Chat Logs/2008-12-07

From Order of Cosmic Engineers

The following is a mostly-complete, slightly-edited log of the chat from Dec. 7, 2008, at the SL-Transhumanists lounge / Cosmic Engineers SL Group HQ.

See Chat Logs for a list of other chat logs.

Chat Logs/2008-12-07

[9:15] Peer Infinity: hi Khannea and BB :D
[9:15] BB Lutwag: Hi Peer
[9:20] Peer Infinity: hi Danica :)
[9:20] Peer Infinity: hi singularity :)
[9:20] Danica Heliosense: alloallo :)
[9:20] Singularity Soler: hey all.
[9:20] Peer Infinity: Welcome to Extropia :)
[9:20] Danica Heliosense: ta :)
[9:21] Peer gives Singularity a big hug.
[9:21] Peer Infinity: mmm :)
[9:21] isenhand Nightfire: hi
[9:21] Peer Infinity: hi isenhand :)
[9:21] Peer gives Danica a big hug.
[9:21] isenhand Nightfire: is it me or have u got shorter, peer?
[9:21] Peer Infinity: :D
[9:21] Danica Heliosense: awww ta :)
[9:21] Peer Infinity: I'm the same height as always...
[9:22] Peer gives isenhand a big hug.
[9:22] isenhand Nightfire: :D
[9:22] Peer Infinity: :)
[9:22] isenhand Nightfire: I hope someone has feed that raptor
[9:22] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[9:23] Peer Infinity: that's an awesome avatar, Danica :)
[9:23] BB Lutwag: Hi Sinularity, Danica & Isen
[9:23] isenhand Nightfire: nice av, make it yourself?
[9:23] isenhand Nightfire: hi BB
[9:23] Danica Heliosense: oh I wish - found it @ Dinosaurs Park
[9:23] isenhand Nightfire: oh, for free?
[9:23] Danica Heliosense: alas, no
[9:23] isenhand Nightfire: ah :D
[9:23] Peer Infinity snuggles with the furry dinosaur :)
[9:24] Peer Infinity pets the furry dinosaur :)
[9:24] Danica Heliosense: :D
[9:25] Peer Infinity: hehe, you're the cuddliest dinosaur I've met :)
[9:25] Danica Heliosense cheers!
[9:26] Peer Infinity: so, you're here for the meeting?
[9:27] Danica Heliosense: oh. just wandered in by accident a few minutes ago, and saw folk about :)
[9:27] Singularity Soler: when is that meeting?
[9:27] Danica Heliosense: (hope I'm not intruding)
[9:27] Singularity Soler: 10?
[9:27] Peer Infinity: no, you're not intruding :)
[9:27] isenhand Nightfire: yes 10
[9:27] Peer Infinity: normally the meeting is at 10, but I think today's meeting is at 12...
[9:28] Singularity Soler: really...my secratary did not advise me... was ther a notice?
[9:28] isenhand Nightfire: extropia's talk at 12?
[9:28] Peer Infinity: yes, Extropia sent an email to the mailing list
[9:29] isenhand Nightfire: drats!
[9:29] isenhand Nightfire: I was hoping to stay fior thatb but I can't stay till 12 :(
[9:29] Peer Infinity: and there was also an announcement sent to the group
[9:29] Peer Infinity: Thinkers lecture will be held at Cosmic Engineers on 7th December at Noon SL time, and repeated on Tuesday 9th, 3:30pm SL time at Supportforhealing.
The topic is, "Google and Red Queen", concerning the future of search software. See note for more details.
[9:29] Singularity Soler: really.. cosmic enginers or her group... i suspect her group... i am going to have to get on that mailing list...
[9:29] Peer Infinity: There are over 120 million digital cameras, 230 million mp3 players
and a billion PCs uploading written documents, audio recordings and
video footage to the Web.
Since only a minute fraction of all that information is relevant to
any one person at any one time, how do we find what we are looking
for? We rely on search engines.
As the likes of Google improve in their ability to anticipate your
needs and find meaningful patterns in the information humanity
accumulates, what are they evolving into?
[9:30] isenhand Nightfire: well, I'll have to read the transcript
[9:31] Peer Infinity: yes, I'll post the transcript as ususal
[9:31] isenhand Nightfire: good
[9:31] isenhand Nightfire: american's have such funny ways of saying things!
