The Future Does Not Compute

From Virtual to Real

This is Appendix B of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org.

Thanks to the computer, we are today flirting with certain ideas that would have been anathema to an earlier scientific and technological mindset:

• The Net and its “information spaces” are increasingly conceived as a kind of global, nurturing, immaterial sea of wisdom, from which we all may freely draw, and to which we contribute our own unique achievements. We are now learning to regard even our own identities in terms of “DNA databases” -- extensions of the larger information space. And, as these databases become digitized and manipulable, the hope is that I may eventually alter my personal genetic database at will, selecting my physiological destiny by multiple choice from the informational surround. On the face of it, this matrix of informational essences carries us a long way from the brute, fixed stuff of nineteenth-century materialism, shaped solely by the outward impact of mechanism upon mechanism. Materiality has been caught up, so to speak, within a ”superior” realm of information, and made to serve it.
• When we construct virtual realities, we do so “from the inside.” ...