{"id":3809,"date":"2013-09-26T10:12:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-26T16:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=3809"},"modified":"2013-09-30T12:38:32","modified_gmt":"2013-09-30T18:38:32","slug":"ambient-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=3809","title":{"rendered":"Ambient Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ThingOneThingTwo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

People are forever buttonholing me on the street and saying, “Nick, what comes after realtime?” It’s a good question, and I happen to know the answer: Ambient Reality. Ambient Reality is the ultimate disruption, as it alters the actual fabric of the universe. We begin living in the prenow. Things happen before they happen. “Between the desire \/ And the spasm,” wrote T. S. Eliot, “Falls the Shadow.” In Ambient Reality, the Shadow goes away. Spasm precedes desire. In fact, it’s all spasm. We enter what I call Uninterrupted Spasm State, or USS.<\/p>\n

In “How the Internet of Things Changes Everything,” a new and seemingly machine-written article<\/a> in Foreign Affairs,<\/em> two McKinsey consultants write of “the interplay”\u00a0between “the most\u00a0disruptive technologies\u00a0of the coming decade: the mobile Internet and the Internet of Things.”\u00a0The “mobile-ready Internet of Things,” as they term it,\u00a0will have “a profound, widespread, and transformative impact on how we live and work.” For instance, “by combining a digital camera in a wearable device with image-recognition software, a shopper can automatically be fed comparative pricing information based on the image of a product captured by the camera.” That’s something to look forward to, but the McKinseyites are missing the big picture. They underestimate the profundity, the ubiquity, and the transformativeness of the coming disruption. In Ambient Reality, there is no such thing as “a shopper.” Indeed, the concept of “shopping” becomes anachronistic. Goods are delivered before the urge to buy them manifests itself in the conscious mind. Demand is ambient, as are pricing comparisons. They become streams in the cloud.<\/p>\n

EBay strategist\u00a0John Sheldon gets closer to the truth when he describes, in a new Wired<\/em> piece<\/a>, the concept of “ambient commerce”:<\/p>\n

Imagine setting up a rule in Nike+, he says, to have the app order you a new pair of shoes after you run 300 miles. …\u00a0Now consider an even more advanced scenario. A shirt has a sensor that detects moisture. And you find yourself stuck out in the rain without an umbrella. Not too many minutes after the downpour starts, a car pulls up alongside you. A courier steps out and hands you an umbrella \u2014 or possibly a rain jacket, depending on what rules you set up ahead of time for such a situation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I ask you: Are there no bounds to the dreams of our innovators?<\/p>\n

Comments Wired<\/em>‘s Marcus Wohlsen, “Though it might be hard to believe, the logistics of delivering that umbrella are likely more complex than the math behind detecting the water.” That is indeed hard to believe.<\/p>\n

But even these scenarios fail to capture the full power of Ambient Reality. They assume some agency is required on the part of the consumer. One has to “set up a rule” about the lifespan of one’s sneakers. One has to pre-program a choice between umbrella and rain jacket. In Ambient Reality, no such agency is required. Personal decisions are made prenow, by communications among software-infused things. The sensors in your feet and in your sneakers are in constant communication not only with each other but with the cloud. When a new pair of sneakers is required, the new pair is automatically printed on your 3-D printer at home. The style of the sneakers is chosen algorithmically based on your past behavior as well as contemporaneous neural monitoring. Choice is ambient. As for that “courier” who “steps out and hands you an umbrella” after the onset of precipitation, that’s just plain retrograde. The required consumer good will be delivered before the rain starts <\/em>by an unmanned drone delivery aircraft. The idea that humans will be involved in delivery chores is ridiculous. In Ambient Reality, human effort will be restricted to self-actualization\u2014in other words, ambient consumption. That’s the essence of USS.<\/p>\n

I hardly need mention that, once the shower has passed, the drone will retrieve the umbrella in order to deliver it to another person facing an imminent rain event. All assets will be shared to optimize utilization. Think how rarely you use your umbrella today: that’s a sign of how broken society is.<\/p>\n

We are on the verge, says Wohlsen, of “a utopian future in which running out of toilet paper at the wrong time will never, ever happen again.” That’s very true, but the never-run-out-of-toilet-paper utopia is actually a transitional utopia. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]In the ultimate utopia of Ambient Reality, there will be no need for toilet paper.[\/inlinetweet]\u00a0But I’ll leave that for a future post.<\/p>\n

This post is an installment in Rough Type\u2019s ongoing series \u201cThe Realtime Chronicles,\u201d which began\u00a0here<\/a>. A full listing of posts can be found\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People are forever buttonholing me on the street and saying, “Nick, what comes after realtime?” It’s a good question, and I happen to know the answer: Ambient Reality. Ambient Reality is the ultimate disruption, as it alters the actual fabric of the universe. We begin living in the prenow. Things happen before they happen. “Between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-realtime"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3809"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3816,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809\/revisions\/3816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}