DESIGN FICTION: Great Hall of Possibilities
DESIGN FICTION: Great Hall of Possibilities
Copenhagen, 2036
The cavernous hall stretches out before you beyond the limits of the eye. Miles, upon miles of towering oak shelves, looming overhead and into the heavens.
On these formidable shelves, laddered into the dark reaches of the above, sits each and every invention conceivable. Billions upon billions of artefacts and documents spanning wall to distant wall, floor to star-strewn ceiling.
This incredible cathedral is the Great Hall of Possibilities. The collection of all possible inventions.
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Walking through the hall, the inventions are not distributed randomly. Instead, they are placed with a very particular organisation. A defined, albeit organic structure. In one area sit all possible variations of axe - from rudimentary stone age axes of hunter-gatherers to today's carbon steel blades. To axes yet to be discovered - axes woven from nano-materials Axes grown from diamond.
Beside this area is a huge collection of chainsaws, laser-cutters and other evolutions and off-shoots of the axe.
And so it is for every other possible invention.
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Now, three things are noteworthy about the Great Hall.
Most items near other items are almost identical with only very minor modifications. Our carbon steel axe could have slight variations in size or shape or composition.
A lot of items are fairly poor. Weird variations that don't do much. Variations that are suboptimal for the problem they intend to solve. The good stuff is rare.
Most of the items have never existed. They have yet to be invented. Or never will.
Close to artefacts that you may be familiar with, most items have never been brought out of the Great Hall and into the world. We had no reason to search all possibilities within those niches.
On top of this, whole swathes of the Great Hall have never even been explored. Nobody has ever walked past those shelves - or even near them. The overwhelming majority of items have yet to be invented.
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Invention is a search of the Great Hall.
This search began deep in our hominin past. Exploration accelerated with the birth of civilisation, again during the first Industrial Revolution, and once more in the Internet Age.
Each invention shedding light on the shelves around it. Drawing our attention to what is possible to create. The more we explore the room, the more possibilities open before us.
Spend enough time wandering between the shelves of the Great Hall and you may begin to see where the most interesting possibilities sit.
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Do these virtual shelves really contain the inventions themselves? Or are they simply illusions. A cheap conjurers trick. Like the impression of gaming background-matter. Life-like, but simulated with simple rules-engines.
That depends. Yes and no. But mostly yes.
The room itself is real. It contains monstrous shelves and stretches forward as far as the eye can see. This is partially an optical illusion, owing to its donut-shaped design and ingenious use of mirrors.
The shelves themselves are in-reality empty. They are populated with the help of augmented reality masks handed out upon arrival at the Hall. These masks, are part of the outfit which visitors are required to wear. Monk-like robes and hooded cowl. The AR masks cover the entirety of the visible face. To onlookers, the faces appear as mirrors. To the wearer, digital imagery is projected forwards onto their field of vision. The robes are generally red. Senior researchers wear black. The most senior sages and leaders are permitted to wear white.
The use of garment is partially an experiential element to the cathedral. To help the user immerse themselves fully. To disconnect from the distractions outside the Great Hall. Partially too it’s a counter-tactic to espionage.
The inventions themselves are perusable. Any invention may be examined, with their details later sent the individual. But the Hall Guardians are sworn to protect the integrity of the archive itself. The superset of all inventions.
— — —
The Hall was founded on two principles. First, to make real the Thought Experiment of the Great Hall of Possibilities. In doing so, accelerate beneficial invention and discovery. Second, to accelerate the search for a unified theory of structured problem-solving.
As such, it is open to any researcher who pays the nominal fee. Those researchers are aided in how best to approach their search of the Great Hall. Mostly, that means learning to find the vicinity of their search. And learning how best to navigate permutations and contexts once they've found their niche.
However, the institution is not keen to share the totality of the archive, or the insights therein - fearing a monopolisation of invention.
Equally, they fear the discovery and harmful application of forbidden knowledge by amateurs or bad actors. These forbidden inventions, often, but not exclusively are weapons and harmful pathogens.
The Hall is deliberate in its design-decision to simulate all invention but to incorporate benevolent-use alignment principles within the underlying display algorithm. All inventions are explored, it is not the role of the Hall to moderate, curate and curtail discovery. However, security clearance is required to access certain vicinities.
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The scope and scale of the simulation is mind-bending.
As of writing, the existing archive contained 457 billion inventions, and growing at 11 billion per day. Permutation-exploration is carried out by proprietary gen-search algorithms. However, those algorithms are fed by user requests and visitor movement. Those areas that are investigated by visitors will receive further attention from the invention-search algorithm. In doing so, human use and curiosity is harnessed.
A visitor never steps into the same library twice.
