teleportation and the internet
Imagine, how cool it would be to have teleportation technology today. Everybody dreamed of this as a child. No boring commute to school, easy and quick travel to any place in the world! Shouldn't we abandon all other research, and instead focus on this technology, that promises so much economic benefit, that it is pretty much impossible to calculate?
The idea of teleportation has been with us for ages. So many novels, movies, especially games that utilize this concept to a great advantage. It fits so well with any setting. How does it work? Magic? Advanced science? Ancient rituals? You name it. It feels so mystical, whimsical. But once you commit to using it in your world, you open up a huge Pandora's box.
Teleportation removes any stakes from the story. Criminals appear in a bank vault and then vanish in an instant. Frodo appears on the Death mountain and performs a ring drop. The whole plot of Interstellar would be pointless. Because of this, teleportation is usually introduced with a lot of caveats and drawbacks. And even then, it usually creates more plot holes and questions than answers.
Is it a cool technology? YES! Is it worth it? It really depends on your usage of it. It really helps if there is a very specific set of conditions, that is required to teleport. Say, you can ONLY teleport while moving at 88 miles per hour and you happen to have a huge ton of energy. Adding cost to it is another great way to add flavor. If it costs something (morally, physically, you name it), it creates a dilemma. The choice to teleport is not so obvious now. Would you teleport, if you had to sacrifice a limb every time you do so? Well, that definitely cuts of food teleportation as a service in your universe…
At this point you are probably asking yourself, what internet has to do with all of this? Well, think about it:
- Can you explain, how any of these technologies work? If yes, can you recreate everything yourself? No? Some wizards-looking dudes with glasses on "clouds" are the only ones who know how to do it? Sounds like magic to me. Jokes aside, just think about how much infrastructure it takes for the bytes of data to even travel between you and servers!
- Both technologies give you almost instant access to other places. Internet is more of a "traveling almost at the speed of light" kind of teleportation, but for you it looks like the data arrives almost instantly and out of nowhere, thanks to radio waves. No, you can't instantly go to a library and get a book about the topic you want, but you can instantly download it, and watch it appear from the thin air on your e-book.
- Both technologies break a lot of set in stone conventions and require a ton of new rules for old stuff to function. Instant access to most of the human knowledge at our finger tips is an insanely game breaking tool, if you think about it. And with the rise of "smart chatbots", the line between what I know and can do and what WE as humans know and can do is getting really blurry.
The only difference is that internet exists today, and teleportation does not. But from how internet has changed our lives we can draw some guesses about the future with teleportation:
- Probably it wouldn't be really great for everyone, as with everything you have to pay more for a better teleportation experience
- You can tell me as much as you want about the wonders, that internet allows us to do, but who cares about that? What are YOU using the internet for? Or let's just take a look at the top websites by traffic today, and draw our conclusions from that.
- I think will be heavily centralized. Not at the start, no, but neither was the internet. And nowadays we spend our days on select few websites, owned by huge organizations.
- Even more events would be happening constantly, because it's now as easy to get to a convention as just looking the address.
- Parties would be even more lame. I don't think, that people will stop being late, and the phenomenon of checking the phone while talking with a person at the same time would probably evolve into chaotic teleportation back and forth in between sentences.
- And to that end, we will be completely lost, if something happens and the teleportation machine/whatever is broken for a day or two. If everybody relies on it to go to work, would anyone own a car? Probably not many.
Yes, it does sound grim. And yes, there are totally positive sides to having teleportation technology. But I do not think we are ready for it. I think we are not ready for the internet, and especially for the speed, with which it evolves. We really really to rethink, how and why we use the internet daily. Does it really provide as much value for us, as we think it does? Is being aware of the lives of other random people that worth it? What price would be a fare exchange for each google search you run?
People take it for granted, because there are thousands of new websites everyday, but running a big website is an insanely costly endeavor. Even if we don't take into the account the massive amount of human labor hours, that someone needs to pay for, upkeep and infrastructure are also insanely expensive. Website is rarely the correct word to describe those massive undertakings. The "cloud" is not magic. The amount of effort that goes into designing parts in private subnetworks, that no real user will ever see, is insane. But most of these services are free. Wild, right?
I'm not going to talk about "big corporations selling your data", because this is not the point. Whatever they do to justify their costs, think about your costs. What is the cost of being up to date on the new hottest memes? Those 15-30-60 minutes add up really quickly. And that is bluntly ignoring other factors, like the opportunity cost, attention fragmentation, negative self perception & more. Is it a worthy price to pay?
Maybe it is a worth while price for you. Maybe you even see it as a bargain! I definitely do not. I've cut off my home WiFi and I do not own anything, that can use mobile networks. I have to go out of my way to find a spot with WiFi to access the internet. And this way of using it has transformed my understanding massively. I will tell you more about my personal experience in a later post.
But for now, ask yourself: do I really need Internet everywhere I go?