Two very good books available online

Two very good books available online in full text:

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

Postsingular by Rudy Rucker

As I always do in these cases, I will also buy the hardcopies on Amazon to encourage the practice of making good books available online.

Posted by G.P. on 11/30 at 03:45 PM
English • News • (0) Comments • Permalink • Print

In defense of Superlative Technodevelopmental Formulations

In his comments to my Defense of Superlativity, Dale Carrico politely describes my ideas as “idiocy”. To make his point, he has produced a masterpiece of nonsensical hair-splitting at the grandest level, in the spirit of the best ideologically motivated demonstrations that 2+2=5. Some people have really elevated mental masturbation to a very creative art form.

Dale is perplexed because he would expect a “Defense of Superlativity” against his critique to make some effort to address at least one of the five charges mentioned below, and it does not seem to him that I made much of an effort to do so.

But wait a minute. I am making just one point, and a very simple one: that “superlative technologies” like immortality and mind uploading are compatible with our current scientific understanding of reality and, someday, may be developed as practical engineering options. Dale has said many times that he refuses to engage “Superlative Technocentrics” in debates on the actual, scientific and engineering aspects of superlative technologies. He only wants to discuss on his nebulous terms, about “(sub)cultural identity politics” (?), “elitist, alarmist, escapist, reductionist attitudes and rhetoric that are especially well suited to incumbent interests and anti-democratic politics” (???) and this kind of things. If he refuses to talk in my language, why the hell should I want to talk in his language?

OK Dale let’s see your points. What you have called Superlative Technodevelopmental Formulations seem to you:

One: To be hyperbolically unrealistic and sensationalist in ways that derange urgently necessary public deliberation about technoscience issues.

Well, first prove “unrealistic” instead of assuming it. Many people who know much more science and engineering than you would not agree. Second, your “Superlative Technodevelopmental Formulations” are not very much related to urgently necessary public deliberation about technoscience issues, so I still don’t see how one can derange the other. We are still far from public deliberation about civil rights for uploads, and the prospect of mind uploading has _nothing_ to do with today’s health care policy. So, I don’t see your point. If your point is that Superlative R&D can divert public research funding that should be used for more urgent things, my reply is that I do not see much evidence that a significant amount of funding is being diverted, and that one of the strength of the public research system is that it allocates moderate resources also to basic research without immediate applications. If your point is that I should follow your priorities instead of mine, then there is not much to discuss.

Two: To exacerbate irrational fears and fantasies about agency typically activated in any case by discussions of technology.

These are _your_ fears and fantasies. Technology is whatever was invented after you are born. Remember what luddites said about communication technologies in the 70s and 80s? “Dehumanizing” and all that? The younger generations have cheerfully embraced the Internet, cell phones, SMS, P2P networks and Facebook without thinking twice. Future generations will also, I think, embrace brain implants, memory transfer and indefinite lifespans without thinking twice.

Three: To lend themselves to faith-based social forms and identity-based political models that are psychologically harmful and dangerously anti-democratizing.

You can say that of everything. Should we discuss the cult-of-personality, charismatic leadership, intolerance of dissent, thought policing and internal purges sooo typical of socialist parties? Yes my friend, socialist parties have had all that and worse. Should we then dismiss socialism as psychologically harmful and dangerously anti-democratizing? Up to you.

Four: To facilitate elitist, alarmist, escapist, reductionist attitudes and rhetoric that are especially well suited to incumbent interests and anti-democratic politics, whatever the professed politics of those who advocate them.

If you mean that Superlative Technologies are Bad because they will be developed and used by military-industrial interests, wait a minute. I had formed the impression that you thought of Superlative Technologies as nonsensical and impossible delusions of sci-fi geeks or Robot God cultists. Industry and the military complex would hardly invest money and resources on impossible dreams, would they. Then Superlative Technologies are not so impossible after all? Interesting. No, I see that I was making a wrong assumption - you never discuss concrete things but “reductionist attitudes and rhetoric”. So your point is just that our Superlative Technodevelopmental Formulations are “well suited” to incumbent interests. Well. So what? Democracy is also _very_ well suited to them, since they can often buy enough votes to win. Should we throw democracy away because it (like everything else) is a double edged weapon that can be used also by the bad guys? I don’t think so.

Five: To represent in their extremity a clarifying and symptomatic expression of the basic irrationality and authoritarianism of prevailing discourses of “Global Development” and “Technoscientific Progress” in an era of neoliberal and neoconservative politics.

Similar comment as above. That neoliberals and neoconservatives like ice cream does not mean that I cannot like ice cream, it just means that ice cream is good for both. “Global Development” and “Technoscientific Progress” are _good_ things, even if also neoliberals and neoconservatives say so.

