Transumanar

Life 2.0: augmentationists in Second Life and beyond

I have been reading posts in the blogosphere about the new system for integrated voice in Second Life. As I thought, comments are split in two main camps: those who think the new option is a good thing, and those who are afraid that it will change the nature of Second Life as they know it.

The two camps have been labeled respectively “Augmentationists” and “Immersionists”. Immersionists are those who want to live a parallel Second Life completely separated by their Real Life (RL), while augmentists are those who want to use Second Life as a means to enhance their RL. Many (but by no means all) immersionists are men playing women or older people playing younger people - of course they are not going to use voice because it would reveal information about their RL identity that they prefer to keep secret in SL. On the other hand most augmentationists, besides using voice, openly disclose their RL identities. For example, I have my RL websites in my SL profile.

A good definition is here: ”The first-generation SL residents were interested in Second Life as an “alternate reality”, one that is disconnected from “real life” but bears some resemblance to it. In this alternate reality you would be able to be whomever you wanted to be - and requests for revealing your real life data are considered rude… A later generation, the “augmentationists”, have a different point of view. They look at Second Life as an extension of real life - a tool, a platform, a communication medium, the 2nd generation World-Wide Web in 3D. For them, anonymity is as silly as faking your voice on a phone call; just because you’re a “phone number” you’re not a different person”.

Of course saying that all immersionists are men playing women would be reductive and wrong. On the contrary many immersionists have serious arguments against voice in Second Life. By this I mean that, though I still don’t agree with them, I think their arguments deserve serious consideration.

In the article Voice and the Crisis of RL identity in SL, the author says: ”One thing that is of extreme concern recently is that Linden Lab appears to be pushing Second Life into being more of an augmentationist realm than a immersionist one, or so it seems… People came to SL for a very specific reason… to have fun… to play… to be something they couldn’t be or to role play…. or to let something out that has always been hidden, to become something new. Where does voice leave all of this… you must remember that 99.99999999% of all of the major content creators in SL are IMMERSIONISTS…. this means that they are not into making their SL a reflection of their RL”, and denounces what (s)he sees as a trend to turn Second Life into “Real Life 2.0”.

I support that idea that everyone should be free to live her Second Life, AND her Real Life, as she wants to live it. So, though I use voice in SL routinely, I do not have anything against immersionists refusing to use it and support their freedom of choice. At the same time, of course I protect _my_ freedom of choice and resist immersionists trying to tell _me_ how I should live _my_ SL (or RL). The point is, I _am_ into making my SL a reflection of my RL - and want the freedom to use all options that permit doing so.

Unfortunately, immersionists have a very valid point when they argue that, with voice and more augmentationist options becoming available (such as the possibility to paste a realtime webcam feed onto an avatar face and body, that may well become available in one or two years), most users of Second Life will become augmantationists and this will effectively discriminate against immersionists and push them into a second class role. They will be able to join immersionist communities where voice and webcam feeds are banned, but will be effectively cut from interacting with most other users.

I understand this argument but it does not seem such a big deal to me. It seems a reasonable assumption that role players prefer to hang with other role players in SL anyway. In a few years, new users of the Metaverse will probably be unable to understand what this debate was about. They will not understand how someone can consider having _more options_ as a bad thing. Everyone can have multiple avatars, say one for role playing and one for social networking, business and learning under her or his RL identity. Those who want to use a single avatar can install voice masking software coupled to the microphone input.

To me, Life 2.0 means augmenting virtual reality with physical reality and vice versa. It means being able to have meaningful interactions with people on the other side of the planet, with an overall communication bandwidth equivalent to face to face contact. We are now taking the first steps in this direction, and this is something good.

I believe those who say NO to voice and “Real Life 2.0”, most of them first-generation residents interested in Second Life as an “alternate reality”, are simply stuck with a preconceived notion of Second Life as _only_ a role playing game for immersionists and are unable (or unwilling) to adapt to this quite radical “change of the nature of the game”. They conceive their (and others’) Second Life only within the narrow area defined by their early role playing experiences, and resist change - even if nothing is going to change for them personally if they don’t want to. But I think having more options to choose is always a good thing, and restricting the freedom of others to choose their options without harming anyone is always a bad thing.

It has been said that virtual worlds like Second Life are dynamic laboratories to shed light on social and economic behavior. In fact, the debate over voice and the intrusion of RL in SL reminds me of another debate which is beginning to take shape, over much more important scientific, social and political issues related to human enhancement. Also Transhumanists talk of augmenting real life, but in much more radical terms. We want to merge biology with technology and eliminate disease, suffering, aging and death. Yes, death. Our generation may be among the last mortal generations, and by the end of the century our children may live in the Metaverse as disembodied software beings. Let’s call this Life 3.0: escaping the prison of the flesh and moving on.

This will be a _very_ radical change of the nature of the game, and of course there will be those who will prefer to stay in the old comfortable game instead of embracing change and moving on. They will conceive their (and others’) life only within the narrow area defined by the experiences of earlier generations, and resist change - even if nothing is going to change for them personally if they don’t want to. I am sure that nobody will force them to upgrade to Life 3.0, and there will be “immersionist” communities for persons who choose to remain immersed in human biology and its limitations. However, knowing that a large part of the human species has moved on beyond biology, and there is a new game going on in which they don’t participate, is bound to have some mental impact on those who choose to stay behind, and create very significant social and political problems to solve. The coming debate on human enhancement is very important as it will permit analysing problems and devising solutions. I think these problems can and will be solved, and after a few decades people will probably be unable to understand what the debate was about.

Posted by on 08/08 at 07:15 AM

I have been following the debate about voice as well. I personally don’t see a strict dichotomy between immersionists and augmentationists. For instance, in real life I am transgendered so when I went to Second Life I of course set up an avatar with which I am most comfortable-a female avatar. And when in SL socially she is with whom you will see. But I also have a male avatar because after all I teach as a male and since I want to use Second Life for teaching having a male avatar makes sense. So I guess in a sense I am an immersionist. Why would I want to mimic my chromosomal male body?

At the same time I think I have to be transparent about myself and that seems more like the augmentationalist position. People can for instance click on my profile, see a link to my blog and a picture of me in RL and this is true regardless of which avatar I am in. For me this transparency is part of maintaining my life as an integrated whole...not little compartments or roles that don’t interact. I spent enough of my life hiding in that way and I just refuse to do that any more.

I do think you are overly optimistic in your prediction about us being among the last mortal generations. Granted technology is moving very rapidly but human consciousness is more than cognition. I am not a vitalist but human consciousness is bound up with the sorts of communication that goes on between the cells of our nervous system and other cells of our bodies and I think we are a long ways from untangling that system.

But a fascinating post.

Paul(Simone/Simeon Gateaux in SL)

Posted by Paul Decelles on 08/10 at 08:40 PM
I think that maturing technologies of augmentism will lay down the foundations for a new class of immersionist. The Web’s old architecture of a proprietory network with PCs attached to it is giving way to an architecure in which we’re never offline, where applications are web-based as opposed to being stored locally on your PC. Obviously this ‘computer’ is generating prodigious amounts of data, but the information is not just growing QUANTITIVELY but QUALLITIVELY as well. This fact is forcing Google etc to autoevolve search engines into massively parallel pattern-recognition AIs.

It so happens that we each have a petascale, massively parallel information-processing system packed in our skulls. Two capabilities we would like to replicate in AI are the various forms of pattern recognition and something known as ‘higher-order intentionality’. So far we have modelled about 20 regions, and this has already helped advance AI. For instance, plugging in models of the visual cortex has enabled visual search engines to begin performing tasks like recognising objects.

This will still be driving augmentism, because after all it is a model of but one region of the brain. Humans will use these new search engines etc to massively improve their performance. They are mere tools to work with.

‘Higher-order intentionality’ means the ability to form a theory of another mind. Human brains can do this; software brains aught to do it as well, so our computers etc can better adapt to our needs. This will see software slowly change from a tool we USE to a tool that CREATIVELY COLLABORATES with us.

If Giulio were to use these tools, the 1st generation would be 10% AI and 90% Giulio. Subsequent generations will close the gap and at some point another change will subtly come about. Somwhere around a collaboration of 60% Giulio, 40% AI, it will no longer seem like a tool we are working with, but another person. As Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) said, ‘people will discuss their needs with a digital intermediary, which will offer suggestions and refinements. The result will not be a list of links, but an annotated report (or a simple converstation) that synthesises the important points with references to the original literature’.