[9:32] Peer Infinity: oh? how so?
[9:32] BB Lutwag: i have been slacking off lately, haven't taken many photos lately to add to the google brain
[9:32] isenhand Nightfire: I'm watching a video on aquaponics and the guy talks about "appropriate technology" meaning ...
[9:32] isenhand Nightfire: scrap stuff u find at home
[9:33] isenhand Nightfire: hi Khannea
[9:33] BB Lutwag: Hi Khannea
[9:34] Peer Infinity: hi Khannea :D
[9:34] Singularity Soler: Khannea... how are you ?
[9:34] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible whispers: Chillin
[9:34] Danica Heliosense waves 'lo
[9:34] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible whispers: Confidence
[9:34] Khannea Suntzu: Heyyyyy singey :)
[9:35] Khannea Suntzu: So what avatar does amara have?
[9:35] Khannea Suntzu: The preggie
[9:35] Khannea Suntzu: Who is she here?
[9:35] isenhand Nightfire: no idea
[9:35] Peer Infinity: Amara's shower is next weekend
[9:35] Khannea Suntzu: Yah yes yes
[9:35] isenhand Nightfire: I have no idea who most ppl here r in RL
[9:35] Singularity Soler: i can make a list....
[9:36] isenhand Nightfire: nice :)
[9:36] Khannea Suntzu chuckles
[9:36] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Together
[9:37] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Held Tight
[9:37] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Sentiment
[9:37] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Endearment
[9:37] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Tender
[9:37] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Closer
[9:37] Peer Infinity: :)
[9:37] Khannea Suntzu is grabbed and barely puts up a fight
[9:38] Khannea Suntzu: Can you PLEASE not stick those whiskers straight up my nasal passage peer?
[9:38] Peer Infinity nuzzles Khannea and kisses and licks all over her face and neck and cleavage and tummy :)
[9:38] isenhand Nightfire: hmmm
[9:38] Khannea Suntzu feels overused, bruised, sweaty, warm and half stoned.
[9:38] isenhand Nightfire: ppl would pay for my seat just now
[9:38] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[9:38] Khannea Suntzu: Yah
[9:39] Khannea Suntzu: That is how circus maximus got going too
[9:39] Singularity Soler: half stoned? thats easy to fix
[9:39] Khannea Suntzu hopes singey isn't a wahabi
[9:39] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Sensual Rub
[9:39] Khannea Suntzu: HmmmRRKK
[9:39] Singularity Soler: no... whats with amsterdam talking about cracking down on coffee houses....
[9:40] Singularity Soler: damn that starbucks... they when too far!
[9:40] Khannea Suntzu: The christians are in charge here singey
[9:40] isenhand Nightfire: yeap, xians don't want ppl to ahve fun
[9:40] Khannea Suntzu: Oh they know it'll be a hard fight
[9:40] Peer Infinity: hmm, I can't find a massage animation in this rug...
[9:40] Singularity Soler: Christians... yes.. but its proaly more saber rattling
[9:41] Khannea Suntzu: They got rid of the shrooms. I will plant me somewhere between 10K and 50K market value in a spare rook this summer.
[9:41] Khannea Suntzu: room
[9:41] Khannea Suntzu: Shrooms
[9:41] Peer Infinity: ooh...
[9:41] Singularity Soler: that would be the Shroom Room
[9:41] Khannea Suntzu: Hey outlawing created black markets
[9:41] Khannea Suntzu: The shroomery
[9:41] isenhand Nightfire: where there isa deep human need there is money to be made
[9:42] Khannea Suntzu: Yah seems so
[9:42] Singularity Soler: Shroom with a View
[9:42] Peer Infinity: :)
[9:42] Khannea Suntzu: Better still - NOW we can start breeding shrooms that have WAYYY more effect
[9:42] isenhand Nightfire: :D
[9:42] IRC: IRC gateway enabled
[9:43] Khannea Suntzu: In a few years we will be able to grow shrooms that copy the effects of 17 distinct different halluciogens
[9:43] Khannea Suntzu: That wasnt possible when they were legal
[9:43] Singularity Soler: excep of course after we dispose of money.
[9:43] Peer Infinity: interesting...