Posted by G.P. on 11/29 at 11:42 AM
English • Views • (28) Comments • Permalink • Print

In defense of “Superlativity”

Many transhumanist ideas are products of fertile and creative imaginations. Some people would add “unhampered by the normal constraints of scientific and philosophical discipline”. Is that so? My answer: NO, or at least not necessarily.

The history of science and engineering show that in some case it is (e.g. perpetual motion machines), and in some cases it is not (e.g. heavier than air flying machines).

A perpetual motion machine is not compatible with the basic laws of physics as they are understood today. This has also been claimed for heavier than air machines, but in that case the claim was wrong.

The history of science and engineering shows that, if something is logically and physically possible, and if there is sufficient demand for it, it will probably be achieved at some point.

Given a highly imaginative engineering project, we have to choose whether to take it seriously as an airplane, or to dismiss it as a perpetual motion machine. This choice depends of course on many factors, including of course scientific and technical knowledge and experience, but also including many unspoken and at times unconscious assumptions, often emotional in nature, about our reality.

Let’s come now to the “superlative” examples.

One of the assumptions I make is that there is no such a thing as “supernatural” - everything in the universe can be, in principle, analyzed by science. According to this assumption, I think our bodies and minds are machines: very complex machines that are not presently understood in great detail, but nonetheless machines whose detailed blueprint can be in principle known, reproduced and improved. There is no mysterious “vital force” or supernatural “essence” forever beyond the domains of scientific analysis and engineering tinkering.

I also assume that I am the information encoded in my brain. Why? Simple - because I don’t see what else I might be. It seems to me that any other assumption would fall into mystic, magic, and supernatural realms that are completely foreign to my basic assumptions about reality.

On the basis of this assumption and conclusion, I think someday we will be able to upload human personalities to suitable computational supports, much longer lived than biological brains. This is, I believe, fully compatible with our current scientific understanding of the universe.

Of course, opinions about development timescales may differ. Ray Kurzweil sees it happening in only a few decades, while other thinkers believe it cannot take less than thousands of years. My own forecast, based only on my engineering intuition and understanding of current developments, is somewhat intermediate: I imagine operational mind uploading technology deployed by the end of this century or in the next century.

This makes me happy for my grandchildren, who will live in a very interesting world, but I don’t see mind uploading developed during my lifetime. So, on the basis that any finite probability is better than zero, I am signed up for cryonic suspension. The “natural vs. supernatural” argument above tells me that cryonics works in principle - there is no mystic “soul” that irretrievably leaves a frozen brain after death by decree of god.

Does it work in practice? Of course I don’t know. I could die in a plane crash without any possibility to retrieve the brain. Or the brain could not reach the cryonic facility in useful time because of legal complications. Or the current cryonic suspension technology could not be suitable. Or the cryonic facility could be bombed by terrorists. Or…

But, on the basis of the considerations above, I am quite willing to try. Actually I think that the odds are not that good (there many things that can go wrong, so there is a high probability that something will go wrong), but a small probability of surviving death is better than no probability of surviving death. Surviving temporary death by cryonics may permit reaching a future where mind uploading technology can provide a much longer life.

And I think the future could be a beautiful and interesting place. Of course it could also be a very ugly place but, one thing is sure, it will be what we make of it. The possibility that I could live to see it gives me hope, energy and drive.

Summary of this long post: I agree that we should not sell unscientific snake-oil, but I think a very long and interesting life enabled by mind uploading technology, and cryonics as a bridge to reach a point in time where this option is available, is an engineering project compatible with our current scientific knowledge. I do not intend to sell this a certainty, but I do intend to propose it as a possibility.

Note: this is just the “cold” vision that has always been proposed by transhumanists, and it is not yet sufficient to make transhumanism emotionally appealing. I will write another post with ideas on how this vision can be expanded to become also emotionally appealing.

Posted by G.P. on 11/26 at 07:03 PM
English • Views • (12) Comments • Permalink • Print

Banking and e-money in Second Life (and beyond)

In the image below, my Second Life avatar is operating a virtual ATM of BNT Financial to deposit or withdraw some Linden Dollars. Or perhaps he wants to exchange Linden Dollars for real money, or money for lindens. We see more and more frequently similar scenes in SL. Then of course there are virtual stock exchanges where you can trade stock of companies that exist only within the SL economy. Looks like an interesting trend.

image

BNT Financial is a part of BNT Holdings. Brautigan and Tuck (BNT) Holdings was founded in the virtual world of Second Life in October 2006. CEO, IntLibber Brautigan had a vision for a virtual world built on the principles and vision of Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash, where a free-market ungoverned future was possible through contract law and personal accountability. BNT also operate the Ancapistan Capital Exchange, providing not only stock exchange services, but currency exchange, currency futures, and land futures exchange services in SL, and interworld. ACE was founded on the premise that the L$ is not fictional, SL is a business platform, and our businesses in SL are not games.

