The collapse of the virtual and actual will above all occur not as a result of perfect simulation but as a result of ever huger accidents and bizarre turns of events no one expected, which is also the origin of what we now call nature. But it may be that in the next one hundred years we will have so radically reconceived the relation of humans to the rest of the world, annihilating the distinction between the natural and the artificial, between art and life, that we will utterly lose the concept of the natural. And it may be that that other Romantic bromide, the distinction between useful and useless, craft and art, commerce and aesthetics, will vanish as well. There is no reason or justification for its existence, but all reasons and justifications, all commerce, will eventually flow through it. This is just an extension of the reality of the computer.
Computers seem useful.
Perhaps art in the next century will amount to a kind of terror in which collaborations of unknowable numbers of people and machines will make beautiful things that no one understands. Perhaps in the next century, works of art will begin both to fashion and to interpret themselves. Perhaps artists will grow works of art the way one grows a field of soybeans, hoping for the best. Perhaps the concept of art itself will become otiose or impossible in the face of the self-creating artifact. Or perhaps the greatest works of art of the next century will be self-consuming artifacts, communicative information viruses that grow by themselves and destroy through communication all communication in diabolically beautiful ways.