[9:43] Khannea Suntzu: I might be a libertarian after all
[9:44] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Snuggle
[9:44] Khannea Suntzu is thrown around by Peer as a ragdoll
[9:44] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[9:45] Khannea Suntzu obeys the bunny law
[9:45] Khannea Suntzu: On that note
[9:45] Khannea Suntzu: Going to eat now
[9:45] Khannea Suntzu: exam tomorrow
[9:45] Peer Infinity: ok, good luck Khannea
[9:45] Khannea Suntzu: Oh Ill stay in SL
[9:45] Khannea Suntzu: Just cooking some greens
[9:46] Khannea Suntzu: BRB
[9:46] Peer Infinity: ok :)
[9:46] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Scissors
[9:46] Peer Infinity: :)
[9:47] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Snuggle
[9:47] BB Lutwag: Khannea leaves her body in Peers hands, while her brain goes elsewhere
[9:47] Danica Heliosense appears to have died.
[9:47] Peer Infinity scritches the furry dino's tummy :)
[9:48] Danica Heliosense: *coooooo*
[9:48] Peer Infinity: feel free to look around, Danica :)
[9:48] Khannea Suntzu: Hmmm tastes like chicken
[9:50] isenhand Nightfire: Danica if u r going to die please don't do it here. U have no idea how much paper work that couses
[9:50] Peer Infinity: the greens you cooked taste like chicken?
[9:50] isenhand Nightfire: no, the dead dino
[9:51] isenhand Nightfire: oops, we bored Singularity
[9:51] Peer Infinity: :P
[9:52] BB Lutwag: Hi Arisia
[9:52] Arisia Vita: Hi BB
[9:52] Peer Infinity: hi Arisia :D
[9:52] isenhand Nightfire: hi Arisia
[9:52] Arisia Vita: Hi all....
[9:52] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible: Tender 3
[9:52] isenhand Nightfire: not yer we r w8ing for the shrooms
[9:53] Zobeid Zuma: Hello
[9:53] Peer Infinity: hi Zobeid :D
[9:53] isenhand Nightfire: hi
[9:54] Peer Infinity invites Arisia onto the snuggle rug :)
[9:54] Arisia Vita wonders what all that rug does... :)
[9:54] Peer Infinity: or whoever else would like to join :)
[9:54] BB Lutwag: Hi Zobeid
[9:54] isenhand Nightfire: try it Arisia
[9:55] Peer Infinity recommends that pink poseball :)
[9:55] isenhand Nightfire: u would :D
[9:55] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[9:55] Zobeid Zuma is afraid of that one. . .
[9:55] isenhand Nightfire: Hi Deebrane
[9:55] BB Lutwag: Hi Deebrane
[9:55] Deebrane String: opps-- sorry form that bump...
[9:55] Deebrane String: lag-hammered today
[9:55] Deebrane String: hello all
[9:55] Peer Infinity: hi Deebrane :D
[9:57] isenhand Nightfire: so, if we r w8ing till 12 for extropia, what's happening at 10?
[9:57] Arisia Vita: I thought the meeting was at 12 today?
[9:57] Arisia Vita: or is that just Exti's talk?
[9:57] Peer Infinity: yes, the meeting is at 12 today
[9:57] Arisia Vita: ah, but the fun starts anytime....
[9:57] Deebrane String: Oh-ho. So we're being creatures of habit, then. ;-)
[9:58] Peer Infinity: :)
[9:58] isenhand Nightfire: yeap
[9:58] isenhand Nightfire: always nice to hang out with such introverted ppl
[9:58] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[9:58] Deebrane String: *snicker*
[9:59] Peer Infinity crawls over to isenhand, and nuzzles and kisses him :)
[9:59] isenhand Nightfire: :)
[9:59] isenhand Nightfire: pink rabbits ok, not sure about raptors
[9:59] Peer Infinity hugs and kisses everyone else, in turn, including the furry dino :)
[10:00] Zobeid Zuma: Hmm, is this not the proper time of the Cosmic Engineers meeting? Or has the schedule been changed?
[10:00] Danica Heliosense: there are raptors, then there are good raptors :)
[10:01] Peer Infinity: this week we're starting at 12:00. Extropia DaSilva is giving a presentation on this topic:
[10:01] Peer Infinity: There are over 120 million digital cameras, 230 million mp3 players
and a billion PCs uploading written documents, audio recordings and
video footage to the Web.
Since only a minute fraction of all that information is relevant to
any one person at any one time, how do we find what we are looking
for? We rely on search engines.