BNT Financial only invests in the fast growing SL economy and pays a 0.05% daily interest, approximately 22% annually. I have some little money in BNT Financial, and some little money in BNT stock on ACE, and recommend BNT to all those who make some money in SL. Especially to transhumanists: this is the business of one of us. Look for BNT ATMs in uvvy islands and other transhumanist hangouts. See this recent interview with IB/ML.

Most transhumanists in SL know that IntLibber Brautigan is our transhumanist friend Mike Lorrey, who certainly cannot be accused of thinking small. He is one of those who have taken the metaverse of Snow Crash very seriously and seen the metaverse as a business platform. He is also an outspoken Libertarian and member of the Free State Project - one of those who walked the walk and moved to New Hampshire to build “strong communities where your rights are respected, and people exercise responsibility for themselves and in their dealings with each other”. I do not share Mike’s quite radical libertarianism - I am one of those who think that there are no such things as one-size-fits-all “magic bullets” in politics and economics - but certainly share some of his views and values. See this video on blip.tv for his September 11 speech in the SL reconstruction of the WTC (image below).

image

Though I am not always against government regulation, I have the feeling that today there is too much regulation, and far too much paperwork. The Internet should be used to save time. I want to use my time to make some money, and not to fill form after form to process and justify each and every transaction. So I have always been interested in Internet payment systems, and thank Paypal for all the time it saves. Of course also Paypal is becoming more and more time consuming because of regulatory pressure. I really wish to see a system for global citizens freely exchanging usable e-currency with only a minimum of regulation. Of course I am aware that criminals and terrorists would also use the system for privacy and money laundering, but I think a good response to criminals and terrorists should NOT also make life impossible for the rest of us.

Second Life is a good parallel microeconomy platform because it permits making quick and efficient P2P and B2B micropayments. The main disadvantage of the system is that it is controlled by a single company, but that will change sooner or later. Of course at some point one needs to take money out of SL to pay bills, and that is the point where paperwork and taxes come in. Again, I am not in against (reasonable) taxes in principle, but very much against wasting time.

Other e-payment systems are real “alternative currencies” backed by gold or other precious metals. The best known are E-gold and Pecunix. Both can be bought and sold at independent exchanges live Vertoro. E-gold has been under severe regulatory pressure, Pecunix (in Switzerland) not yet. Two of the newest and hottest systems, eCache and Loom, are based on advanced schemes and algorithms and seem to offer much better privacy - like cash, but electronic cash that can be exchanged on the net. Look for entries on eCache and Loom on Digital Money World.

Like for exchanging music and movies on the net, I think this trend cannot be stopped. It is just too convenient for end users, and in the long run the “rest of the world” will have to adapt by finding alternative ways to compensate creative artists, fight criminals and pay for government. One of the comments to eCache : Anonymous Digital Bearer Certificates on Digital Money World is very interesting: “In the 1990s, the NSA tried stamp out independent cryptography software development and prosecute Phil Zimmerman after the source code to his PGP privacy suite was leaked on-line. This ‘disaster’ led almost directly to Netscape creating SSL, the technology that protects most web-based financial transactions. By trying to stamp out E-gold, which is account based and relatively traceable, the Secret Service has now set off a ‘digital arms race’ which has already resulted in the launch of eCache, a non-account-based, or digital banknote, currency. It doesn’t take a genius to see that, like the spread of crypto privacy software before it, vibrant financial services with end-user controlled privacy are emerging… like it or not”.

Posted by G.P. on 11/19 at 11:04 AM
English • Views • (2) Comments • Permalink • Print

Charlie Stross in Second Life

These days one just cannot keep up with all the interesting things that happen in Second Life. Today as soon as I went in I had the good luck to run into Sophrosyne Stenvaag who told me about their plans for Extropia Core in Second Life and that she was about to go to attend an interview with Charlie Stross (YES! The author of Accelerando - one of my 3 favorite SF writers with Rudy Rucker and of course Greg Egan). See a short videoclip of the interview on blip.tv. I talked to Charlie who promised to do a talk for transhumanists in Second Life. I will contact him to schedule the talk, in a format lecture + Q/A like we used for Kevin Warwick.

image

The interview with Stross took place at the amphitheater at Dr. Dobb’s Island (aptly named “Life 2.0"). About 70 avatars attended. There is a very good coverage at Information Week:

“Our guest for our next GridTalk is science-fiction writer Charles Stross, whose most recent novel Halting State, is set in the near future—just 11 years from now, when virtual worlds, massively multiplayer games, advanced mobile computing, and augmented reality are a part of daily life. Stross will discuss the world he created for Halting State, and how networked technologies are likely to evolve and affect our daily life and business over the course of the next decade. You can join the discussion in Second Life or on the Web, or listen afterwards as a downloadable audio file or a podcast. Scroll to the end of this post for more details how to participate.

