Sublime

The Jarre was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plastics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain (New York: Quill, 1999).

it would be replacing the user by a different person.

Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market;

it is only a matter of a few years, soon after the turn of the millennium, until bandwidth becomes sufficiently capacious to make technically possible the “metaverse,” the alternative, cyberspace world imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson.

What are the major challenges we face?

Let’s go for global warming, peak oil and ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous computing?

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally