The Four Converging Technologies Giving Rise to the Spatial Web boundaries between the digital and physical are beginning to fade....... Web 3.0, or the Spatial Web ...... version 1.0, static documents and read-only interactions limited the internet to one-way exchanges. Web 2.0 provided quite an upgrade, introducing multimedia content, interactive web pages, and participatory social media. ..... mediated by two-dimensional screens. ............. the rise of Web 3.0, riding the convergence of high-bandwidth 5G connectivity, rapidly evolving AR eyewear, an emerging trillion-sensor economy, and powerful artificial intelligence.
....... freeing our eyes from the tyranny of the screen ....... convergence of AR, AI, sensors, and blockchain ...... graphics processing units (GPUs)—electric circuits that perform rapid calculations to render images ........ blockchain can now enable distributed GPU processing power, and blockchains specifically dedicated to AR holographic processing are on the rise. ........ cameras and sensors will aggregate real-time data from any environment to seamlessly integrate physical and virtual worlds ....... In healthcare, smart AR glasses will provide physicians with immediately accessible and maximally relevant information (parsed from the entirety of a patient’s medical records and current research) to aid in accurate diagnoses and treatments, freeing doctors to engage in the more human-centric tasks of establishing trust, educating patients and demonstrating empathy. ............. AR will converge with AI, sensors, and blockchain to multiply manufacturer productivity and employee experience. ....... digital guides superimposed on production tables will vastly improve employee accuracy and speed, while minimizing error rates. ........ Boeing brought Skylight’s smart AR glasses to the runway, now used in the manufacturing of hundreds of airplanes. Sure enough—the aerospace giant has now seen a 25 percent drop in production time and near-zero error rates. ........ Jaguar Land Rover, for instance, implemented Bosch’s Re’flekt One AR solution to gear technicians with “x-ray” vision: allowing them to visualize the insides of Range Rover Sport vehicles without removing any dashboards. ........ Perhaps one of the most profitable business opportunities, AR guidance through centralized AI systems will also serve to mitigate supply chain inefficiencies at extraordinary scale. Coordinating moving parts, eliminating the need for manned scanners at each checkpoint, and directing traffic within warehouses, joint AI-AR systems will vastly improve workflow while overseeing quality assurance. ............ “All these technologies that are coming together around artificial intelligence are going to augment the capabilities of the worker and that’s very powerful. I call it Augmented Intelligence. The idea is that you can take someone of a certain skill level and by augmenting them with artificial intelligence via augmented reality and the Internet of Things, you can elevate the skill level of that worker.”
.........Perhaps the most heartening outcome of the AI-AR convergence is that, rather than replacing humans in manufacturing, AR is an ideal interface for human collaboration with AI. And as AI merges with human capital, prepare to see exponential improvements in productivity, professional training, and product quality. .......... Stacked convergence of blockchain, sensors, AI and AR will disrupt almost every major industry.
......... Because AR requires much more compute power than typical 2D experiences, centralized GPUs and cloud computing systems are hard at work to provide the necessary infrastructure. Nonetheless, the workload is taxing and blockchain may prove the best solution. ........ “I predicted that 90% of computing would eventually reside in the web based cloud… Otoy has created a remarkable technology which moves that last 10%—high-end graphics processing—entirely to the cloud. This is a disruptive and important achievement. In my view, it marks the tipping point where the web replaces the PC as the dominant computing platform of the future.” ............. our future of brick-and-mortar retail will largely lean on blockchain to create the necessary digital links. ..... distributed computing power with blockchain networks like RNDR will democratize AR, boosting global consumer adoption at plummeting price points.
How the world will change as computers spread into everyday objects The “Internet of Things” will fundamentally change the relationship between consumers and producers ....... by 2035 the world will have a trillion connected computers, built into everything from food packaging to bridges and clothes. ...... One way to think of it is as the second phase of the internet. ...... a series of unresolved arguments about ownership, data, surveillance, competition and security will spill over from the virtual world into the real one. ...... Flows of data from iot gadgets are just as valuable as those gleaned from Facebook posts or a Google search history.
Drastic falls in cost are powering another computer revolution The first act, in the aftermath of the second world war, brought computing to governments and big corporations. The second brought it to ordinary people, through desktop pcs, laptops and, most recently, smartphones. The third will bring the benefits—and drawbacks—of computerisation to everything else, as it becomes embedded in all sorts of items that are not themselves computers, from factories and toothbrushes to pacemakers and beehives......Countless tiny chips will be woven into buildings, cities, clothes and human bodies, all linked by the internet......... Smart traffic systems will reduce waiting times at traffic lights and better distribute cars through a city. ........ Data from factory robots, for instance, will allow algorithms to predict when they will break down, and schedule maintenance to ensure that does not happen. Implanted sensors will spot early signs of illness in farm animals, and micromanage their feeding. Collectively, those benefits will add up to a more profound change: by gathering and processing vast quantities of data about itself, a computerised world will allow its inhabitants to quantify and analyse all manner of things that used to be intuitive and inexact.......... analogy with another world-changing innovation. Over the past century electricity has allowed consumers and businesses at least in the rich world, access to a fundamental, universally useful good—energy—when and where they needed it. The IOT aims to do for information what electricity did for energy.