I asked Rasmus Bjornsson, a curator and algorithm-designer, whether the inventions I was seeing were 'real'?
"Yes, very much so. Right now, I can look at a mirror display of what you are seeing on these shelves. But I get to see some additional meta-data. On this shelf before us, we can see 180 inventions. 30% of these had already been simulated in the catalogue. The remaining 70% were generated as you approached, or are currently being simulated. So if you look up at that area there, the details of those inventions have not been simulated until you move closer and gesture to investigate them. We may see a delay of a couple of seconds if we choose one that is particularly tricky to simulate and assess."
What about forbidden knowledge?
"We don't give out information about that beyond our general policies. That is a defensive and conservation strategy and we do it to ensure that the Great Hall is not co-opted by Bad Actors."
But, these possibilities are being generated as we speak, how do we assess whether some of them are harmful?
"What I can say is this. Firstly, some entire areas are considered Forbidden. These are the usual ones. Advanced weaponry, pathogens, adversarial illness design, methods of transmission of viruses. All the bad stuff we know about. Then we have some additional filtering rules we apply to what is generated on-the-fly. You will see that these are fairly lenient. That many of the inventions you see could easily be re-purposed for harm. That bio-symbiotic filtration system for example, could be utilised to deliver pathogens. We don't screen for those types of misuse."
And how much is filtered?
"I can't say. Will not."
But right here? How much is filtered?
"Right here in this vicinity, there are 1,400 near-variations that are deemed overtly malicious and deliberately life-threatening or contain some aspect of relentless-destruction."
And what of the non-filtered inventions. What percentage of those are potentially harmful?
"I would estimate in this vicinity - perhaps 15%. Maybe a little more if combined with some core mal-tech or malevolent AI. You can see why we screen so thoroughly for access to the Great Hall. We don't want even benign technologies falling into the hands of Bad Actors, or even commercialised by entities who may use them to undermine Knowledge and FreeSearch.
But again. There are limits.
If we are too strict, the archive becomes a gimmick. And a bottleneck to discovery. And that is against our Charter."
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The Hall and the surrounding Research Cathedral is permanent base to 78,000 researchers, inventors and designers. Narya, Dreamspike and Determinist have all opted to base their research lab HQs in the adjoining district. The Great Hall is the Mecca of the Structured Patterning of Problem-solving movement. By extension it is the heart of frontier knowledge work in design, invention, algorithm design, speculative design and meta-design.
It's adherents and worshippers are a varied bunch. The priest-class are researchers who focus on the discovery of underlying design principles and structure of knowledge and invention. These are the cultural descendants of the founder Thomas Gilchrist and his school of Meta-Invention. This group is a mixed bunch ranging from the highly theoretical, the mathematical, and design eccentrics all the way to the evangelical and neo-religious.
Traditional and Symbolic Designers and their conceptual and speculative off-shoots make up another 20-30% of permanent researchers.
Then there's a long-tail mix of lone inventors, wanderers and the insatiably curious. The Hall has attracted also, those Completists and Collectors who crave to understand a more full 'variation of things'. The Hall has needed to introduce pre-screening for some of the more harmful offshoots of this group owing to a number of mental-health incidents centred on fixation and obsession with the infinities of variation. in the earliest days of the Hall, there were cases of visitors refusing to leave after searching for days. There is talk of a new entry in the American Symptom of Disorders for visitors who become addicted and unable to leave. Those strict time-limits are now enforced by a security caste, wearing distinctive primal-green robes.
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Outside I got talking to one researcher who specialises in Alternative Historical Design. He uses the Hall to explore the turns that humanity never took. Inventions that were adjacent to those in our history and within grasp given the knowledge and materials of the day. He consults with movie studios, palaeontologists, archeologists, historians and of course anthropologists. From his work, he says it is possible to pinpoint if a new archeological find is consistent with the directional drift of a civilisation or a new direction in design and perhaps peopling.
It's also painful he says. So many opportunities where inventions and discoveries were "Right there! Staring us in the eye, and we just blundered past them. The lives that could have been saved. The future we could have now, if we had only taken those branches that the Tree of Invention had offered to us so much earlier."
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That notion of addiction, of overwhelm, of religious fervour simmers here. This is not a place of dispassionate research. Of academic detachment.
The possibility of what could be, what could have been, what will come next. It's infectious. My visit here was sparked by pure inquisitiveness and a notion that my own research could be helped by what I felt was a useful Tool for Thinking.
I've spent a fortnight here now.
And frankly, I don't see myself leaving anytime soon.
This is the Grail of Discovery. The Everything Palace. The possibilities here are endless.
To return to Oxford, is to return to the Dark Ages.
We have entered the Age of Infinity. And I wish to sit at its source.