As the likes of Google improve in their ability to anticipate your
needs and find meaningful patterns in the information humanity
accumulates, what are they evolving into?
[10:01] Peer Infinity: Thinkers lecture will be held at Cosmic Engineers on 7th December at Noon SL time, and repeated on Tuesday 9th, 3:30pm SL time at Supportforhealing.
The topic is, "Google and Red Queen", concerning the future of search software. See note for more details.
[10:01] isenhand Nightfire: we r just here cos we allways r
[10:01] Peer Infinity: yes :)
[10:01] Khannea Suntzu: aha
[10:01] Khannea Suntzu: cool
[10:02] Peer Infinity continues petting Khannea sexily :)
[10:02] isenhand Nightfire: hi interviewer
[10:02] BB Lutwag: hi interviewer
[10:02] Peer Infinity: hi interviewer :)
[10:02] Deebrane String: H'lo, Interviewer.
[10:03] Khannea Suntzu enjoys getting petted, since she has a dignificant muscle pain in jaw muscles, arms, inner thighs and some bruising in related soft tissue,
[10:03] Khannea Suntzu: hoi mike
[10:03] IntLibber Brautigan: heya Khannie
[10:03] Zobeid Zuma blehs after eating too many gummi bears. "I get started, then I just can't quit."
[10:03] Peer Infinity: hi IntLibber :D
[10:03] isenhand Nightfire: hi intLibber
[10:03] IntLibber Brautigan: i have a new toy to show off
[10:03] Deebrane String: *waves at intLibber*
[10:03] Khannea Suntzu: Hmmm?
[10:03] Deebrane String: ..oh dear... ;-)
[10:04] isenhand Nightfire: does it go bang?
[10:04] IntLibber Brautigan: no
[10:04] IntLibber Brautigan: it makes map sculpts entirely inworld
[10:04] Deebrane String: Ah. VERY nice.
[10:04] Khannea Suntzu: Hmmm!!
[10:04] Arisia Vita: hah
[10:04] IntLibber Brautigan: phone brb
[10:04] Khannea Suntzu: Commercial?
[10:04] Arisia Vita: very nice Peer
[10:04] Interviewer Wilber: Hi, all.
[10:04] Khannea Suntzu: Grrk! UURrrK RRRK!
[10:04] isenhand Nightfire: hi
[10:04] Peer Infinity: hehe, Zobeid mentioned gummy bears, and I just couldn't resist :)
[10:04] Khannea Suntzu: Trample therapy is SOoooooooOOooOOo yummy
[10:05] isenhand Nightfire: kilngon, Khannea?
[10:05] Deebrane String: therapy... so that's what we're calling it now... ;-)
[10:05] Peer Infinity: oops, now how do you stop a gesture...
[10:05] Khannea Suntzu: Massage by foot pressure is actually a good and safe massage application
[10:05] Zobeid Zuma: That's cute, Peer.
[10:06] Deebrane String: True that, Khannea, and my atomic makes use of that from time to time...
[10:06] Peer Infinity: :)
[10:06] Deebrane String: but trample suggests a different... application. *twinkle*
[10:06] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[10:06] Peer Infinity: how does your tool work, intLibber?
[10:07] Khannea Suntzu: Yah me too, a few years ago and I was expected to reciprocate by grooming her toes, toenails and ballerina feet for hours
[10:07] Deebrane String: *dily skritches Danica's scales*
[10:07] IntLibber Brautigan: ok back
[10:07] Deebrane String: Knannea: I'm guessing that didn't go well/long.
[10:07] Danica Heliosense cooos a leetle more.
[10:07] Khannea Suntzu: I think 11 years was a fair score?
[10:07] isenhand Nightfire: deom, IntLibber?
[10:07] Deebrane String: *chkchkskritchchk*
[10:08] IntLibber Brautigan: I would do one of this sim but its all water here anyways
[10:08] Deebrane String: I sit corrected, Khannea...
[10:08] Khannea Suntzu: Zobeid, whatever you do, dont pull that chair over the floor.
[10:08] Deebrane String: hee.
[10:08] Zobeid Zuma: buh?
[10:08] Khannea Suntzu: Makes a NOISE
[10:08] Arisia Vita: (Men In Black)
[10:08] Khannea Suntzu giggles
[10:08] isenhand Nightfire: :D
[10:09] Peer Infinity: "map sculpts"?
