By Alex Hertel
What will be the next evolution of recorded music? Most people are familiar with the history of the technology: we went from the record to the 8-track, to cassette tapes, to CDs, and finally to digital files such as MP3s. What will come next? Sure, bit rates and compression standards might get better, but it’s hard to imagine what the next medium to improve on digital *could* even be. It feels kind of like we might be at the end of this road.¹
What about computers? We’ve similarly progressed from room-sized institutional computing to personal desktop computing, to portable laptop computing, and most recently to mobile smartphone computing as well as wearable computing such as Magic Leap, Oculus, and Hololens. For this reason, some computer scientists and inventors (myself included) are asking these same, “What comes next?”, and “What comes last?” questions about computing technology. The answer might be what I call the “World Computer”, created by the convergence of several technologies: augmented/virtual reality, the Internet of things, machine learning, cloud, edge, wearables, and 5G. The combination is far more than the sum of its parts.
The World Computer is the most expensive, complex, and powerful piece of technology ever built. Controlling the World Computer is the biggest opportunity in high tech because it will push the Internet out into the physical world to make it digitally interactive. It’ll enable a new type of web which Rony Abovitz at Magic Leap has called the “Magicverse”, whereas I like to call it the “Real World Web”. Whatever its name, it’ll enable a new multi-trillion dollar market.
None of the big tech giants seem to recognize the major opportunity here, or if they do, they’re not acting like it. They all seem to think that computers are in the data centers. No! The computers aren’t in the data centers. The data centers are in the larger World Computer. They’re all acting like your phone is a computer. It isn’t. Your phone and its sensors are a mouse cursor for the physical world. Everyone is acting as if AR and IoT are standalone technologies. They aren’t. Those are just the World Computer’s pixels and I/O devices. Imagine a world where all devices are just connected peripheral parts of a larger machine rather than just connected to the same network — that’s what we’re talking about here. To crib a line from Sun Microsystems: “The network is the computer.”
Everyone seems to be looking at the problem from the wrong altitude, and nobody seems to be interested in seizing the larger opportunity. This World Computer is the most powerful piece of technology ever built, and it is an example of the Von Neumann Architecture but it doesn’t yet have an operating system and it doesn’t have dev tools tailor-made for it. Note to investors: pay attention to whoever builds these O/S and dev tools, because they will control this behemoth, and this is still a situation where one player could grab all of the marbles on the table and effectively own this multi-trillion dollar machine and market.
This is even more interesting given that the World Computer might end up being the final stage of computing evolution, kind of like the .mp3 is for recorded music. Sure, we’ll always continue to improve parts of the larger system with I/O devices such as cybernetic implants and brain/computer interfaces, or better quantum computing data centers, but the World Computer paradigm itself may be the ultimate expression of ubiquitous, wearable, invisible computing.¹
The co-founder and CEO of Xperiel, Alex Hertel is an inventor who completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Toronto and is an expert on the use of immersive technologies to make the physical world digitally interactive. He previously co-founded Walleto which was acquired by Google and became Google Wallet.
¹However, to quote John Von Neumann, “…although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.”
