Too busy to read?

Pretend you live inside the world's largest rental store. Why would you own anything? You can borrow whatever you need within arm's reach. Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning and few of its disadvantages. You have no responsibility to clean, to repair, to store, to sort, to insure, to upgrade, to maintain.

Police will be required by law to record all activity from their wearables while they are on duty. Rewinding police logs will shift public opinion, just as often vindicating police as not. The everyday routines of politicians and celebrities will be subject to scrolling back from multiple viewpoints, creating a new culture where everyone's past is recallable. Rewindability and findability are just two Gutenberg-like transformations that moving images are undergoing. These two and many other factors of remixing apply to all newly digitized media, such as virtual reality, music, radio, presentations, and so on.

Most people are lucky to see a doctor once a year to get some aspect of their health measured. But instead of once a year, imagine that every day, all day, invisible sensors measured and recorded your heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, glucose, blood serum, sleep patterns, body fat, activity levels, mood, EKG brain functions, and so on. You would have hundreds of thousands of data points for each of these traits. You would have evidence while at both rest and at full stress, while sick and healthy, in all seasons, all conditions.

Brand companies can command higher prices for similar products and services from companies without brands because they are trusted for what they promise. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

Reading becomes social. With screens we can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow, we will be able to link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we've read, from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie. (All these tricks will require tools for finding relevant passages.) We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia--highlights, notes, questions, musings.

Ebooks today lack the fungibility of the ur-text of screening: Wikipedia. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated in the near future, and the true nature of books will blossom. We will find out that books never really wanted to be printed telephone directories, or hardware catalogs on paper, or paperback how-to books. These are jobs that screens and bits are much superior at--all that updating and searching--tasks that neither paper nor narratives are suited for. What those kinds of books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, bookmarked, summarized, cross-referenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked to. Being digital allows them to do all that and more.

"No one is as smart as everyone."

The dream of many companies is to graduate from making products to creating a platform. But when they do succeed (like Facebook), they are often not ready for the required transformation in their role; they have to act more like governments than companies in keeping opportunities "flat" and equitable, and hierarchy to a minimum.

If you want a glimpse of what we humans do when the robots take our current jobs, look at experiences. That's where we'll spend our money (because they won't be free) and that's where we'll make our money.

Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 new products.

A constant 24/7/365 monitoring of vital body measurements. Imagine how public health would change if we continuously monitored blood glucose in real time. Imagine how your behavior would change if you could, in near real time, detect the presence or absence of biochemicals or toxins in your blood picked up from your environment. (You might conclude: "I'm not going back there!") This data could serve both as a warning system and also as a personal base upon which to diagnose illness and prescribe medicines.

The achievable dream in the near future is to use this very personal database of your body's record (including your full sequence of genes) to construct personal treatments and personalized medicines. Science would use your life's log to generate treatments specifically for you. For instance, a smart personalized pill-making machine in your home (described in Chapter 7) would compound medicines in the exact proportions for your current bodily need. If the treatment in the morning eased the symptoms, the dosage in the evening would be adjusted by the system.

As cars become more digital, they will tend to be swapped and shared and used in the same social way we swap digital media. The more we embed intelligence and smarts into the objects in our households and offices, the more we'll treat these articles as social property.

Economist Michael Cox asked his students how much they would accept to give up the internet entirely and reported they would not give up the internet for a million dollars. And this was before smartphones became the norm.

And who will write the code that makes this global system useful and productive? We will. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or post an item for our friends, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the holos mind, thereby programming it by using it. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a web page as a way of teaching the holos what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach this contraption an idea.

At the center of every significant change in our lives today is a technology of some sort. Technology is humanity's accelerant.

A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten. As Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

Access is so superior to ownership in many ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy.

In the universal library, no book will be an island. It's all connected.

"Recording in a diary is considered admirable. Recording in a spreadsheet is considered creepy."

A filter dedicated to probing one's dislikes would have to be delicate, but could also build on the powers of large collaborative databases in the spirit of "people who disliked those, learned to like this one." In somewhat the same vein I also, occasionally, want a bit of stuff I dislike but should learn to like. For me that might be anything related to nutritional supplements, details of political legislation, or hip-hop music. Great teachers have a knack for conveying unsavory packages to the unwilling in a way that does not scare them off; great filters can too. But would anyone sign up for such a filter?

Take transportation as an example. How do you get from point A to point B? Today you can do it in one of eight ways with a vehicle: 1. Buy a car, drive yourself (the default today). 2. Hire a company to drive you to your destination (taxi). 3. Rent a company-owned car, drive yourself (Hertz rental). 4. Hire a peer to drive you to your destination (Uber). 5. Rent a car from a peer, drive yourself (RelayRides). 6. Hire a company to drive you with shared passengers along a fixed route (bus). 7. Hire a peer to drive you with shared passengers to your destination (Lyft Line). 8. Hire a peer to drive you with shared passengers going to a fixed destination (BlaBlaCar).

Facebook has the ability to ramp up an AI that can view a photo portrait of any person on earth and correctly identify them out of some 3 billion people online.

Over the next three decades, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We'll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present.

Libraries (as well as many individuals) aren't eager to relinquish old-fashioned ink-on-paper editions, because the printed book is by far the most durable and reliable long-term storage technology we have. Printed books require no mediating device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence.

cannot link from this sentence to only those exact "passages" inside an online movie. We don't have the equivalent of a hyperlink for film yet. With true screen fluency, I'd be able to cite specific frames of a film or specific items in a frame.

There are three times as many people alive today as when I was born (1952).

"In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention."

"too cheap to meter"--too

In 30 years it will be. The tendrils of hyperlinks will keep expanding to connect all the bits. The events that take place in a console game will be as searchable as the news. You'll be able to look for things that occur inside a YouTube video. Say you want to find the exact moment on your phone when your sister received her acceptance to college.

Almost any subject I care about has an overlay app that displays it as an apparition. A fair amount of public art is now 3-D mirages. The plaza in our town square hosts an elaborate rotating 3-D projection that is refreshed twice a year, like a museum art show. Most of the buildings downtown are reskinned with alternative facades inside AR, each facade commissioned by an architect or artist. The city looks different each time I walk through it.

The holy grail of visuality is findability--the ability to search the library of all movies the same way Google can search the web, and find a particular focus deep within. You want to be able to type key terms, or simply say, "bicycle plus dog," and then retrieve scenes in any film featuring a dog and a bicycle. In an instant you could locate the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the witchy Miss Gulch rides off with Toto. Even better, you want to be able to ask Google to find all the other scenes in all movies similar to that scene. That ability is almost here.

Microsoft's vision for light field AR is to build the office of the future. Instead of workers sitting in a cubicle in front of a wall of monitor screens, they sit in an open office wearing HoloLenses and see a huge wall of virtual screens around them. Or they click to be teleported to a 3-D conference room with a dozen coworkers who live in different cities. Or they click to a training room where an instructor will walk them though a first-aid class, guiding their avatars through the proper procedures.

Indeed, dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event. The conventional vision of the book's future assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on the shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to enliven it with his or her imagination. In this conventional vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability--the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of ebooks and etexts, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Over 36 million Kindles and ebook readers with e-ink have been sold.

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Twenty years ago I might have been able to believe that in 2016 we'd have maps for the entire world on our personal handheld devices. But I could not have been convinced we'd have them with street views of the buildings for many cities, or apps that showed the locations of public toilets, and that it would give us spoken directions for walking or public transit, and that we'd have all this mapping and more "for free." It seemed starkly impossible back then. And this free abundance still seems hard to believe in theory. Yet here it is on hundreds of millions of phones.

new portals to synthetic worlds.