I submitted this article not because I agreed with it but because I could not disagree with it. I am not satisfied with the internet as it is.

I feel like what we have in the internet currently is amazing. It really does help level the world a bit, information is all important and anything that acts like a superconductor for it makes information hoarding and abuse of asymmetry very difficult. But there is something missing. It's not quite all there. It's like it is stuck in an amazingness uncanny valley. It could be so much more. And looking at multiple societies across history, where for some reason the tendency is for advancement to just stop - I don't want progress to get stuck where it is because people are too satisfied with how good things are. Because they can be much better.

I just finished inhaling The Peace War and Marooned in Real time. It was written in 1984-86 but could have been written yesterday. The books explore not just what it would be like for one person to have the information of the world but also the productivity of a 20th century nation. We're at that critical stage between those two points now, and theres no reason to assume we will cross it. We could become too enamored with things that do not positively shift the gradient with respect to time.

For example, the book also had Visors as I/O. A more advanced version of Google's Visors. Google's Visor demo showed it hooked up to Google+. I was not impressed. Maybe I am not the target audience. But consider, a grammar for audio recognition of a graphing calculator is not hard to write. Hook that up with something like Wolfram Alpha, something that can plot rotate, recognize gestures; that would have been impressive. Or basic searches in wikipedia. But I suppose not good advertising for google.

Or imagine something that would be to the internet as Crysis 3 is to pong. Say, smart fashion. Tiny sensors embedded in clothes to measure things like temperature, ph levels, air pressure, wind speed, acceleration, etc. How much easier would physics be to teach if you could go outside and actually see magnetic fields. Throw a ball up and get told how many Newtons of force you used. The sensors could monitor health and connected to networks constant processing your biostats. Also free processing in the form of scattered monoliths (billed monthly with a basic allowance free). Every possible interaction involving information exchange (including money) between people or bureaucracies involve an API. Contracts in Haskell, Prolog or at least Python. Most regulation is done under noble intentions. But the human brain is just no good at using vast amounts of data and long chains of thought. With all the data from the APIs and computational contracts, the damage from unintended consequences would be minimized. Progress could increase in speed.

These of course, are nothing concrete. But they are not so far fetched either. It is close, a perpetual 5 years away. So many amazing things are at the verge of occurring: 3D printing, ubiquitous computing, organ printing, synthetic biology, computer aided experiment design, questioning of p-values, more quantitative approaches to medicine and biology, cleaner nuclear fission, more efficient photovoltaics, organic circuits, asteroid mining. They are all on the verge, if we can push then the future really will be amazing. But only if we push. And possibly if we invent a Theory for Effective Preemptive and Efficient Interaction with Lumbering Disconnected Bureaucracies that works.

Whenever I see the internet I see what it could be. And I am not satisfied. Maybe that is the correct opinion to hold.