The Mirrorworld

There's a lengthy read available over at WIRED entitled "AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform - Call It Mirrorworld" and I can't suggest reading it enough. The title is a bit more hand-holding than it needs to be but, basically, it discusses the fact that everything around us is being documented and digitized into a digital copy; a mirror copy of reality into the virtual.

The piece does a great job of selling that idea and the benefits that can come from it. Cameras, robots and AI documenting our environment; sharing that information with one another and learning from one another - i.e. automated cars that inform one another of road conditions. It also warns of the obvious privacy concerns of having cameras on everything around you, capturing everything from every conceivable angle to fully understand it.

It also makes a great point about how Augmented Reality marks the end of thinking of "The Internet" or "Cyberspace" as some other realm. We've always cast digital technology as somewhere else (see Lawnmower Man, The Matrix or The Firm for prime examples) but that's no longer true. Our world and the Mirrorworld are the same, one augmenting and informing the other.

It's a lofty piece and certainly worth reading with a critic's eye. This little quip really stood out to me:

The great paradox is that the only way to understand how AR works is to build AR and test ourselves in it. It’s weirdly recursive: The technology itself is the microscope needed to inspect the effects of the technology.

Obviously, I don't disagree but the idea that you can't know the benefits or dangers of something until you've already made it, is worrisome!

It reads like a sci-fi manifesto at times; a (mostly) positive approach that I greatly enjoyed.