It’s really hard to predict the future on the scale Stross does. Imagine yourself in 1996. Back then, would you have predicted the ubiquity of smartphones, user-generated content on the Internet (blogs weren’t even invented yet), Facebook, MySpace, the massive American entertainment industry grinding to a complete halt over a dispute over Internet video, and post-9/11 geopolitics? Could you have imagined, in your bones, what it would be like to live in that world?

That’s what Stross accomplishes with Halting State. In Stross’s year 2018, most people wear transparent eyeglasses that are hooked up to computers and networks that overlay electronic images and information over their view of the real world around them. These electronic glasses display electronic street signs and directions. Police see overlays of the criminal activity at every building they see. A fencing enthusiast gets to practice her swordplay in a visual representation of a gothic castle. Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and virtual worlds like Second Life are part of day-to-day life. And the characters in Halting State take it all for granted. Halting State is a well-realized and intelligent treatise about near-future effects of networked technology. It’s also an extremely entertaining, thrilling, and funny crime caper novel”. 

Posted by G.P. on 11/13 at 05:29 PM
Blog • (0) Comments • Permalink • Print

“F### death!” vs. anti-superlative apologists of death

I have stopped posting to the always interesting Amor Mundi blog edited by Dale Carrico (because I have no time for debating people who think insults are arguments), but I still read it often. It is a useful window on their mindset. See my previous post on Anti transhumanist thought cops for a background.

When I and other sensible people stopped posting there, and left them to congratulate each other for their shared narrow-mindedness, I thought they would at least be happy repeating their anti-superlative blah blah to each other. Instead, they started immediately insulting each other. In the comment thread of post predictably titled Superlative Boo Hoo, Dale begins by stating that “Those who disagree with me and who are now also beginning to get annoyed can go screw themselves”.

Then one of Dale’s followers friendly invites another to consider using a more readable and understandable posting style, and receives a “fuck you” in reply, soon followed by “the rest of you can stick your heads in the toilet”. Yes, I have quoted out of context, but please read the exchange to see how the quotes are quite representative of the context. I cannot help thinking that these folks just like being rude, and will take pleasure in insulting each other when there is no external enemy to insult. What an illuminating example of intellectual and emotional maturity.

But this is only about form, let’s see some content.

In the comment thread of a post titled Business of Death, one infidel dares mentioning cryonics, and is immediately flamed by Dale: “By the way, you do realize that you are going to die, don’t you?”.

My answer to that question would be:

I realize that, with a very high probability, I am going to die. I think operational anti-aging, rejuvenation and mind uploading technologies will be developed someday, but probably not during my biological lifetime. I am signed up for cryonics, but I fear something may not work. I am not thinking of technical problems here - on the contrary I think at some point reviving today’s cryonic patients will be a trivial engineering problem - but fear that before that time regulatory PC zealots will manage to declare cryonics illegal and throw the bodies away.

So, I am probably going to die. Tough. So what? I will not be the only one, people have died until now and will continue to die for some more decades. Dear armchair psychologists, I am sorry to contradict your elegant analysis full of nice and empty words, but I don’t fear death that much. Find another one.

At the same time I consider death not as a philosophical problem, but as an engineering problem. Quoting from my post on Common Sense Transhumanism: Aging is like farting, and dying is like diarrhea. Both are unchosen biological accidents waiting for a good engineer with a good screwdriver. The sooner we can live without shitting our pants, the better. This is transhumanism in a nutshell, as I see it. Of course I could have chosen an example not related to things that most people find vulgar and disgusting, but I think this formulation has the merit of removing residual associations with certain mistaken notions of aging and death as good things, and showing in plain and simple words that they are disgusting things.

This must have been one of the reasons why they have chosen a really excellent name for the recently established Fuck Death Foundation (see also their website at http://www.fuckdeath.org/). I love the name because it tries to remove any vestigial reverence for the “sacred nature” of our limits, that even modern “intellectuals” fall for. Death is not “bad, but...”. It is just bad. So Fuck death is the proper attitude.

By the way, I use “immortality” as a shorthand for “indefinite lifespan”, realize that the notion of self is bound to undergo deep changes during an indefinite lifespan enabled by technologies like mind uploading, realize that probably we will not be able to survive the heat death of the universe or something of that sort, and don’t care in the least. Please enjoy your abstract PC prejudices and let me enjoy my indefinite lifespan.

Dale’s and cohorts’ replies to the guy who dares mentioning cryonics are full of things like “Well, that didn’t take very long. One more Robot Techno-Immortalist Cultist brings on the crazy”, “Don’t blame me for your mortality, poor sad beleaguered True Believer”, “You’ve gone off the rails, and it is very much a matter of the company you are keeping”, and many other statements full of respect for others’ points of view, like for example “Another comment thread derailed by Superlativity. What a pack of loons”.

