Recently, the "metaverse" is very popular, but listen carefully to Zuckerberg's speech, and then look at some self-media propaganda about the metaverse, or the reports of capital and securities research institutions, it is difficult to find where the technological innovation point is? Speaking of platters, building organizations for social networking, issuing generations of currencies, the most prominent is to find application scenarios for VR/AR.
New technologies promote human civilization to step after step, and its fundamental driving force stems from the continuous pursuit of quality life and wonderful life by human beings. Any major change in industry or industry is the result of gradual accumulation of technology and has obvious signs. The VR/AR technology repeatedly mentioned in the metaverse has long been rid of the mystery, and has also experienced the hype from 2013 to 2016 and the market winter from 2016 to 2019, and so far there is still no major breakthrough in the level of network applications, hardware technology, biotechnology, neuroscience, etc., and it is difficult to rely on VR/AR to bear the weight of the "metaverse".
Of all the inventions of mankind, the impact of the Internet on humanity is immeasurable, just as the impact on human beings at the time of the invention of the steam engine and electricity is immeasurable. With the Internet, we have the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, blockchain, SDN, VR/AR, etc., these technologies or concepts will be further fully developed, and there will be new technologies, new terms, new concepts and so on in the future.
(The following text was written six years ago)
The Internet is not only changing the means of information transmission, but also changing our consumption patterns and production patterns. It is influencing human thinking and emotional communication, as well as the spirit of cooperation and sharing, and in the future it may even subvert the traditional model of human wisdom accumulation and life continuation. To sum up, the Internet will go through the following stages of development:
The first stage is the interconnection of information, which mainly addresses the equality of human beings' right to know.
E-mail, electronic forums, file transfers, network news, these early applications of the Internet opened a door to information transmission across time and space. The easy-to-interact nature of the network, blogs, WeChat and other information sharing platforms, satisfies the desire of human beings to participate and express. The amount of information transmitted by the network is large and wide-ranging, which meets the needs of different groups of people for information and realizes the equality of human rights to know. As marshall McLuhan, a famous Canadian scholar, has argued, the medium has changed the way people exist, reconstructing the way people feel and their attitudes towards people. After the emergence of the Internet, the information services it can carry are greatly enriched in form and content, and the interaction of the transmission process is also extremely vivid.
Network search has brought convenience and precision to obtain information, more importantly, the Internet subverts the traditional media "central complex, the end is simple" information dissemination law, to the news and information dissemination to bring great freedom, so that netizens and journalists also have the right to speak, accompanied by the network can be convenient to distribute the netizens distributed in various places to form many interest groups, thereby directly interfering in the individual cognitive process, and strongly and profoundly affecting the inheritance and development of culture and values.
The second stage is the interconnection of consumption and the convenience of human material life needs.
The convenience and efficiency of information exchange has accelerated the process of internet services for consumption. Since the 72-hour network survival test in September 1999, online consumption has gradually attracted the attention of the Chinese people. Nowadays, people's shopping channels are not limited to traditional markets, shopping malls, supermarkets and stores, e-commerce platforms have gradually become the new main consumption channels, the sharing economy affects people's consumption patterns and consumption habits, but also greatly stimulates consumer demand.
With the rapid rise of the online shopping market in second- and third-tier areas, as well as the development of mobile payment, the "occupation" of traditional industries by e-commerce has accelerated. In addition, the explosive growth of mobile terminals will not only provide convenient new channels for the tertiary industry such as e-commerce, but also promote the continuous deep integration of mobile Internet and Internet of Things technology, extending to wearable devices, smart homes, Internet of Vehicles and other fields, thereby providing people with richer and more convenient services, and also spawning many new business forms and consumer products.
The third stage is the interconnection of production, which serves the employment and development of human beings.
As the impact on the consumption chain deepens, the tentacles of the Internet continue to extend upstream to human activities, and efforts are being made to subvert the industrial world that people think is still closed and traditional. Germany's Industry 4.0, the "Industrial Internet" advocated by GE in the United States, and the practice of Haier, Gree and other enterprises in China have proved that a user-oriented personalized customization era is coming.
The production interconnection phase will blur the boundaries between industrial production and agricultural production. Since most people pay more attention to life and health than to the pursuit of quality of life, personalized agricultural product customization will develop rapidly, and agricultural production will precede the interconnection of industrial production. The traditional industrial production interconnection will change the production process with a clear division of labor in the past, use big data and cloud computing to link people, machinery and equipment, products, sales and services and continuously generate new data, communicate with each other, efficiently analyze, integrate in real time, optimize resources and production chains, and produce according to user needs.
Driven by Internet information technology, industrial production will continue to transform and upgrade. On the one hand, it will greatly change the production and organization of industrial manufacturing, and large-scale personalized customization will improve production efficiency; on the other hand, it will give birth to new models and new formats such as manufacturing service. In the future, the use of intelligent robots and high-end CNC machine tools is expected to become the "brain" of advanced high-end manufacturing equipment.
The fourth stage is the interconnection of wisdom, helping human beings to realize the pursuit of knowledge and spiritual life.
Human beings have thousands of years of civilization accumulation, each person also has their own wisdom, the stage of wisdom interconnection will be all the accumulation of human cultural civilization through the Internet real-time sharing, knowledge personalized learning, art barrier-free appreciation, spiritual exchange, life and entertainment, cultural prosperity era is coming. An important topic in the future development of the Internet is information conversion technology, in addition to online communication between everyone, how to achieve direct information conversion between the human brain and the computer, including information conversion from the human brain to the computer, from the computer to the human brain, and the two-way information conversion between the two brains, this technology can help people complete many unexpected things.
In April 2009, Adam Wilson, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin in the United States, wearing a hat full of electrodes, sent a 23-character Microblog message through his mind, thus realizing the conversion of information from the human brain to the computer. Everyone has seen the science fiction video, if scientists can develop a special chip, implanted in the back of the human brain directly with the network, so that you can naturally have a wealth of knowledge without reading or memorizing. If this is the case, the Internet will help humanity truly achieve a leap from the Internet of Everything to the Intelligence of All Things, and completely change the traditional model of human wisdom accumulation and cultural inheritance.
The fifth stage is the interconnection of life, which fulfills the human desire for health and longevity.
Health and longevity is the ultimate topic of human science and technology. Although the quality of human life is constantly improving, and medical technology often has breakthroughs, life, old age, illness and death are still the essential characteristics of natural human life at this stage. People often go to the hospital when they are sick and care about their bodies when they retire. With the continuous enrichment of health information management methods, the traditional disease-centered medical model will gradually be replaced by a health-centered and human-centered life management model, and the sages described in the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic two thousand years ago will become a common reality.
In the future, high-frequency physical condition monitoring will replace today's annual physical examination, through the monitoring of all-weather physiological indicators such as sleep, exercise, washing, eating, excretion, etc., everyone will form their own life indicator big data in the cloud for health assessment and health intervention. In the future, every time you brush your teeth, you can complete a metric detection, and the toothbrush will automatically transmit data to the cloud. Caring for such a comprehensive health system, people can understand life, disease, and health at a deeper level, and use big data to truly manage their own life and health.
Not only that, with the development of bionic technology, robotics, artificial intelligence technology, information transfer technology and personality information technology, it is not impossible to invent a certain sense of human "immortality" such as bionic humans. Some scientists predict that the future "bionic upgrade" of intelligent robots is expected to have the appearance of natural human body shapes, body characteristics, gender functions and autonomous consciousness. Human outlook on life and outlook on life can be subversive. (Li Zhimin, picture from the Internet)