[10:09] Khannea Suntzu gets a comb and starts combing in sllloooooooooooooooooooooooow long strokes from up between his ears all the way along the spine to the fluff
[10:10] Peer Infinity helps Khannea :)
[10:10] Khannea Suntzu combs peer in looooooooooooooong strokes
[10:10] Khannea Suntzu: You;d be helping by not squirming peer
[10:10] IntLibber Brautigan: ok a map sculpt is a sculptie of the sim terrain
[10:10] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[10:11] Peer Infinity does my best to hold still...
[10:11] IntLibber Brautigan: observe
[10:11] Khannea Suntzu: Hmmm fascinating
[10:11] Khannea Suntzu: How much it cost?
[10:11] Peer Infinity: wow...
[10:11] IntLibber Brautigan: it can do a full region this size, or do quarter sims this size,
[10:11] IntLibber Brautigan: not sure, a friend of mine is developing it
[10:11] Khannea Suntzu: Aha ok
[10:12] Khannea Suntzu: You can stretch and mold at will?
[10:12] IntLibber Brautigan: no
[10:12] IntLibber Brautigan: its very interesting how it works let me rez it here, its a HUD
[10:12] isenhand Nightfire: need one that can make all the little buildings as well ;)
[10:12] Peer Infinity: I'm guessing that the sculpty misses some of the finer details of the terrain, due to limits in resolution...
[10:12] Deebrane String: V. 2. Or 3.
[10:13] Peer Infinity: and buildings are prims, so you would need a totally different system to add those to the map...
[10:13] isenhand Nightfire: I was just being a pain, peer
[10:13] IntLibber Brautigan: ut oh where did it go
[10:13] IntLibber Brautigan: whose got parcel powers here?
[10:14] Arisia Vita: the one with her back being rubbed?
[10:14] IntLibber Brautigan: my HUD repositioned itself somewhere in the sim
[10:14] Peer Infinity: Khannea and I have parcel powers
[10:14] Deebrane String: so much for attentiveness... ;-)
[10:14] IntLibber Brautigan: can you return whatever belongs to Intlibber brautigan?
[10:15] Peer Infinity: only 2 objects
[10:15] Peer Infinity: they're returned now
[10:15] isenhand Nightfire: my time is up, I have to go
[10:15] IntLibber Brautigan: thanks
[10:15] isenhand Nightfire: cu all
[10:15] Deebrane String: ;-)
[10:15] Deebrane String: C u
[10:15] Peer Infinity: ok, bye isenhand
[10:15] IntLibber Brautigan: that was the map not the HUD
[10:15] IntLibber Brautigan: its probably on another parcel now
[10:15] IntLibber Brautigan: who has estate manager power?
[10:16] Peer Infinity: it's not on either of the neighbouring parcels either...
[10:16] Peer Infinity: are you sure it was rezzed?
[10:17] IntLibber Brautigan: yes it rezzed here temporarily then seems to have moved somewhere
[10:17] Deebrane String: let me double check Moravec...
[10:17] Peer Infinity finally notices Danica's new look, and oohs :)
[10:19] Khannea Suntzu: Yah stripes
[10:19] Peer Infinity: another question I meant to ask yesterday, IntLibber, what are you guessing will happen to the SL economy over the next year? will the open grid be fatal to the main grid's economy?
[10:20] IntLibber Brautigan: actually the openspace controversy is damaging the main grid immensely already
[10:20] IntLibber Brautigan: 2000 sims have gone from the grid in the past month
[10:20] Khannea Suntzu: Oh???
[10:20] IntLibber Brautigan: some people are converting back to full sims
[10:20] Khannea Suntzu checks the stats to see how that reflects
[10:20] IntLibber Brautigan: others are selling out or abandoning and moving to other estates and mainland
[10:20] IntLibber Brautigan: and others are moving to other grids in disgust with LL
[10:21] Khannea Suntzu: Hmmm ok
[10:21] IntLibber Brautigan: I'm an officer in a group that is taking LL to task legally for their behavior
[10:22] IntLibber Brautigan: Save Our OpenSpaces has organized as a nonprofit corp
[10:22] Peer Infinity: Deebrane says that your HUD is nowhere near Moravec's space, by the way
[10:22] IntLibber Brautigan: odd
[10:22] Khannea Suntzu: You are sueing LL?
[10:22] Peer Infinity: interesting...