Well, Dale does try to make two points. One, that he considers very important, is “It is crucial to disarticulate the basic irrationality of The Denial of Death for embodied sociable narratively coherent beings in a finite universe from things like—informed, non-duressed, non-normavizing consensual healthcare in an era of unprecedented emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapy”. I am not going to waste too much time trying to understand what all these elegant and big words mean - I think it is a restatement of Dale’s well known condemnation of imagination as a danger for serious people who want to do serious things. I believe I must have said a few times what I think of this nonsense.

But the best is: “we people are all of us finite beings, forever prone to disease, accident, violence, betrayal, novelty, and fantasies about shiny robot bodies or angelic digital ones and so on rest on deep confusions about the actually embodied status of mind”.

Nice and poetic words. But Greg Egan has said it better: “We humans are fallen creatures; we’ll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery”. Egan also explains the origins of this deathist meme: “Even with the language graft, Yatima could make little sense of this, and the translation into Modern Roman was equally opaque. Ve dredged the library for clarification; half the speech seemed to consist of references to a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators”.

The keyword here is theistic. They claim to have shed religious superstitions and of course they claim to be PC atheists, but they are saying exactly the same things that religions have always said to enslave the masses and stay in power: we must accept and respect our limits with reverence and humility, and do not try to gain forbidden knowledge and power (or else - think of what happened to poor Icarus and Prometheus). My summary: bullshit, or even better chickenshit. Of course, for them transhumanism, defined by Fukuyama as “a strange liberation movement” that wants “nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints”, is the most dangerous idea.

Posted by G.P. on 11/13 at 07:42 AM
English • Views • (23) Comments • Permalink • Print

My =giulio page

I purchased my iname and am now =giulio on the net. Soon I will be able to log in the myriad of Web2.0 services that I use by just typing =giulio and a single password. That looks great. Also, at some point I will be able to maintain just one profile (instead of separate profiles for Facebook, Linkedin etc.) and the system will take care of propagating my profile. In some sense, the Internet itself will be the social network.

My main page on the XRI registry is http://xri.net/=giulio/(+index). This page is a set of hidden links to my blog, personal page, company site, facebook profile, Linkedin profile etc. The link http://xri.net/=giulio/(+contact) or simply http://xri.net/=giulio takes to a contact form where visitors can send email to me after authenticating themselves with their openid. The iname =giulio belongs to me, and if I want I can transfer it to another service provider just like a web domain name.

Openid and Inames, two open and non proprietary standards, look very promising as enabling services for the social web and, I think, will permit creating personal hubs linked by social applications like Opensocial and the Facebook platform, but with the user in control of her or his identity.

Posted by giulio on 11/09 at 07:54 AM
English • News • (0) Comments • Permalink • Print

CSI:NY in Second Life - preview of the future of TV

The CSI:NY show featuring Second Life and the CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life have been among the most talked metaverse news of 2007. From the NY Times: The lead detective on the hit CBS series “CSI: NY,” Mac Taylor, is a pretty conventional television hero: like his colleagues on the two other “CSI” franchises, he uses science to follow the evidence and catch the bad guys. But in the episode for Oct. 24, Taylor, played by Gary Sinise, finds himself entering the computer-based virtual world known as Second Life.

image

Gwyneth Llewelyn’s Don’t miss the CSI:NY “Down the Rabbit Hole” featuring Second Life! has very interesting comments and some advice for those who have missed the episode on TV. The plot is fast-paced, clean and simple as in most CSI episodes: the good guys hunt, stalk, find and catch the bad guys, this time not only in the real world but also in the metaverse. A killer has taken control of the popular Second Life avatar “Venus” - a popular fictional character, “the Paris Hilton of Second Life” - by torturing her previous owner to get the password and killing her, and uses Venus’ avatar to contact new victims in Second Life. In the image below, Taylor talks to the avatar of the killer in Second Life.

image

The killer copies the look of her stolen avatar when she goes out to kill in real life (image below). Who is the killer? We don’t know yet. At the end of the episode of October 24 we don’t know yet who is the killer - (s)he (?) managed to escape in both RL and SL - and will have to wait for another episode in 2008 to find out.

image

In the meantime we can participate in the hunt for the killer in Second Life. On the website of the CSI:NY Virtual Experience we can sign up for the Finding Venus game: “On October 24, Detective Mac Taylor chased a murderer, Venus, into Second Life. She’s on the loose, and her virtual body count is rising. Track her down before she kills again!”. I have only visited the CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life as a virtual tourist and not really played the game, but I am sure that the creators must have disseminated the virtual world with valuable hints that will permit the more astute players to find Venus in both realities. For example: “We’ve put a trace for Venus on every camera in the city. We’ve received our first image! Head to the Venus crime lab to study the photo in the lab, and then go out into the field and try to find where the photo was taken”.

