When I was younger, my father and I played a com­puter game called Myst. In Myst you take the role of an unnamed char­ac­ter that dis­cov­ers a book con­tain­ing a world. By touch­ing the image on the first page you are trans­ported into the world described within that book. Through­out the series of games (and sub­se­quent nov­els) you learn that an ancient soci­ety devel­oped the abil­ity to write worlds into books with a spe­cial lan­guage that made words into real­ity. I remem­ber when it first occurred to me that the authors of this video game had accom­plished the same feat that the ancient race had — the abil­ity to cre­ate worlds.

I soon learned that I too could make worlds that were only lim­ited by the scope of my own imag­i­na­tion. The tool for build­ing these worlds was a com­puter and a pro­gram­ming lan­guage. I wanted to become a maker of worlds for a video game com­pany, but soon found that the tools were dif­fi­cult to acquire and even more dif­fi­cult to learn. So, I looked for a way to build up my knowl­edge and found HTML and CSS — lan­guages for web­sites. I couldn’t pro­duce 3 dimen­sional worlds, but I could cre­ate very use­ful 2 dimen­sional ones. This is what I still do today. I’ve watched and attempted to catch up with all of the progress that com­put­ers have made since my early days of web devel­op­ment. What I and many oth­ers have noticed is that it doesn’t stop, it gets bet­ter, and it gets bet­ter faster.

Our abil­ity to cre­ate vir­tual worlds with pure infor­ma­tion and increas­ing com­plex­ity, res­o­lu­tion, and speed, ulti­mately leads us to some questions:

1. What can we do with these vir­tual worlds?
2. Will we be able to make worlds or char­ac­ters that are indis­tin­guish­able from real ones?
3. Is it pos­si­ble to manip­u­late real­ity with pure infor­ma­tion, in the same way that we do with vir­tual realities?

The best I can do is make edu­cated guesses about these ques­tions, but there are three par­a­digms likely to hap­pen in the near future that could shed some light on them.

The first par­a­digm is aug­mented real­ity. In the near future almost every prod­uct will have a com­puter in it. Soon after that, all of those objects will be hooked up to the inter­net. We will use this inter­net of things in com­bi­na­tion with vir­tual real­ity pro­gram­ming to cre­ate an aug­mented real­ity with addi­tional infor­ma­tion about the world over­laid seam­lessly onto it. It’s use­ful while con­sid­er­ing this to imag­ine your com­puter screens are win­dows into a vir­tual world. Now take away the screen, but leave all of the infor­ma­tion. While walk­ing down the street, you will be able to see or know what your coor­di­nates are, or where the near­est cof­fee shop is. This isn’t sur­pris­ing, we already have these capa­bil­i­ties in our cell phones. Aug­mented real­ity takes that two inch screen, blows it up full size, and dis­ap­pears in the process.

Beyond over­lay­ing vir­tual infor­ma­tion, there are poten­tial ways to cre­ate phys­i­cal objects with pro­gram­ming. Cel­lu­lar biol­ogy and engi­neer­ing — the sec­ond par­a­digm — each study the rela­tion­ship between DNA (the pro­gram) and the cel­lu­lar com­po­nents (the hard­ware). Cells are pro­gram­ma­ble con­struc­tors — they build phys­i­cal parts from infor­ma­tion in the DNA pro­gram. In com­puter terms, that would be like writ­ing a pro­gram, burn­ing it onto a CD, and then watch­ing the CD build a com­puter around it, autonomously . DNA pro­grams can be writ­ten and then exe­cuted in a sim­i­lar way to com­puter pro­grams, but the results are phys­i­cal (and inci­den­tally alive). As we speak, sci­en­tists are reverse engi­neer­ing the mechan­ics of thou­sands of life forms. Research into genetic pro­gram­ming is well under­way, and we are already start­ing to see the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cod­ing for phys­i­cal construction.

The cel­lu­lar engi­neer­ing rev­o­lu­tion will give us a leg-up on the third par­a­digm, nan­otech­nol­ogy. As men­tioned above, we are reverse engi­neer­ing the parts built by mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion to make our own mol­e­c­u­lar machines. How­ever, the real break­through will be cre­at­ing our own nan­otech­nol­ogy from the ground up. (I won’t go into it here, but there are some seri­ous doubts about the via­bil­ity of some nan­otech­nolo­gies.) If we can over­come the inher­ent dan­gers and dif­fi­cul­ties of nan­otech­nol­ogy, we will have the abil­ity to trans­form real­ity with pure infor­ma­tion. Nanobots will be able to recre­ate almost any object with raw mate­r­ial and infor­ma­tion to atomic pre­ci­sion. This is pos­si­ble because a nanobot is sim­ply an atom mover. It can pick one up here and put it there. When atoms can be rearranged with infor­ma­tion, vir­tual aug­mented real­ity and actual real­ity will inter­min­gle and become indis­tin­guish­able. Soft­ware and hard­ware will merge.

It’s dif­fi­cult to pre­dict when these advances might hap­pen. Com­puter pro­gram­ming of vir­tual real­i­ties is already pos­si­ble. Cur­rent desk­top com­put­ers can cre­ate very con­vinc­ing spe­cial effects that can quite eas­ily pass the scrutiny of the aver­age human eye. The genet­ics rev­o­lu­tion is in it’s infancy but is already show­ing enor­mous promise. It would be wise to watch genetic engi­neer­ing closely as it’s advances will tell us much about the timetable for advance­ments in nanotechnology.

We are in a unique posi­tion in his­tory. We have the power to cre­ate worlds, and our pow­ers are increas­ing expo­nen­tially. Con­sider how lucky we are to be given that priv­i­lege. Com­puter pro­gram­ming is becom­ing the lan­guage, and we the authors of reality.