[10:22] IntLibber Brautigan: SOS is organizing a legal fund to launch a class action anti-trust and RICO Act suit against LL
[10:23] Khannea Suntzu: Hmmm why RICO?
[10:23] IntLibber Brautigan: SOS has 2000 members
[10:23] IntLibber Brautigan: bait and switch, which is what this OS policy is, falls under RICO
[10:23] Khannea Suntzu: Interesting rationale and it will serve as a great show of intimidaion against LL
[10:23] IntLibber Brautigan: the fact they are doing it against their competitors, the estates, is anti-trust
[10:24] Khannea Suntzu: why are those competitors?
[10:24] IntLibber Brautigan: SOS is organizing the legal fund as an IPO on ACE
[10:24] IntLibber Brautigan: estate owners compete for land customers against LL's mainland
[10:25] Khannea Suntzu: Yes they do
[10:25] IntLibber Brautigan: we are tantamount to phone services resellers who repackage long distance bought in bulk from the major long distance carriers
[10:25] Khannea Suntzu nods
[10:25] IntLibber Brautigan: or ISP resellers
[10:25] Khannea Suntzu: Let me know how it unfolds
[10:26] IntLibber Brautigan: its illegal for a provider of wholesale and retail services to undercut their wholesale customers
[10:26] IntLibber Brautigan: in the present pricing regime, they are making the wholesale price higher than their own retail price
[10:26] Khannea Suntzu: I dont see any of this in the land use data graph yet
[10:26] Khannea Suntzu: http://secondlife.com/_img/economy/08_Q4_LandGrowth.jpg
[10:26] IntLibber Brautigan: which is obvious predatory pricing
[10:26] IntLibber Brautigan: go to the economic stats
[10:27] IntLibber Brautigan: http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php
[10:27] IntLibber Brautigan: Islands Added 3
Month Islands Owned
(End of Month) Islands Added
(During Month)
December 2008 - MTD 24372 -190
November 2008 24562 -1977
[10:28] IntLibber Brautigan: that is the net growth in the grid
[10:28] Khannea Suntzu: minus 2000?
[10:28] IntLibber Brautigan: ergo 1977 sims lost from the grid, net, which accounts for any new sim sales made by LL as well
[10:28] IntLibber Brautigan: so likely 2500-3000 sims were abandoned or converted last month
[10:29] Khannea Suntzu: So thats a form of theft
[10:29] IntLibber Brautigan: yes
[10:29] IntLibber Brautigan: also including all the money and time invested by the sim owners in their sims
[10:29] IntLibber Brautigan: building, developing
[10:29] Khannea Suntzu: I am very interested. It may lead to SL becoming a foiundation managed by stakeholders eventually
[10:29] Khannea Suntzu: Anything LL decides at some point will lead to them getting sued
[10:29] IntLibber Brautigan: SOS is seeking to have LL declared a utility
[10:29] Khannea Suntzu: Yah
[10:29] Khannea Suntzu: thats sensible
[10:30] Peer Infinity: yeah, good idea...
[10:30] IntLibber Brautigan: ok now, theres another topic I'd like to breach here
[10:30] Khannea Suntzu: Ok?
[10:30] IntLibber Brautigan: something I've noticed unfolding on my facebook friends list, which includes both Lindens and Extropians/transhumanists
[10:31] Khannea Suntzu: Yah?
[10:31] Arisia Vita accepted your inventory offer.
[10:31] IntLibber Brautigan: lemme convertt this gif to jpg and upload it
[10:32] Arisia Vita accepted your inventory offer.
[10:32] Peer Infinity is expecting to see a "circle of friends" diagram...
[10:33] Peer Infinity giggles at Arisia's wiggling fingers :)
[10:34] Peer Infinity: yes, that's exactly what I was expecting to see...
[10:34] IntLibber Brautigan: ok the blue area represents all my transhumanist friends
[10:34] Khannea Suntzu: The conclusion being....?
[10:34] IntLibber Brautigan: and the green/red represents my exclusively SL friends
[10:34] IntLibber Brautigan: there is very little linkage between the two populations
[10:34] Khannea Suntzu: Ah
[10:35] Khannea Suntzu: Indeed
[10:35] IntLibber Brautigan: my SL friends list has a lot of Lindens in it
[10:35] IntLibber Brautigan: some obvious, some not so obvious
[10:35] IntLibber Brautigan: this tells me that we as a group are not being effective in networking with the Lindens
[10:36] IntLibber Brautigan: this is something we as transhumanists should take as a primary agenda
[10:36] Peer Infinity: networking with Lindens?