image

The CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life is a recreation of some typical New York city blocks over a few SL sims. When I visited there were about 50 avatars exploring the sims and participating in the Venus hunt. Many avatars were in the orientation and welcome area: the CSI:NY Virtual Experience is geared mainly at newcomers. In fact, it is expected that one million new players will come to Second Life from the huge CSI audience over the next few weeks. Expert SL users tend to forget that the SL learning curve may be too steep for casual players who don’t live and breathe computer systems like we do. The Electric Sheep Company, creators of CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life, have taken this into account by designing ergonomic and easy to navigate sims, and even developing a special and more ergonomic CSI-themed SL viewer ("OnRez") for new users. From the website: “For the BEST Virtual CSI: NY experience, make sure you have the OnRez Second Life viewer”. The SL pictures in this article have been taken with the OnRez viewer.

image

This is a very interesting initiative and one of the first examples of mature use of virtual worlds by the entertainment industry. It will bring many new users to Second Life and increase the media visibility of the show and its sponsor Cisco Systems. I think an interesting twist would be filming some of the SL scenes for the second episode in the actual CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life, to give fans the option of seeing their own SL avatar in the TV show. I am sure this is the beginning of an interesting trend to mix and merge TV and film entertainment with virtual worlds. But it is still a first weak coupling between TV/film and the metaverse - I am sure the evolution of the TV/film industry will see a much stronger coupling with virtual worlds.

image

The CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life is “only” a companion to the TV show. But with the evolution of online VR technology, at some point virtual worlds will BE the show. From the comfort of our 2017 living room, perhaps watching a big screen like in the CSI:NY image below but probably also using highly immersive VR gear (glasses, gloves etc.), we will experience shows by walking around in high fidelity 3D VR worlds with high fidelity avatars of the actors reproduced in VR through motion tracking and capturing technology. We will be able to go back and watch a scene from a closer distance or from another point of view. And it will be interactive, perhaps with the possibility to activate a fork in the plot like in a role playing game, but certainly with the possibility to interact with the in-world advertisements.

image

Then, with brain interfacing technology and full sensorial stimulation, we will be able to BE in the show. This has been long foreseen by science fiction writers like Greg Bear in Slant ("Performers commit pornography of the soul, sharing their sexual and emotional experience with an audience of millions through a direct neural link, the Yox") and Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age ("A term (short for “interactive") used by Neal Stephenson to describe a form of elite interactive entertainment, in which a live human performer (a “‘ractor") working from a computer-provided script, improvises in real-time with paying customers, over a virtual reality network"). It will slowly but steadily become reality in the next one or two decades.

Posted by G.P. on 11/05 at 06:41 PM
English • Views • (11) Comments • Permalink • Print

Open social networks

The announcement (Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle) of the Google’s Opensocial platform has certainly been the most discussed IT news item in the last few days.

image

(Source image and credits)

There have been enthusiastic comments by well-known and influential people, less enthusiastic comments of industry observers who see this as one more step toward Google owning the Internet, and balanced comments that try to see the good and the bad points. See also OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People.

I also favor a balanced view. This is clearly a Google move against Microsoft /Facebook, and the Opensocial platform is not as open as they say (at this moment it requires the Google Gadgets platform, which is not open). It is certainly more open than the Facebook platform, but not very significantly so. At the same time, it is a step toward at least more interoperability between social networks, and this is a good thing.

As a user, I just do not have the time for too many social sites. Social networks are all about saving time (better organization of personal and professional contacts, integrated discussion space, discovery of people and resources, etc.) but “having” to be on too many social networks is a waste of time. The Web 2.0 is great but at this moment one must maintain an “identity” on too many sites to use it effectively. I wish to sign-on once and maintain a profile and a contact list on just one site, with the “system” taking care of replicating my profile on other sites. All three professional social networks that I use (mainly Viadeo, but also Linkedin and Xing) have joined Opensocial, so perhaps at some point I will be able to maintain my profile on one and export it to the others. Also, applications running on one network may be able to discover resources (new interesting contacts, calls for proposals) on other networks.

A partial list of social networks and service operators that have joined the Opensocial initiatives and participated in the opening event with their own demos is in the Opensocial blog on Campfire One: taking social applications to new frontiers. Interesting: “In fact, Viadeo, a business social network, says it believes that OpenSocial will soon become necessary, as business applications require very specialized knowledge, and no single social networking site can build out so many of these applications across verticals alone”. Viadeo is the first European partner to join Google’s initiative, and in my opinion the most usable professional social network. See the Mashable interview with Viadeo CEO Dan Serfaty to find out a little bit more about the company and how its involvement in OpenSocial came about.