At this point it my reference to ‘a new class of immersionists’ should be clearer: Avatars run by AI rather than human brains. Again, do not expect Turing level AIs right-off-the-bat, expect Giulio’s ‘digital intermediary’ to act on his behalf for increasingly lengthy amounts of time and in increasingly diverse ways. Still augmentist…but on the threshold of true immersionsism.

Eventually, we will have totally reverse-engineered human intelligence, leading to autonomous avatars with no biological brain driving them, capable of the full range of human intelligence, including emotion and consciousness (at least, they will convincingly act as if they possess these qualities). I call these new kinds of avatars ‘mind children’, a term 1st used by Hans Moravec in reference to intelligent robots. Once Mind Children exist in SL , NO human will be able compete with them. Anshe Chung would be NO MATCH for a mind child that could track billions of financial data per second. Aimee Weber will not seem particularly creative compared to a mind child analysing a design proposal from a trillion different angles simultaneously, capable of thinking through 100 years of creative effort in a microsecond.

Of course, it’s a great likelyhood that no person in SL TODAY will be alive to see this eventuality. Actually, that is wrong. The people who CREATED Extropia DaSilvaetc might be dead, but the avatars and their inventory (which could be quite a lot of data by the time we die) would still be stored out there on the ‘web’. Eventually, the software modelling of human brains would be complete enough to model general human intelligence and, in theory, could be used to run Extro, Gwyn, etc. Ideally, we would scan every interneural connection and neurotransmitter concentration levels that comprise our knowledge, learning and skills, in which case the AI mind would be perfectly capable of acting just like us (an ‘upload’). Less ideally, we do not live to use ‘upload’ level scanning, but we leave behind enough information about ourselves such that a mind child does a reasonable job of ‘being’ Khannea Suntzu (or any other resident you might know). I would expect most of us to live this long, at least.

It can be argued that an ‘uploaded’ Extropia DaSilva is NOT the original. I agree, which is why I insist on maintaining a SEPARATE IDENTITY to my ‘primary’ (the person who created me). Augmentists do not tend to separate their identities, and I think this will cause conflicts when the time comes to choose whether or not to upload your mind, and see your Sl self become a ‘mind child’ far greater in his/her abilities than you could ever be.

Posted by on 08/11 at 12:28 AM
Hi,

I think the matter is quite simple.

1. Second Life is evolving from a game state to a platform for next generation, real time communication. Personally, I think the potential of something as incredible as second life is wasted if used only as a game or a hyper social networking utility.

2. Companies such as IBM will be delighted that they can now utilize voice features for their global meetings, interviews which they already conduct in second life. Many doors are opened now.

3. Text has not been removed. People can use text or voice. Voice feature is essential. Video is already there to some extent. All can be chosen to be an option.

This is the funny thing with technology. We rant and curse at the entry of something new. But, we all end up doing it anyway !

Posted by V.R.Manoj on 08/11 at 02:05 AM
Yes, that’s because we are pragmatists at heart regardless of our philosophical framework-at least most of are. I don’t know what all the negativity about voice is. Were just adding another RL like parallel way of communicating....let’s see voice, video, gestures, text, the avatar’s form and dress, the builds a person makes.

P. Simone/Simeon Gateaux in SL

Posted by Paul Decelles on 08/11 at 03:46 AM
Thank you so much for all you do, incl this nice essay. I am completely new to SL, so forgive a beginner’s reaction and critique. I completely agree with you in defending (if i may put it this way) both augmentationists’ and immersionists’ rights of individual choice, and the evolution of SL.

But unless i’ve misunderstood you, i think your mapping of
augmentationism <=> transhumanism
immersionism <=> bioconservatism/etc
, while a valid aspect of the issue, misses another aspect that runs the opposite way. When i fantisize a SL existence for myself, i am very sympathetic with immersionism, precisely because of the transhumanistic freedom it gives me to transcend limits of my current body/appearance/gender/identity/etc. I can’t speak for real immersionists, but it fits this impulse that any steps that reduce this creative freedom by tying my avatar to my RL identity/appearance/voice/etc could feel like an *anti*-transhumanist limitation.

Looking fwd to any comments,
alyosha
(RL name :^) )

Posted by on 08/11 at 04:23 AM
Hi Alyosha,
while I am still myself in Second Life, I also appreciate the the transhumanist freedom it gives users to transcend limits of their current body/appearance/gender/identity/etc. I only wish all these options were available in real life too, and look forward to the day when people will be free to choose the body they like (or to choose not to have a physical body at all).

The main mapping I am trying to establish is:

Refusing to allow _others_ to use voice in SL = Refusing to allow _others_ to enhance themselves in RL

Both attitudes are against the live and let live principle. I understand the concerns of immersionists in SL and those of bioconservatives in RL, but relinquishment (not implementing options that could be implemented) is NOT the way to go.

Posted by on 08/11 at 05:24 AM
Mobile phones continue to be equipped with microphones/speakers to enable voice communication AND keypads for text messaging. So far we have not seen one totally abandoned in favour of the other; people are happy to use both depending on current whims/necessity.

Therefore, this fundamentalist attitude I see directed toward the inclusion of voice in SL makes little sense. Why worry/gloat that one form of communication must cause the extinction of the other? There is NO evidence WHATSOEVER that this will be the case! I heartily agree with Giulio that increasing the options for communicating in SL can only make it a better, more inclusive experience:)

On a side note, I like to think of augmentists and immersionists in the following way: Augmentists are like authors of autobiographies. On the other hand, immersionists are the equivilent of authors exploring the genres of fiction. It’s worth noting that the fallacies of memory and historical records means an autobiographical story is partly fictional, and the need to draw on RL experience for fleshing out fictional characters means even the wildest fantasy contains some fact. Saying one is ‘truth’ and the other ‘lies’ is far too simplistic!

One more thing. A book can store (but not process) roughly 10^6bits.Not nearly enough for GAI and so literary characters remain fantasy. But computers could potentially store AND process enough information for our ‘characters’ in Sl to quite literally have minds of their own. Wonder what tales they will go on to tell?

Posted by on 08/11 at 09:42 AM
One curious thing about the nomenclature: I’d assert that the ability to convincingly represent oneself as the avatar of one’s choice, including sex, is at core an “augmentative” one. This is implicit in several of the above posts, as well.

Pseudonyms with responsible backing actors do not heave the same social import as anonymity _or_ on-to-one mapping with RL personae. The issues of reputation and trust are coextensive across those fields.

And, of course, data mining and text analysis mean that a sufficiently motivated entity with sufficent time will sooner or later be able to make an intelligent guess about who’s whom. Attention is the limited resource… for now.

Posted by on 08/13 at 01:35 AM
‘data mining and text analysis mean that a sufficiently motivated entity with sufficent time will sooner or later be able to make an intelligent guess about who’s whom’.

Such an ability is already being developed at Microsoft research, according to New Scientist.

‘In online communities at least, entering fake details such as a bogus name or age may no longer prevent others from working out exactly who you are. New research by Microsoft...is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analyzing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. Previous studies show there are strong correlations between the sites that people visit and their personal characteristics...while each offers only a fairly crude insight, analytical software could use a vast range of such profiles to perform a probabilistic analysis of a person’s browsing history. From that it could make a good guess about their identity’.

Posted by on 08/13 at 06:55 AM
Umm, well, yes, but that’s not precisely what I was talking about. I was just referring to lexical analysis of pure published text being sufficient to identify a person / entity to some degree of likelihood. You might even be able to do it with nothing but heuristics that build Markov chains.

The stuff you’re pointing to is in the same region of the sky, as it were—a kind of feature extraction approach—but would appear to be more like traffic pattern analysis, and require a more intimate or immediate connection to either one’s browser cache, one’s IP traffic, or both.

Something a bit more like spyware, in other words. But it remains to be seen how all this evolving “True Names"-type stuff will play out.

Posted by on 08/13 at 08:59 AM
I’m glad I found this site as I was attempting to get in contact with you. The IEET site certainly excels at limiting public discourse, with its restrictive (and apparently broken) comments system.

Along with several other commenters here, I think your analogy of immersionists to opponents of transhumanism is precisely backwards.

I posted what would have been my comments on my own blog, <a href=http://sophrosyne-sl.livejournal.com/16768.html>Finding Sophrosyne</a> - I encourage you (and any interested commenters) to come visit.

