Kevin Kelly predicts that we will usher in a new huge platform in 5,000 days. Everything in the world can be connected to AI (artificial intelligence), and the real world and digitalization will be perfectly integrated. AR (augmented reality) known as the "mirror world" reality) world will be born. He said that in the near future, all roads, buildings and other actual things in the real world will display their "digital twins" in the mirror world - a virtual object of the same size as the real thing. "We will interact with this mirror world, manipulate it, and experience everything in it, just like we do in the real world...Eventually we will be able to search physical space as we search text. We will hyperlink objects into a physical network, Like hyperlinked text on the web, this will work wonders, spawning new products."
In 2019, Kevin Kelly wrote in Wired magazine: "The mirror world doesn't quite exist yet, but it's coming. Soon. One day, probably within the next 10-15 years, every place and everything in the real world will have its full-size digital twin in the mirror world.” This world is not a two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. The dimension of time can be added to become a four-dimensional space: "The street view images in Google Maps are just facades, flat images connected together. But in the mirror world, virtual buildings will have volumes, and virtual chairs will be the same as real chairs. A virtual street will have layers of textures, gaps and intrusions to convey the feeling of a 'street'." The world can also constantly "roll backwards" and roll forward. Walking on a city street, you can choose to move 100 Images from years ago or even 200 years ago are superimposed on the real scene.
You only need to give a command to the smart glasses - "I want to see what this place looked like 100 years ago", and the glasses will reproduce what it looked like back then. In this way, you can "listen" to the changes of the times that the building tells at any time. Currently, we can only see a small area of the mirror world through AR helmets. But these virtual fragments are being pieced together to form a lasting space that is shared by us, parallel to the real world.
Deep in the research labs of technology companies around the world, scientists and engineers are scrambling to build virtual places overlaid on real ones. Everything connected to the Internet will be connected to the mirror world. And anything connected to the mirror world will affect and be affected by other things in this interconnected environment.
Kevin Kelly concluded dramatically that whoever dominates this emerging platform will become the most powerful force in history. The power of can be compared to Google and the way it dominates the internet, or how Facebook and WeChat dominate social media. This is the so-called "third platform".
The first largest platform is the Internet , which digitizes information and makes knowledge subject to the power of algorithms; the second largest platform is social media, which mainly runs on mobile phones. It digitizes people and makes human behaviors and relationships subject to the power of algorithms. . As the third largest platform in the future, the mirror world will digitize everything else in the world. On this platform, everything and everywhere will be machine-readable. Using AI and algorithms, the mirror world can not only help us search the real world, but also help us search for interpersonal relationships, and give birth to new things.
According to Kevin Kelly, a mirror world is not just a replica of the real world, but something with layers of context, meaning, and functionality that make it interactive and interoperable. The mirror world has an amazing dual nature, blending reality and virtuality, which will bring new possibilities for gaming, entertainment, education, and work that are currently unimaginable.
Yet it is precisely because of this duality that the emergence of the Mirror World will affect us all on a deeply personal level. We know that living in a dual world can have severe physical and psychological effects on people, and we already know this from our current experience of living in cyberspace.But we don’t know how big these impacts will be, let alone how to prepare for them or avoid them. We don't even know the exact cognitive mechanisms that make AR hallucinations work. We instinctively resent the specter of big data, imagining the many ways it could harm us.
For example, the mirror world will cause major privacy issues. After all, it will contain billions of eyes, catching glimpses of things at every point, eventually converging into one continuous view. The mirror world will create a huge amount of data, the scale of which we cannot imagine now. For this spatial realm to function, for digital twins of all real spaces and things to synchronize with it, while still being visible to millions of people, will require tracking of people and things to an extent that can only be described as a total surveillance state. Eventually, everything will have a digital twin.
(The author is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University)
