Several other companies are following this path of launching digital currencies based on gold. Most formidable seems to be G-Coin from Emergent Technologies, run by the serial entrepreneur Brent de Jong, who sees G-Coin as offering a path to a new gold standard. With 250 engineers and offices in seventy countries around the world, Emergent offers G-Coin as a Western version of the Chinese DigixDAO. The bullion assets behind G-Coin are tracked from the mine to the transaction on a permissioned blockchain that provides a possible model for supply chains in many industries. De Jong is a seasoned entrepreneur and financier devoted to using the blockchain to make gold the “earth’s most liquid currency” based on “vaulted, conflict free, responsibly mined gold.”
Bell’s Law dooms the existing recentralization of computing and ensures the emergence of a new architecture. Lo and behold, here it is. It is based on the same cryptography that Claude Shannon and Alan Turing developed during World War II. It now provides a new computer architecture founded on blockchains, mathematical hashes, and the array of associated inventions in the Great Unbundling.
The new architecture provides alternatives to the five trillion a day of gambled money. It provides alternatives to today’s insecure Internet, this porous Web where Equifax or Yahoo can lose hundreds of millions of items of personal data in a nonce, and the five Internet leviathans all just demand more passwords and user names.
All these disorders of our money and our information technology may find remedies in the new cryptocurrency movement that began in 2009 with Satoshi and bitcoin and will end with the new technologies of the cryptocosm. Even though bitcoin may not, after all, represent the potential for a new gold standard, its underlying technology will unbundle the roles of money. This can finally clarify and enable the necessary distinction between the medium of exchange and the measuring stick.
Disaggregated will be all the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft conglomerates)—the clouds of concentrated computing and commerce. A new hardware paradigm is moving beyond digital and silicon to analog and carbon nanotubes and hybrid chips with sensors and 5G antennas galore. Even money itself is being disaggregated and reinvented. The clouds are dispersing into the skies—sky computing rendered on your laptop and smartphone, spread across blockchains, transparent and transformative.
The final test is whether the new regime serves the human mind and consciousness. The measure of all artificial intelligence is the human mind. It is low-power, distributed globally, low-latency in proximity to its environment, inexorably bounded in time and space, and creative in the image of its creator.
EPILOGUE
The New System of the World
Peyton Manning, ever the champion quarterback, swiftly surveys the field in front of him. From his podium on the second floor of the Capital Hotel in Little Rock, he spies a familiar figure in the corner. It is the six-foot-four-inch form of Hunter Hillenmeyer. For seven years a defensive back with the Chicago Bears, he is now a strategist and spokesman for the Nashville company Strivr, perhaps the world’s leader in finding valuable new markets for virtual reality.
Both of these charismatic former NFL players are in Little Rock for the Summit Conference of Stephens, Inc., the banking and investment paladin, whose chairman, Warren Stephens, is a pal of Manning’s and an investor in Hillenmeyer.
Assured that the sandy-haired, unhelmeted Hillenmeyer is unlikely to charge the stage and bring him down, Manning proceeds with his sage observations on football and business life. Advocating “learning by doing, and always getting better,” Manning steers his theme right into the path of Hillenmeyer.
At this conference, where Strivr is showing off its ingenious immersive training technology, Hillenmeyer is a bigger star than Manning. He points out that Moore’s Law has brought the price of virtual reality gear down to one-tenth or less of what it was in the heydays of Doug Trumbull and Jaron Lanier. Today, Facebook’s Oculus Rift headsets cost less than a thousand dollars—still prohibitively expensive for the consumer market but cheap compared with previous VR systems.
“Learning by doing” is by far the most effective form of training, and Strivr has focused on the details of delivering a full experience of virtual learning. The key is breaking through the user’s frontal cortex. That’s the “thinking,” deciding, problem-solving part of the brain, which knows the virtual experience is unreal. Bypassing these lobes of intelligence, VR operates on the so-called reptilian brain behind, where a suspension of disbelief allows the memory to be imprinted with a “real” experience. By fostering this cerebral phase change, virtual reality can accelerate the learning process for most jobs.
I am summoned from the audience to undergo an onstage demonstration of what Hillenmeyer is talking about. I don the Oculus headset, and after some juggling of my glasses—whoops!—I fumble away my frontal cortex. It must be around here somewhere, but plunged into the middle of a Dallas Cowboys’ huddle as quarterback, I am engulfed. Virtually in Dak Prescott’s shoes, I’m preparing to throw a pass to wide receiver Cole Beasley. Fully immersed in the play, I all but fall off the stage avoiding the rush as I crisply complete the pass.
After a stint at Stanford’s VR lab assisting the university’s football team, Hillenmeyer formulated his RIDE principle: The opportunities for virtual reality are found in events that are too rare, impossible, dangerous, or expensive for ordinary people to experience. My pass play for the Cowboys, in which VR preserves me from any chance of being stomped by a three-hundred-pound defensive end, reflects all four conditions.