...... total spending on it will reach $520bn by 2021........ the economic impact of the iot could be as much as $11.1trn every year by 2025......... Like most futures, a lot of the iot is already here—it is just not (yet) evenly distributed. ....... The price of computation today is roughly one hundred-millionth what it was in the 1970s ........ a megabyte of data storage in 1956 would have cost around $9,200 ($85,000 in today’s prices). It now costs just $0.00002....... between 1950 and 2010 the amount of number-crunching possible with a kilowatt-hour of energy grew roughly a hundred-billion-fold. ....... In 1860, sending a ten-word telegram from New York to New Orleans cost $2.70 (about $84 in today’s money). These days, speeds are measured in megabits per second. (A megabit is equal to roughly 2,700 ten-word telegrams). Connection speeds of tens of megabits per second can be had for a few tens of dollars a month. ...... 51.2% of the world’s population had internet access in 2018, up from 23.1% ten years ago.
........ The final ingredient is a way to gather all the data that a trillion-computer world will generate and to make sense of it all. Modern artificial-intelligence techniques excel at extracting useful patterns from large quantities of raw data. ........ the new sorts of chips that might make the iot work, which will cost less than a cent each and will be able to harvest the energy they need to run from sunlight or ambient heat........ A world of ubiquitous sensors is a world of ubiquitous surveillance. Consumer gadgets stream usage data back to their corporate makers. Smart buildings—from airports to office blocks—can already track the people who move through them in real time. Thirty years of hacks and cyber-attacks have proved that computers are insecure machines. As they spread, so will that insecurity. Miscreants will be able to exploit it remotely and at a huge scale.
Will Facebook’s Libra Change the Way the World Banks? The Templars were originally a Catholic military order that took up residence in Jerusalem, where they pledged to protect Christian pilgrims. They created the economic infrastructure for the Crusades, writing promissory notes in France or England that were redeemable in the Levant. A cipher based on the shape of the cross ostensibly guaranteed the notes’ security. In other words, the Templars created a variant on modern international transfer services, five hundred years before the first central bank......... Today, the demand mounts for a similar system, but on a global scale. Billions of people have no access to banks. Countless others endure high fees and slow transactions, especially when sending money across borders. What we consider a global financial system is, in reality, hardly global. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank of International Settlements, and the Financial Stability Board provide little more than a multilateral veneer over relationships that are primarily bilateral and dominated by commercial and central banks. Even within borders, moving money involves costly processes of settlement and exchange........... A blockchain-type network creates a public ledger, a universally trustworthy account of who owes what. Just as the Templar cipher verified an otherwise forgeable piece of paper, cryptography will ensure that Libra cannot be spent twice or otherwise duplicated. Such technologically guaranteed, artificial scarcity allows cryptocurrencies to operate as money........ Libra will be redeemable at a fixed price for certain established currencies (such as dollars, euros, and yen). Members of the association will deposit assets in the Libra Reserve as backing any time someone wants to buy more Libra. As a result, whereas Bitcoin fluctuates wildly in value, Libra should remain relatively stable. That stability makes Libra potentially useful not only as a store of value but as a medium of exchange. Users will, Facebook argues, be able to send money around the world as easily as they send messages and videos........ In addition to banking the unbanked, Libra could replace traditional intermediaries in cross-border transactions, such as remittances, which amount to more than $600 billion per year. Libra could also end up reducing the power of central banks in countries with weak currencies or strong capital controls, because it will allow people to move their money out of these countries more easily. ......... Facebook is already in the crosshairs of governments around the world, and the stakes are nothing less than the stability of the global economy....... Much of the current financial system is antiquated below the surface. ........ The country with the most to lose from Libra also has the most to gain from a revolution in the global financial system. That country is China. China bans Facebook and forbids trading in cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin) that could circumvent its capital controls. China is also home to the world’s biggest digital payments systems. WeChatPay and AliPay together process as many transactions in a day as the United States does in nine months. They operate only with China’s own currency, the renminbi, and they are centrally controlled, which makes payments easy for the government to access or limit. Facebook’s argument to regulators is that if an American company doesn’t move aggressively into blockchain-based payments, China will. The truth is that Facebook’s entry has accelerated China’s movement in this direction......... No country is more interested than China in displacing American hegemony over global financial institutions. Cryptocurrency serves that objective.
........ There is also the IMF, whose director, Christine Lagarde, has already hinted at a possible “IMFcoin” based on the IMF-sponsored assets known as Special Drawing Rights......... Money transfer helped the order become one of the wealthiest institutions in medieval Europe—a sprawling financial empire and powerful creditor to kings. After the crusaders were pushed out of the Levant, however, the Templars languished. And then the order collapsed abruptly at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The French King Philip IV, deeply in debt to the Templars, arrested and tortured many of its members on trumped-up charges of heresy. He eventually convinced the pope to ban the order, coincidentally canceling his debts.
The Templars’ power and wealth were their undoing. Facebook should take heed.
