The Spatial Web

This book is about the future of the Web, and the supposed trajectory that it will go through. Web 3.0 is the name of the combination of technologies that have been emerging in the last decade or so, including VR / AR interfaces, distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain. Also, IoT, AI, Quantum Computing, etc. Combining all of these should result in something that the authors call the Spatial Web.

Currently, the state of the Web is such that we are interfering with it mainly through our screens. And it still is a technology of transferring pages, and protocols and languages that it uses are limited to that. For example, HTML and HTTP were not designed to accommodate transferring some stuff in Spatial environments. That is the main premise of the book, that in the future we will be having new protocols and languages to implement all the Web 3.0 technologies that I listed above.

Also, the authors argue the importance of blockchain-based decentralized identity and say that to facilitate the possibility of having one giant Web of not only interconnected pages but everything interconnected, including all the physical objects and even us, humans, we need to have a way of identifying something or someone globally, without having separate accounts for each service on the Web.

I see a couple of problems with all these. First of all, it will be a huge distraction from the actuality. The last couple of decades of advancement in technologies caused people to be disconnected from the actual reality around them. We are always doing something, rather than just being. And true fulfillment can not be found in doing, but in just consciously being in the moment. This is what mystical traditions are trying to teach us for the last 5000 years, but we don't listen. Imagine the level of disconnection from reality when VR / AR will become as advanced as this book claims it will. That's scary.

Also, the problem I see is the lack of a centralized arbiter. The problem of decentralization from the dawn of civilization was corruption, ego, and selfishness of humans. That's just the nature of a human being. Without a very deep understanding of that nature, we can not have advanced technology that we'll interface with. Everything that human touches become a tool for his or her selfish motives, and without proper rules and protocols, this selfishness can become disastrous. Hopefully, we'll learn all the lessons that history teaches us about the human ego and build technologies according to correct values and principles.

So, in the end, the book paints a very positive picture of a technological future, which is good. But it's just a vision, not sure how it will unfold in the years to come.