Opensocial enables developers to write applications a la Facebook that will run on all social networks that have implemented Opensocial support (containers). Opensocial does not provide a single sign-on system - though it is easy to see the beginning of a push toward establishing the Google sign-on system as a de-facto single sign-on system. As a user, I would very much prefer a single sign-on system based on the fully open standard Openid, with value added services based on i-names. If a fully open, distributed metanetwork is established based on these open standards, then the Internet itself becomes the social network (as it should be).

Some bloggers have expressed fears that the Opensocial initiative, led by Google with the support of all the major players (but Facebook - too bad, as at this moment Facebook is by far the most usable and efficient social network) may kill open standards such as Openid in the cradle. I don’t think that so, because (at least as it is currently defined and implemented) Opensocial is an interoperability system and not an identity system.

Posted by G.P. on 11/03 at 12:19 PM
English • News • (0) Comments • Permalink • Print

Anti transhumanist thought cops

In the last couple of weeks I have been participating in a discussion on Dale Carrico’s blog Amor Mundi, one of my favorite blogs. The discussion was of course about one of Dale’s favorite themes: what he describes as “Superlative Technology Discourses (and the Sub(cult)ural Futurisms to which they are regularly connected)”. Dale is really a master writer, and reading his writings is always a pleasure even when one does not agree (as it is my case). Besides “Superlative Technology”, Dale also talks of a “Robot God” worshiped by transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, etc. Dale maintains a collection of links to his writings on this subject in his Superlative Summary. Michael Anissimov’s blog has a critique of Dale’s critique with many interesting comments at The Singularity Debate.

One of the clearest descriptions of Dale’s Superlative critique that I have seen, posted by another participant, is “I do think that those who have come to believe that their enthusiasm for the pseudo-scientific tropes of science-fiction constitute serious political and social initiatives are, at best, a priority distraction, and, at worse, a credibility danger to socially and politically progressive movements”.

Even as one full of enthusiasm for “the pseudo-scientific tropes of science-fiction”, which I would rather call “imaginative scientific and social speculations inspired by science-fiction literature”, I understand that this is a valid point (from their point of view). We transhumanists do spend part of our time in imaginative scientific and social speculations instead of dedicating it to whatever priorities they would like us to have, and it is certainly a fact that some PC ultra-rationalist and narrow-minded “serious people” can be scared of being associated with people who take immortality and uploading seriously.

If I did not care about “serious political and social initiatives, socially and politically progressive movements”, I would dismiss this argument by saying something like “Feel free to act according to your priorities, and I will feel free to act according to mine, thank you very much, and I don’t give a fuck about your credibility”. Since I do care about these things (that is why I read Dale’s blog), I hope we will find some way to ensure compatibility between transhumanism and politically progressive politics, but I am NOT going to give up ideas that are important to me because Dale says so.

Some excerpts from my own post to clarify my point of view:

Dale: The criticisms I seem to be getting are largely from people who would either deny the relevance of my own political, social, and cultural emphasis altogether (a denial that likely marks them as unserious as far as I’m concerned) or who disapprove of my political commitment to democracy, my social commitment to commons, and my cultural commitment to planetary multiculture (a disapproval that likely marks them as reactionaries as far as I’m concerned).
Me: Not my case, as I do not deny the relevance of your own political, social, and cultural emphasis, and approve of your political commitment to democracy, your social commitment to commons, and your cultural commitment to planetary multiculture.
I criticize your intolerance for those who, while basically agreeing with you on the points above, have ideas different from yours on other, unrelated things, and affirm their right to think with their own head.
Because, my friend, you will never persuade me that one who finds intellectual or spiritual pleasure in contemplating nanosanta-robot god-superlative technology-etc. cannot be a worthy political, social and cultural activists.
I can believe in Santa Claus and Eastern Bunny if I like, and still agree with you on political issues. Unless, of course, you persuade me that the two things are really incompatible. I will gladly take the Robot God and Easter Bunny then.

