(2017-06-30) Stephenson The Scifi Guru Who Predicted Google Earth Explains Silicon Valleys Latest Obsession

The Sci-Fi Guru Who Predicted Google Earth Explains Silicon Valley’s Latest Obsession. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Neal Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart.

I think that those two options are more different than a lot of people realize

Completely separate and almost unrelated. The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in.

The Gargoyles in Snow Crash are kind of in a different category from the Metaverse users, because they’re using what we would now call an augmented-reality device. But I think we sort of are there already with smartphones. The real question isn’t whether it’s going to happen but how artfully it’s going to be done, and can we make it better than it is now? More social, more elegant, and just more conducive to healthy society, healthy interactions?

Even a few years ago, to say nothing of 25 years ago, I really didn’t see the whole social-media bubble thing coming and didn’t—even when I became aware of it—didn’t really get its significance until November 8, 2016 (Donald Trump).

The thing that’s not intuitive that makes social-media bubbles so deceptive is that you don’t see what you’re not seeing. So, it just invisibly, behind the scenes, filters out all the stuff that you’d rather not see, and you’re not aware that filtering is taking place. That’s the thing that causes bubbles.