In the 1970s, virtual reality broke through by training pilots on flight simulators and preparing oil rig engineers in special-purpose training cells. Then it triumphed as gear to test and design products. As Lanier points out in Dawn of the New Everything, “Every vehicle you’ve occupied in the last two decades, whether it rolls, floats, or flies, was prototyped with VR.”1
Hillenmeyer’s current example of a rare VR event is the post-Thanksgiving “Black Friday” rush at Walmart, whose Walmart Academy is a major Strivr customer. Because of the rate of turnover in Walmart’s workforce, some 40 percent of managers have never experienced this once-a-year tornado. Strivr plunges trainees into the midst of the chaos and enables them to complete transactions without being trampled. Walmart reports that trainees who have practiced using VR perform more confidently and effectively under actual conditions.
In the impossible category, Hillenmeyer cites Strivr’s program for training the U.S. Olympic ski team. Gathered in Park City, Utah, the team used VR to experience the downhill course in South Korea, site of the 2018 winter games. Mikaela Shiffrin, Lindsey Vonn, and the other Olympians could experience the course, viscerally vamping through every twist and turn, without risk of a season-ending injury, or worse.
In a profile of Shiffrin in the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes, “[A]nyone can make a ruinous mistake (lose an edge, hook a tip, choose the wrong line) or encounter bad luck (equipment malfunction, snow squall, gust of wind). And what about food poisoning? Or even geopolitics: the time would seem inopportune for an international sporting carnival on the Korean peninsula.”2 Better to stay in Park City as long as possible and test out the Korean slopes in virtual reality.
Perhaps most valuable is Strivr’s training software for firefighters, whose lung cancer rate is fifty times higher than the rest of the population’s. Every year, firefighters have to train in smoky conditions where they inhale toxic fumes. Using Strivr, they can experience smoky vision without inhaling. Still more vital, they learn to identify the visual and auditory signs of an impending “flash-over event,” in which flames can suddenly sweep them up.
Strivr’s markets suggest the range of VR opportunities. Each training regime is different from the others and entails intimate knowledge of a particular environment. Each VR session requires an expensive and time-consuming process of rendering the images for the 3D environment.
“VR hype,” CEO Danny Belch writes in the Strivr blog, “isn’t just
hype anymore . . . it’s real. The fact that Walmart and United Rentals are using VR will have a lasting impact on the VR industry at large.” Specializing in rentals of construction equipment, United Rentals has faced the problem of inducing its customers to learn safety practices on site. “They just won’t do it.” Using VR, though, the company reduces liability risks while improving safety and productivity.
Walmart’s VR deployment in some two hundred stores with thousands of managers is the largest ever. In the history of the technology, Walmart may prove to be the crucial matrix of success. Lowe’s has followed with widespread adoption of virtual reality to train customers in techniques of home improvement.
Entering the “happening” phase, virtual reality pervades the venerable Internet Trends Report by Mary Meeker of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. She reports that consumers are buying headsets at a slow but steady rate, while gaming companies pull in real money on VR titles. Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker notes, citing Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017, up twenty-six-fold in little more than a decade. Global gaming revenue surged more than $100 billion in 2017, and China is now the top market.
I tell the Strivr team—Hillenmeyer and Belch—that OTOY is planning a global computer platform for VR rendering anywhere on the cheap. Balch thinks that would be exciting, opening new markets for Strivr’s software around the world. No reason for virtual reality to be relegated to rare, impossible, dangerous, or expensive markets if it can be ubiquitous.
Designed to enhance human capabilities and human learning, virtual reality is the opposite of artificial intelligence, which tries to enhance learning by machines. Virtual reality asserts the primacy of mind over matter. It is founded on the singularity of human minds rather than a spurious singularity of machines.
Requiring an ever-expanding sensorium of interfaces and transducers with human beings, VR fosters an industry of prosthetic extensions—goggles, gloves, scrolling floors, haptic syntheses, and sensory fusions—that extend the boundaries of human experience, ultimately conveying movement, force, resistance, heat, sharpness, and other interactive effects. Just as Strivr can train firemen and skiers, these advances can improve the training of nurses, emergency services, surgeons, and even physicists.
Late in 2017, I interviewed Jules Urbach of OTOY when he was still in the thrall of a visit earlier that day by the writer-physicist-celebrity Lisa Randall of Harvard, a paragon of TED talks and New York Times bestsellers and another candidate to live forever without believing in God. Randall had dropped by OTOY to discuss Jules’s Octane VR rendering tool, which measures and interprets the movements, reflections, refractions, and interactions of photons. She saw it as an empirically tested model of photon behavior that might offer clues to the multidimensional nature of light.
The author of books on fathoming the universe’s “hidden dimensions,” Randall had told Jules that the process of rendering images offers a new way to decrypt the cosmos. Everything starts with photons, and photons go back to the Big Bang. In making a computer-generated image, OTOY maps a mini-bang of the emissions and reflections of photonic rays in a terrestrial scene. Rendering algorithms is an empirical quest to explain reality, with human enlightenment as both the source and the goal.