Dale: f you pretend your religious ritual makes you a policy wonk expect me to call bullshit; if you demand that people mistake your aesthetic preferences and preoccupations for scientific truths expect me to call bullshit; if you go from pleasure in to proselytizing for your cultural and subcultural enthusiasms expect me to call bullshit; if you seek legitimacy for authoritarian circumventions of democracy in a marginal defensive hierarchical sub(cult)ural organization or as a way to address risks you think your cronies see more clearly than the other people in the world who share those risks and would be impacted by your decisions, all in the name of “tolerance,” expect me to call bullshit.
Me: I believe I have said ad nauseam that I do not do or support any of the things mentioned besides “proselytizing for my cultural and subcultural enthusiasms”, which I think is perfectly normal. So, you should not call bullshit. Except that, of course, you will call it anyway.
And of course you are completely free to call bullshit when you want. Provided, that is, that you are not too surprised when others call bullshit on you.
But here I don’t find anything that deserves a grandiose label such as bullshit. What I see is chickenshit - the petty arrogance of narrow minded, politically correct memetic bureaucrats. For one who calls himself “a champion of multiculture, experimentalism, and visionary imagination”, you don’t seem willing to accept that points of view different from yours can be also valid.
I will go read some blogs on Robot Gods and Superlative Technologies, full of naive enthusiasm for technologies that probably won’t be developed so soon or so smoothly as we wish, but inspired by some basic mental sanity.
Singularity! Immortality! Mind Uploading! Superlative Technologies! Here is to the Robot God!!
One thing we certainly agree upon: this “is starting to look like the kind of conceptual impasse no amount of argument can circumvent between us”.

Dale: I have such trouble playing this discursive game with Sub(cult)ural Futurists is that we seem to be playing on two separate boards altogether and I don’t think they have quite grasped this yet.
Me: Yes, we are playing on two different boards.
I wish to play on a concrete board, and focus on concrete things. You and I happen to agree on many concrete programmatic points. I am telling you, forget that we disagree on other things, forget that I am a God Robot Cultist who engages in Superlative Technology Discourse and believes that the Eschaton will upload him to a Techno-Heaven, and let’s join forces to achieve the common objectives.
According to my perception, that may of course being completely mistaken, you are playing on an abstract board and focusing on abstract issues characterized by endless questioning of others’ hidden motivations and “identity”. As I see things, I am focused on outcomes, and you are focused on identity (from a critical perspective of course, but focused on identity anyway). I think different identities should not matter much as long as there is agreement on outcomes.

Then I was, of course, attacked for having written things like “future magic will resurrect the dead!” I replied the following:

I do say things like “future magic will resurrect the dead!” on occasions, based on the writings of many thinkers including Tipler.
But such statements are to be interpreted exactly in the same spirit as the “we will win the match” that football players say to each other before a match, or the “we will win the elections” that political activists say to each other before elections.
These are not statements of fact, but rather expressions of hope and declarations of intent.
“We will win the elections” mean: “we hope to win the elections, AND we will do our fucking best to actually win the elections”.
Since these are linguistic conventions that we all use in everyday language, everyone would understand these sentences as above.
If that makes you happier: I do not BELIEVE that future magic will resurrect the dead (do you relly think I am that stupid?). I HOPE that future magic will resurrect the dead, and I INTEND to do my best to contribute.

Which is, I think, a polite and almost conciliatory reply where I did my best to make a point without insulting anyone. But I was not surprised, I am afraid to say, to receive a very rude and offensive reply from a “gentleman” that I will indicate as “an aggressive and intolerant thought-cop”. To react to this completely unnecessary attack, I could either say something like for example FUCK OFF, or withdraw from the discussion, which is what I did.

I will not stop reading Dale’s blog. I think he is a very smart person and has a certain intellectual finesse that makes me enjoy his writings, even when he does his best to be blunt and offensive. But unfortunately his blog is becoming the refuge of embittered and self-righteous bigots who, without having his rhetorical and intellectual skills, use it as an outlet for their anti-transhumanist hate pieces and, of course, insult those who dissent. So, I will continue to read Dale’s essays but stop wasting my time discussing with his cohorts. I think the best we can do is ignoring them.

Besides insulting people who may contribute to an interesting debate, and perhaps even concede some points, if shown some respect, Dale’s cohorts have a few other annoying habits. One is to claim, through some superior understanding of psychology or whatever, that they know better than you what is going on in your mind. A bit paternalistic and elitist if you ask me, coming from people who claim to be champions of diversity. But their most annoying habit is to leave their territory of abstract adademic hair-splitting and venturing in the territory of science and engineering, where they are completely clueless.

They try to “ridicule” the point of view of those of us who consider immortality and uploading as concrete engineering possibilities. They don’t say reasonable things like “these are terribly complex engineering problems and I don’t think we are even remotely close to a solution” (I would agree with this of course). No, they claim that things like immortality and uploading are impossible to achieve in practice. Wake up to modern science and engineering: immortality and uploading are not metaphysical problems, they are engineering problems. Our bodies, brains and minds are physical things, which behave according to the laws of nature, and can be reverse-engineered, copied/pasted and improved once we develop the scientific understanding and the engineering capability to do so. Some people do not accept this simple engineering approach because, I think, perhaps they have not been able to shed their religious upbringing: they have still some hidden “reverence for nature”, “respect for our limits”, and belief that there must be things forever closed to science.

Posted by G.P. on 11/01 at 07:56 AM
English • Views • (2) Comments • Permalink • Print
Page 1 of 1 pages