[The World on the Page] A World of Living Together Beyond Smart Glasses

Kevin Kelly's Vision of the World After 5,000 Days
AI-Driven AR and VR Will Shape the Future
Smart Glasses as the Key Catalyst

"What does technology want?"

American author Kevin Kelly says that to foresee the future, one must always live asking this question. By listening to the voice of science and riding the flow of technology while participating in turning expectations into reality, the chances of success increase. This is because science and technology today are the greatest driving forces changing the world.

Kelly states that while we can contemplate how to use science and technology better for all humanity, we cannot block the potential for their development itself. When electricity is invented, soon after radio waves emerge, eventually leading to Wi-Fi. Therefore, whether we like it or not, we must listen to the voice of technology to enhance the resolution of the future.

In "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future," Kelly says that over the next 50 years, artificial intelligence (AI) technology will bring revolutionary changes to human society comparable to automation and the Industrial Revolution. Soon, we will enter a world where we are born, grow, learn, and work surrounded by AI. Just as we cannot imagine a world without water or electricity, AI will become an essential infrastructure in daily life like the internet or social networking services (SNS).

When the internet was commercialized in 1995, a web platform was built that digitized global information for searching and answering. About 5,000 days (approximately 13 years) later, SNS platforms appeared. SNS, accelerated by the invention of mobile phones, transformed the extremely complex and capricious human relationships (social graph) into massive amounts of information, accelerating the development of AI needed to understand and utilize it. The web and SNS have each brought significant changes to all areas of human life, including politics, economy, society, and culture.

According to Kelly, at the center of the changes in the next 5,000 days is the Mirror World, a combination of AI and smart glasses. Coined by Yale professor David Gelernter, this term refers to a world where the real and virtual worlds overlap. The Mirror World uses the Internet of Things and other technologies to digitize the physical space where humans live and, further, the human senses of seeing, hearing, and feeling the world. Smart glasses are a collective term for various devices that help humans easily access that information.

The Mirror World has two modes of expression. One is the digital virtual reality commonly called the metaverse, and the other is augmented reality, where reality and information are combined in real time. Inside smart glasses, countless people in different locations build a global-scale virtual world together in real time as if playing a game, and in the real world viewed through smart glasses, all kinds of digital information are overlaid on streets or objects with simple gestures like eye or hand movements. Both are essentially the same as they are born from the combination of AI (digital) and reality, differing only in their modes of expression.

For example, a world will come where one million people work together using smart glasses to develop the next-generation car. Just as open source allows unspecified many to collaborate on better software, people interested gather around a vividly implemented 3D car in the virtual world, converse with the help of AI real-time translation technology, create a new car, and record each contribution using blockchain technology to utilize in the reward process.

In the future, expertise and experience, imagination and insight, and skills in dialogue and collaboration to participate in such discussions will become very important. Especially, acquiring optimized learning methods to adapt to rapidly changing realities, deeply exploring favorite fields while maintaining broad interests and cultural knowledge as a generalist is recommended. Crossing multiple fields to understand others, learning essential knowledge together, and collaborating on projects will become increasingly common.

Wearing smart glasses while moving around the real world allows access to the history and records of places or objects in real time, as seen in sci-fi movies. For example, when walking down a street and looking at a restaurant, one can instantly know when it was established, its main menu, and consumer reviews. While browsing a supermarket or market and observing cooking ingredients, information about who produced them and how to cook them comes to mind. Creatively utilizing accumulated spatial information becomes the shortcut to success, and innovating to make it easily accessible to residents becomes the future of the city.

Translation (interpretation) AI provided through smart glasses breaks down spatial barriers. This activates exchanges and employment across regions, and the nomadic lifestyle of "living a year" while traveling to various countries rapidly increases. The spirit of challenge pursuing life beyond regions becomes the secret to a better life, and competition among cities to attract talent intensifies.

Cities transform into massive clusters that easily accumulate and utilize high-quality information. Amsterdam becomes a megacity attracting design talent, Silicon Valley software, Shenzhen home appliances, and Seoul semiconductor-related industries, drawing talent and capital. Cities or countries lacking appropriate welfare guaranteeing humane lives for immigrants, open cultures fostering communication and cooperation, and affordable, high-quality public infrastructure will decline in the long term due to talent shortages.

Currently, digital giants like IBM, Microsoft (MS), Google, and Facebook pour money into AI and virtual reality technologies to secure the future that the Mirror World will achieve. However, IBM did not become MS, MS did not become Google, and Google did not become Facebook. Being protected by success tends to distance one from reality. Therefore, the author predicts that faster, smarter, and more daring companies will become winners in the journey to the Mirror World. Technology creates new opportunities and always changes the success model. Someone rides that wave and lives the future first.

Concerns about AI, from mass unemployment to human extinction scenarios, are growing. At such times, we must cultivate sensitivity to the flow of science and technology, increase common sense, and always pay attention to how to use them. While we cannot stop technological progress, it is entirely possible to guide it to become good technology serving the entire community.

Jang Eun-su, Publishing Culture Critic

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.