The Metaverse Roadmap Summit Interviews, 2006: Robert Scoble

Keep as few rules on it as possible. These rules impede commerce, impede exploration, impede human ideas. And the network really for me is a way to share ideas and argue ideas out and discuss ideas and image ideas. Second life now is I can build a world and my world might be different from the world you are comfortable living in. If you try to put rules on my world, that will impede my exploration of what the future might be. My hope that people can connect with each other in new ways and get over their differences, get over the, you know, get over some of the social differences that are out there. You know, my wife's Iranian and their society is, believes different things from my society here. And the only way we're going to ever bridge that, you know, in a peaceful way is to connect with each other and find some common ground where we can discuss things openly and in a transparent way. Otherwise we're, you know, we're just going to resort to what we're doing in Iraq, shooting each other, you know, and that's not the kind of future I want for my son. The usual fears were where my ideas are going to be used against me. You know, so you already online, you go through a self censoring process because you know it's going to end up on search engines like Google and MSN and Yahoo. So you don't share if you're doing anything weird or different from society. You're very careful about sharing that. Because it's so easy now to use technology to find the people who stand out, the people who say they're using drugs, hey, do a search. Who's saying they're using dope today? And find their IP address and find their address and let's go raid their house. Technology can be used to cut down the weird ones and pick on the minorities in a new way. And you're seeing governments do that, China does that. They pick on the weird ones and the guys who are out there advocating for change. And when powerful people don't like to see change in a society, they use tools to find them and stop that kind of advocacy. That's really tough because it's tough to know where a disruptive technology is going to come from. For instance, we all know that flexible screens are coming soon, two, five, ten years from now. But what is that going to mean when there's cheap flexible screens that don't take much power? You know, can you wrap one on a pole? Can you, can you wrap one on this microphone? Can you have the microphone behave differently because it has some way to communicate back with me what it thinks because it might have some intelligence now and say, hey, you're not close enough to the microphone. Get closer, you know, or hey, you're too close. It might have some sort of feedback to give me, you know, when it has that kind of communication device in my home 15 years from now, I expect to see monitors everywhere. In other words, information and ideas are going to be able to follow me around my house. I can stop at my stove and a recipe could appear and I could maybe talk to my house and say, hey, I don't want chicken pie tonight, I want a salad or I want to make some cookies. Tell me how to make some cookies. And a new recipe might appear right there. And that mixture of right now, Second Life is something you do on a little screen and you have to dive into that screen to get into a virtual world. Well, what if my house has almost monitors on every wall? You go to the bathroom and there's monitors and you go into the living room and there's monitors surrounding you. What happens then? Because now the virtual world and the real world could sort of combine, could collide. That'll be interesting to watch what happens. I know at Microsoft we have engineers who are playing with monitor technology that'll allow you to put monitors, low cost monitors, on all your walls, particularly in your office where you're going to sit all day long. And so you could build a holodeck. In fact, the guy who runs Microsoft Research is a big Star Trek fan. I wonder where he gets his ideas. Well, one way to predict the future is just to be a little bit ahead of everybody else and see what the researchers are doing. Most that I have on my computer, cell phone, wireless access. So I'm not even using WI fi anymore. I don't have to look for a Starbucks to find access or look for a WI fi hotspot. I just have it all the time. And that's transformative because I was in a bus going to Manhattan and I was iming and blogging from that bus and then getting cell phone calls in reaction to what I was blogging and iming. And by the time I got into Manhattan, I had a dinner set up with people who are already in Manhattan saying, hey, come on over, we'll have dinner together. And that's transformative. It's bizarre because if you don't use the Internet that way, if you're not a blogger and you're not tied into a network of people who are always online like that, you don't realize Just how transformative that is and what kind of experiences you can have that you couldn't have if you. If you're not connected in that way. But that's like a year away, right? What's going to be something, you know, by the time my son's out of high school or out of college, that's really going to be transformative? It's going to be interesting to see what happens with people who are putting things inside their skin. I met a guy at a conference last week who has RFID tags in his head, hands, and that seems very bizarre behavior today. I've only literally met one guy in the world who's done that, right? Maybe there's ten or a hundred guys in the world who've stuck something in their skin that's like a piece of technology that doesn't do anything, right. But now he can go up to his car and unlock his car with his hand. He doesn't have to look for his keys or look for his bag or anything like that. I'm sorry. He doesn't have to, you know. And now what else. What other kinds of experiences could he build in his house? So as he's walking through, you know, his kitchen, the kitchen could sense he's there, and he's different from his wife or from his kid, and his kid and his wife could have separate RFID tags and identities. And when they walk in, you know, when my son walks into the kitchen, he's going to want different things to eat than when I walk into the kitchen. And my doctors told me not to eat high cholesterol foods or sugar foods. So I'm already on a different diet than my son can eat. So what is that going to. Just having RFID chips like that on us or in us, what's that going to allow us to do? And then you go further, I read Ray Kurzweil's the Singularity is New, where he thinks that people are going to further augment their bodies with wearable devices and also implantable devices that actually do something for us. At PopTech, at the conference last year in Camden, Maine, there was a guy who had no arms. He was an electronic lineman, and he had accidentally grabbed onto an electric wire and electrocuted himself. And so he lost both of his arms. And the doctors have now built him prosthetics that hook into his nerves and his muscles so he can open a mechanical hand using just his nerves and his muscles here. And he can feel things, so he can grasp things using this mechanical arm, using his muscles here, and he can feel them using the nerves that are going back. So if you can do that already today with somebody who doesn't have arms, what can you do tomorrow to augment the physical behaviors of human beings? Can you make a brain surgeon even more steady by hooking into their arms and damping their shaking? You can see my hands shake. I can't be a brain surgeon. But maybe 50 or 100 years from now, they can figure out how to solve that problem for people like me. And so now we can have more brain surgeons. That's going to be a fascinating. And I can't predict where that's going, you know, because you can paint a general picture when you think about the future. You know, things like this are going to come, but you don't know the exact implementation, you don't know how it's going to be implemented, and you don't know if it's going to be low enough cost to have it go mass market. You know, another one's robotics, right? Look at the Sony Robotics that. They're the Sony and the Honda robotic guys that today cost 150 to $300,000 to build, but just do fantastic things. I mean, they can walk, they can run, they can hold things, they can walk upstairs, they can dance, they can move, they can behave humanoid. You know, where is that going? What will that mean to society? I don't know. You know, that's going to be a fascinating thing to watch in the next 15 years. Enabling. I mean, that's where I think. Yeah, that's the one word. You know, it enables me to have experiences that I couldn't otherwise have. I mean, let's go back in time 100 years. That was right when the car came out. Or we didn't have mass airplanes, we didn't have airplanes. To go to Hawaii, for instance, would take a week on a ship. Having technology enables us to do new things and have new experiences that we just can't have today. It.