SF author William Gibson’s views on the future

Rolling Stone Magazine is celebrating its 40th anniversary and interviewed SF author William Gibson (who coined the term “cyberspace” in 1982 and whom we happily quote here) and his views on the future of Internet share many common points with our previous post on “Virtual and real are the same“.

We come to wonder if the future is not just present cutting-edge technologies being used by the average citizen…

Below is an extract of the complete interview available here.

RS | Ubiquitous computing?

WG | Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.

In a world of superubiquitous computing, you’re not gonna know when you’re on or when you’re off. You’re always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it’s a drag.

RS | Is there a downside to that blended reality? Or could it represent a change for the better?

WG | People worry about the loss of individual privacy, but that comes with a new kind of unavoidable transparency. Eventually we’re going to know everything that every twenty-first-century politician has ever done. It will be very hard for politicians and governments to keep secrets. The whole thing is porous. We just haven’t really figured out quite how porous it is.