A new kind of presence

David Weinberger imagines an exciting technology future:

At the FlyEye site you scan a huge video wall that shows you a feed from every person out in the streets who is sporting a meshed GoPro or Google Glass wearable video camera. Thousands of them. […] Off on the left there’s a protestor holding a sign you can’t quite make out. So, you click on one of the people in the crowd who has a blue dot over her that means she too is wearing a meshed video camera. Now you see through that camera. The protestor’s sign isn’t as interesting as you thought. So you video surf through the crowd, hopping from camera to camera.

FlyEye provides a “Twitch Plays Pokemon” sort of interface that lets the remote crowd ask participating meshed camera-wearers to turn this way or that. You click furiously asking the person with the camera you’re “riding” to look backwards. No luck. So you hop to someone further back. […] The software enables a user to choose which camera to ride, as well as the sorts of services that would make it easier to choose which cameras to surf to. Plus some chat capabilities of some sort.

 

Is Earth a seeded planet?

“One possibility is that we will build 3D printers and create organic humans based on our software personalities just to experience reality through five senses. An organic creature can keep learning its entire life. So our future software selves might find a need to bring some of our minds back into organic form just to keep up the challenge and the learning. And you know where this is going. If the scenario I described might happen in the future, how can we know it didn’t already happen and we are the second-generation organic humans?”

Scott Adams thinks it is and makes his case here.