Managing your online reputation is essentially a game. You can even earn XP. And that’s awesome. But what happens as your online life becomes more and more relevant to your real life?
If you have about half an hour, I strongly encourage you to watch this talk by Jesse Schell. It’s fun. (Also, embedded at the bottom of this post.)
But if you don’t have half an hour, let me sum it up for you:
Games are spilling into reality, and reality is becoming more like a game. More and more actions in your daily life are rewarding you with experience points.
It basically ends there, with a nice note about how your grand kids will be able to find out just exactly how much of a loser you were, because your entire life is being recorded.
I don’t think Mr. Schell went far enough. What happens when people realize they can trade points for real things? What happens when the guy who sucked at regular, money-earning jobs finds out he’s really, really good at getting points for stuff he was already doing anyway?
What happens when we realize we no longer need money?
What are the implications of a currency that, instead of being printed in limited supply by the government, is infinite and generated by our own actions as individuals?
Just some thoughts.
How robots are making us more human
I’ll start this one off with a quote I read on Mashable a few months ago:
In a world where the vast majority of information we encounter comes from people we’ve never met, who no one we know has ever met, and who we will probably never meet – who, as far as we know, are just electrons – how do we determine humanness? We define ourselves by our differences from other things. We walk upright, we have opposable thumbs, we use tools, we think about ourselves and, most uniquely, we think about thinking about ourselves.
Before photography, painters would strive for realism. After photography - this. The human being, as a medium, is due for a similar fate.
So what happens when we create something that can think about thinking about itself? What happens when we create something that does it even better than we do?
Think about this: painters didn’t celebrate the medium of paint until photography was invented. The full potential of newspapers wasn’t appreciated until the Internet started putting them out of business. The true beauty of film wasn’t understood until everyone had gone digital. Hiking became a sport only after cars were invented.
While machines have taken over the laundry, the dishes, logo design, (just kidding guys, take the gun out of your mouth), and a million other things, we’ve made enormous strides in art, literature, caring for one another, and, well, making machines that are even better at doing everything for us. And the more we create machines to do things for us, the better we get at the things that are left, that only we can do.
When we’ve finally made ourselves completely obsolete, that’s when we’ll know what it really is to be human.