Posted by Sophrosyne Stenvaag on 08/15 at 06:24 PM
Hi Sophrosyne,

Thanks for writing. I just posted to your blog. My comment and your original are pasted below.

----

Hi Sophrosyne,

Actually I agree with all that you say. I use SL mainly, as you say, as a phone, but appreciate that others use it to _enhance themselves_ in VR (wanting for the ability to do so in RL). As a transhumanist, I support those who want to change the cards we have been given by nature.

But the point I am trying to make is another. Even if I were not a transhumanist, I would not complain against the second lifestyle of other SL users, simply because it is not my business as long as it does not affect me. So I cannot accept when immersionists who do not want (for their own reasons, all perfectly valid) to use voice in SL say or imply that nobody should be allowed to use voice. This is, I think, a luddite attitude. SL is big enough for many second lifestyles, and my second lifestyle is not others’ business as long as it does not affect them.

So the analogy I am trying to establish is:

Refusing to allow _others_ to use voice in SL = Refusing to allow _others_ to enhance themselves in RL

Both attitudes are against the live and let live principle. I understand the concerns of immersionists in SL and those of bioconservatives in RL, but relinquishment (not implementing options that could be implemented) is NOT the way to go.

G.

----

Okay, now I’m just annoyed. I went to comment on a post that was cited in the Second Life Insider yesterday, and apparently not only do you have to *donate to the organization* to comment on their posts, the form to do so doesn’t load!…

Here’s what I wanted to post in reply (showing that, yes, despite your expectations, I actually *can* control my temper sometimes!):

I think you missed the implications of your own argument from transhumanism.

Your analogy between “old-time” immersionist residents and opponents of transhumanism is precisely reversed (in addition to being a miscategorization in the first instance: I was rezzed in April 2007, and am one of a great many immersionists rezzed this year).

Augmentationists who see SL as, essentially, a telephone - another communications medium for business as usual - are viewing this technology as if it were a “horseless carriage” - just like something old and familiar, rather than an “automobile” - a new thing in itself. They insist on the literal equating of the unaugmented human into the new space: gender=gender, age=age, species=species.

Immersionists *are* transhumanists. We reject the view that a person is its body. We are furries, gynoids, merfolk, dragons. We view personality and identity as the constructs of will, not the legacy of genetics.

We are your allies, not the ignorant bigots who demand to know “A/S/L” - age, sex, location - in the atomic world immediately on meeting someone in the digital world.

We are out here already *being* transhumanist. Augmentationists, especially the ones you’ve been listening to, with their spurious statistics on genderbending - which reveal their own deep fear of transhumanist category shattering - are the reactionary rear guard of a dying way of life.

Come to my blog. Go to my profile, and from there look at the blogs of my Immersionist friends. Take an honest and objective look at what you see there, and decide for yourself if we’re old fuddy-duddies, or if we are in fact living just the life you advocate.

Of course, Guilio will never read this, never see that he’s been misled by corporate interests and cultural reactionaries. And the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies? Has a very interesting take on participating in public discourse, don’t they?

ETA: I found that Giulio cross-posted to his own blog, which *does* allow comments. I dropped a short comment inviting him here. Let’s see what happens…

Posted by on 08/16 at 05:21 AM
I am somewhat amused at your suggestion that people are trying to “keep voice from sl”, as if that were ever possible. All that has ever been needed was a “hey, let’s do this in voice, what’s your skype address” (insert name of any of a half dozen services in place of skype as you wish). The complaint is over the massive outlay of time and resources to force it upon everyone, when that time and those resources could have been better utilized on something that didn’t work (like the basic day to day working of the service), rather than something that already existed and worked fine. In all the complaints about sl and how it functions, the number of “OMG why don’t you get voice working in the viewer so I don’t have to use skype” were suspiciously few in number. It may well be nice to have for those who want it, and I would not campaign to keep it out, even if it were possible to do so. It just seems like a lot of time and money wasted to me that could have better been spend working on some of those things that have arisen as complaints time and time again, but obviously flashy new tech additions make better press releases than stability fixes...(Special press release: SL now almost works as well as we have been telling you it does for the last 3 years.)...Ah yes, I see..that really doesn’t read well...I guess voice was needed…

Posted by on 08/16 at 06:40 PM