Mirror Worlds

A comment to my recent post “Streamnets” caught my attention to dig further because it mentioned the concept of Mirror Worlds, a written work by David Gelernter. It’s a fascinating book, quite ahead of its time – it was published back in 1993.

According to Gelernter, “[Mirror Worlds] are software models of some chunk of reality, some piece of the real world going on outside your window”. These pieces of the real world can be of diverse natures:

At this very instant, traffic on every street is moving or blocked, your local government is making brilliant decisions, public money is flowing out at a certain rate, the police are deployed in some pattern, there’s a fire here and there, the schools are staffed and attended in some way or other, oil and cauliflower are selling for whatever in local markets… – Mirror Worlds, p. 3

It seems to me that what the book was describing back then is starting to take place right now. We’re actually taking advantage of such Mirror Worlds to make decisions and orchestrate our own lives.