The Daily Planet #99: The AI Bubble, Part 24

And to round out this series on the AI Bubble, I am going to share one of my own pieces from a few years ago, from when I was speculating about the Interverse. It's now clear to me that the Interverse is the human-nature mesh of culture we should be creating, and the technical obstacles to doing so are going to disappear sooner rather than later.

The Interverse is the humanist's idea of interconnected realities with technological concerns in the background. And with time, it should be more than humanist - the interverse should embrace all beings: the Blue Whale, the Tardigrade and the Lemongrass and all other beings great and small.

The Interverse should remind you of the Buddhist Monk and peace activist Thich Nhath Hanh's concept of Interbeing . The interverse should also remind you of the Internet for the interverse is the next evolutionary stage of that revolutionary technology. In due course, the interverse will be the mature 'intelligent internet' which we can expect as a stable technological background for the foreseeable future, just as writing hasn't really changed for two thousand plus years.

Some predictions: The near future interverse, i.e., whats achievable at scale in 10-15 years, is the human-human interverse, which is approximately the amount of time that Facebook has existed. It took 15 years for the Facebook → Meta transition. In another 15 years we can expect a full fledged human-human interverse. Or so I believe. That H-H interverse will complete the transformation of the internet from connecting machines to connecting people. While I am obviously excited by this possibility, the human-human interverse could easily become a dystopia.

In a more distant future, I can imagine an interverse that connects humans with other beings; the Blue Whales-Human interverse, as I keep saying. I would put that in the 50 - 75 yr range, approximately the same duration as electronic computing until now - though we are beginning to see that happen as well.

Nevertheless, both the human-human interverse and the interspecies are possible in the 21st century (assuming we make it as a species for that long) and I would classify them as fiction science instead of science fiction, i.e., a combination of technical and theoretical knowledge that's within grasp.

M5: The Interverse

Is the Metaverse in our Heads?