It is also a path to understanding human consciousness. As Lanier points out, VR puts the conscious human being at the center of the sphere, letting you “feel your consciousness” in its pure form. “There you are, the fixed point in a system where everything else can change. . . . In VR, your input is you.”3
The Google system of the world focuses on the material environment rather than on human consciousness, on artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence, on machine learning rather than on human learning, on relativistic search rather than on the search for truth, on copying rather than on creating, on launching human hierarchies in a flat universe rather than on empowering human beings in a hierarchical universe. It seeks singularities in machines rather than in human minds.
The new system of the world must reverse these positions, exalting the singularities of creation: mind over matter, human consciousness over mechanism, real intelligence over mere algorithmic search, purposeful learning over mindless evolution, and truth over chance. A new system can open a heroic age of human accomplishment.
Propelling such advances will be a shift of focus from the fruits of computation to its roots in trust and security. Information theory always expounded reality from two sides. On one side it measures and enables communication, transmission, redundancy, and reliable copying across time and space. On the other side, it focuses on decoding and decrypting the hidden dimensions of reality shrouded in noise. On one side, it is a copying machine; on the other side, it is a truth machine, attempting to resolve the ground states of the world.
In 1948, when Shannon developed his Information Theory at MIT and Bell Labs, the world was preoccupied with communication across a noisy channel. Questions of truth and consequences deferred to questions of signal and noise. Information Theory began with “Communications Theory for Secrecy Systems.” This paper proved that a perfect randomized one-time-pad constitutes an unbreakable code. It is a pillar of the theory of information as it defines one pole of a continuum between noise (white noise, purely random) and perfect order (predictable, deterministic, and information-free).
Shannon’s attention was focused on the fertile domains in between, dubbed stochastic (controlled or bounded probability), that constitute the challenge of communications, codes, encryption, and decryption. In this pursuit he addressed the problem of finding sense in mountains of raw data. Shannon’s work pointed to the realms of big data, machine-learning, and artificial intelligence that fueled the Google era.
The result is an Internet architecture top-heavy with free apps that can do anything you could want and porous in its underlying protocols to establish identities, property rights, and other facets of the ground state of the system. A porous, perforated Internet stack allows the money and power to be sucked up to the top.
A global copying machine, the Internet founders in establishing origins, facts, truths, timestamps, ground states, and identities. Fake news and phishing expeditions are hardly differentiated from real events and edifying communications.
Now it is time to move beyond the slippery slopes of the Internet and provide an immutable database on which to build new structures of trust and truth: low-entropy carriers for a high-entropy era of human creativity and accomplishment. The new era will move beyond Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states to blockchain hashes of history and futurity, trust and truth.
The opposite of memoryless Markov chains is blockchains. While Markov chains gain efficiency and speed by rigorously eclipsing the past, blockchains elaborately perpetuate the past in every block with a mathematical hash. Perhaps ten thousand times slower to compute than Markov chains, every hash contains an indelible signature of all transactions going back to the original block. Markov chains tell you the statistically likely future without knowing the past; blockchains enable the real-life future by indelibly recording the past.
Blockchains thus preserve and extend information, while Markov chains risk destroying it with the assumption of randomness. Removing the specific intentions and plans, histories and identities from their calculus, Markov models represent a flight from the real knowledge that creates and constitutes wealth. The next era’s system of the world will see the ascent of memory and specificity, invention and factuality, timestamps and titles—what Chaitin, the greatest surviving information theorist, calls “the new math of creativity,” the math of human freedom that follows Gödel and Turing and their proofs of uncomputability and incompleteness.
The universe is hierarchical and multidimensional. It cannot be reduced to two-dimensional sequences. A computer industry for a world of information should be oriented to the creative dimensions of virtual rea
lity rather than the flat universe of the materialist superstition. A successful system of the world should be devoted to rendering the full complexity of human life and mind.
Some Terms of Art and Information for Life after Google
Bitcoin: A method of secure transactions based on wide publication and decentralization of a ledger across the Internet. Current credit card systems, by contrast, are based on secrecy and centralization and use protected networks and firewalled data centers filled with the personal information of the transactors.
Bitcoin’s public ledger of transactions is collected in blocks roughly every ten minutes, beginning with the current block and going back to the “Genesis block,” created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin. Each block is confirmed when at least half the participants in the bitcoin verification process—the “miners”—hash the block mathematically with all the previous blocks since the Genesis block. In order to change or rescind a transaction, therefore, more than half the computers in the system have to agree to recompute and restate all the transactions since Genesis.
Bitcoins are not coins, but metrics or measuring sticks for transactions that are permanently registered in the blockchain.
Blockchain: A database, similar to a cadaster of real estate titles, extended to events, covenants, patents, licenses, or other permanent records. All are hashed together mathematically from the origin of the series, each record distributed and publicized on decentralized Internet nodes.
Boltzmann’s entropy: Heat (the total energy of all molecules in a system) over temperature (the average energy of the molecules). Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) identified this difference with missing information, or uncertainty about the arrangement of the molecules, thus opening the way for Claude Shannon and information theory. Both forms of entropy register disorder. Boltzmann’s entropy is analog and governed by the natural logarithm e, while Shannon’s entropy is digital and governed by log 2.
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