and a disorienting centrifical force.

It is the scale of the friction and speed of the disorienting centrifical force being generated in this nonlinear moment that is inherently dangerous and threatens to tear us apart (e.g., extinction). Successfully traversing this nonlinear moment to come out on the other side will require some shared destination — a shared reality. This starts with a reframing of what the famed religious scholar, Joseph Campbell, said is the need for a new human-oriented “myth.”

Perhaps the best model for new human-oriented “myth” is that of a single coevolving “nested system” (think Russian dolls).

Or, better yet, think of the earth as humanity’s spaceship (i.e., system) traversing the cosmos.

Despite our day-to-day perception of speed — walking, running, cars, trains and planes — it is useful to recognize that near the equator the earth (and thus all humanity) is rotating on its axis in excess of 900 miles per hour (mph); which is faster than plane breaking the sound barrier. In turn, as part of the evolving solar “system,” the earth is traveling around the sun at more than 67,000 mph.

But our entire solar system is traveling around our evolving Milky Way galaxy (i.e., system) at about 500,000 mph. Meanwhile, our galaxy is itself moving through space at approximately a million mph! Yet, none of mortals feel any of the resulting friction or the centrifugal forces associated with the changes occurring.

Together, these three coevolving systems — earth, solar and galactic — represent a single nested system traversing space and time. But the key point is that together this nested system is following a single shared trajectory and destination.

Ultimately, this nested system’s shared trajectory and destination appears predictable and disastrous (i.e., collision with the Andromeda galaxy). What is of greater concern to us on our spaceship earth system is that the journey will traverse an incredibly hostile environment with plenty of known and unknown risks everywhere.

I’m a worried man with a worried mind

Similarly, the earth itself is a tightly interconnected coevolving nested system; consisting of the smallest biological species, on up the food chain to us and throughout the biosphere. What is unique about our earthbound nested system is the role technology plays in our shared reality.

In this respect it is generally well known that every technology offers a dual-edge — both benefits and risks. Moreover, it is increasingly recognized that various technologies can simultaneously cut across all of our earthbound nested systems. In this context, it is critical to realized that digital technology has become the reality of our shared trajectory and destination.

Said differently, we are on the cusp of digitizing reality. That, ultimately, within the laws of physics, virtually every aspect of our earthbound physical and biological world is capable of being redesigned, synthesized and remixed endlessly — at will — to suit any objective.

This is giving us an extraordinary ability to steer our spaceship and avoid many of risks associated with this nonlinear moment. However, the lethality of some of these digital chimeras and their potential for accidental or deliberate use is stunning. The paradox is that, at present, there is no known shared destination so all efforts aimed at steering our trajectory are arbitrary.

Consequently, as humanity goes forward on our civilizational journey, the known and unknown risks in digitizing reality are everywhere. But, in an increasingly tightly earthbound nested system — where the scale of demassified friction and centrifical forces are accelerating — the absence of any shared destination means the margin for error can diminish significantly as we go out in time.

Simply put, while statistically everything about the survival of our species on this blue dot has always been tenuous, absent a shared destination — some shared reality— the risk of not surviving our journey increases dramatically. Thus, if nothing else, the most basic shared reality we need is to minimize the threat of a bad destination — extinction. To do that, however, requires us to insure our digital trajectory avoids all known risks and is flexible and responsive enough to adapt to the unexpected ones.

Unfortunately, up to now humanity has failed to steer our trajectory to avoid known risks (e.g., ongoing arms-race) or become sufficiently flexible and responsive enough to adapt to the unexpected ones (e.g., arrested political evolution). In part, this is because, until recently we lacked any conscious awareness —a shared reality — that our technology can cut across all nested earthbound systems simultaneously. And, in part, because of a lack of conscious awareness that we are in the process of digitizing reality and thus have not contemplated nor developed a shared destination.

The times they are a changin’

Going forward, the success or failure of our journey will depend on whether we manifest a shared destination — a shared reality — by design, default or accident. To reduce the risk associated with the nonlinear moment we are now in requires us to design a shared destination and be as well prepared as possible for known and unknown risks.

Unfortunately, our default shared destination, which we generally ignore, is, as E.O. Wilson says, a world of primitive emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. Emotionally we are increasingly a demassified and fragmented species developing more, not less separate realities. Absent a shared destination, an increase in the number of separate realities means our collective survival is reduced to luck. This will not suffice.

It is also unfortunate that international and regional institutions and organizations are only allowed to work around the edges of civilization. Meanwhile, our medieval national political systems have all regressed to the mean, incapable of anything beyond self-interest careers, crass power politics and reactive actions.

In other words, our institutions have no shared destination, which means no one is steering our journey. So, what we have is an accident waiting to happen — on a civilizational scale. This will not suffice.

Imagine all the people sharing all the world

In terms of designing and manifesting a shared destination, Marc Andreessen’s “software eats the world” probably comes closest to describing our shared digitized trajectory. Still, absent an explicitly articulated shared destination, knowable risk become unknown, which means they are compounded to become genuinely unknowable risks (e.g., weaponizing artificial intelligence and the threshold for the emergence of artificial general intelligence).

Metaphorically, every moment on this digital trajectory — each pixilated slice of space-time — creates the equivalent of the “butterfly effect,” which ultimately influences a set of survival or extinction paths, options or doors available to us. In other words, depending on the pixels — digital technologies — selected, highlighted and amplified — consciously or unconsciously, for good or ill — every sequential slice of time moves us further along one particular trajectory toward some shared destination.

That we are increasingly demassified and have separate realities is as it should be. That we are in a nonlinear moment on a trajectory digitizing reality our journey is fraught with known and unknown risks. That we lack a shared destination for our nested earthbound system seems dangerously foolhardy. More importantly, depending on political elites seems outright stupid.

We need a shared destination as a new myth that reflects our shared digitized trajectory — and the sooner the better.

To develop any semblance of a shared destination we must first create a dynamic curated database of reliable knowledge. (Full disclosure, this is what my company provides.) As a platform layered onto that of our external physical reality this can advance augmented reality to become an augmented knowledge system. A collective touchstone, if you will.

Given the growth in demassification and separate realities the only plausible way to voluntarily aggregate self-interest behavior is to incorporate augmented knowledge systems into ambient virtual assistants. The key task then becomes creating another platform to layer on top of the augmented reality and knowledge system stack. This top platform layer must be a functioning para-political system capable of developing, designing and manifesting a shared destination.

Done well and soon, maybe we have a chance to break on through to the other side of this nonlinear moment and start a new chapter in human evolution. May the force be with us.

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You can learn more about my work at https://medium.com/a-passion-to-evolve or my website http://www.dochuston1.com/ You can also find me on Linked-in.

In any case, may you live long and prosper.