[10:36] IntLibber Brautigan: shaping the metaverse
[10:36] Peer Infinity: but... the lindens will be obsolete soon...
[10:36] IntLibber Brautigan: which includes, in part, having a lot of influence in LL
[10:36] IntLibber Brautigan: LL will only be obsolete if we let it be so, and that would actually be a bad thing
[10:36] Khannea Suntzu: It is indeed a viable goal
[10:37] IntLibber Brautigan: all the wrong moves that LL has made in the past two years has been IMHO because they have not had enough positive influence from people like us
[10:37] Peer Infinity: Shaping the Metaverse
[10:37] IntLibber Brautigan: rather they've been negatively influenced by luddites like Prokofy Neva
[10:37] Peer Infinity: Save Our OpenSpaces
[10:38] Peer Infinity: Prokofy Neva
[10:38] Peer Infinity: (I'm making reminders to create wikipages)
[10:38] IntLibber Brautigan: ok
[10:38] Khannea Suntzu: How did luddites get a hold over ***lindens*** ???
[10:39] IntLibber Brautigan: now there is a guerilla tactic you can use on facebook
[10:39] IntLibber Brautigan: oh, pure ranting khannie
[10:39] IntLibber Brautigan: prok is one of the best now bloggers about SL
[10:39] IntLibber Brautigan: known
[10:39] Khannea Suntzu: I heard about that name yes
[10:39] IntLibber Brautigan: theres plenty of others
[10:39] Khannea Suntzu: ...ok
[10:39] IntLibber Brautigan: a lot of folks who are syndicalist medeivalist guild techie types
[10:39] Peer Infinity: prok has lots of nasty ideas... like... banning freebies...
[10:40] IntLibber Brautigan: LL is allergic to negative publicity
[10:40] IntLibber Brautigan: hence they tend to listen to the gripes of people who cause them negative publicity
[10:40] Peer Infinity: :(
[10:40] Khannea Suntzu: Yuck
[10:40] IntLibber Brautigan: a lot of these people spend their time attending Linden office hours ranting about all they think is evil on the grid
[10:41] Khannea Suntzu: I wish I had time and energy to counterrant
[10:41] IntLibber Brautigan: what we productive folks dont have in time, we need to make up for in quality
[10:42] Khannea Suntzu: I made a snapshot of this diagram
[10:42] IntLibber Brautigan: now, whatever you think the future is for LL< they are the primary shapers of what will be the future metaverse beyond SL
[10:42] IntLibber Brautigan: it is thus imperative that we gain significant influence inside the lab
[10:42] Khannea Suntzu: I will look at the profiles and see what's up this week
[10:43] Khannea Suntzu: What are your goals with SL, mike?
[10:44] IntLibber Brautigan: personally my goals are to restore SL to its role as the economic core of the metaverse
[10:44] Khannea Suntzu: 1. make it a platform for communication, trade and personal manifestation
[10:44] IntLibber Brautigan: theres been far too much anti-economic BS in the past year
[10:44] Khannea Suntzu: Aha ok
[10:44] IntLibber Brautigan: SL's economy started tanking long before RL did, and thats because of the ranters
[10:44] Khannea Suntzu: There IS rumors of an imminent google alternative
[10:44] IntLibber Brautigan: nope
[10:45] IntLibber Brautigan: google just cancelled Lively
[10:45] Khannea Suntzu: Precisely thats why
[10:45] IntLibber Brautigan: google said they are focusing on their core businesses
[10:45] Khannea Suntzu smiles
[10:45] Khannea Suntzu: Hmm-hmmmm
[10:45] IntLibber Brautigan: mainly cause interest in lively tanked within two months
[10:45] Peer Infinity: :P
[10:45] Khannea Suntzu: Lively was ... not through through very well
[10:46] Khannea Suntzu: thought
[10:46] Peer Infinity: but... it was slightly better than IMVU...
[10:46] IntLibber Brautigan: barely
[10:46] IntLibber Brautigan: I liked the story about the tentacle robot being used for sexual purposes tho
[10:46] Khannea Suntzu: I wrote a school report on this topic
[10:46] Peer Infinity: ooh, what tentacle robot???
[10:47] IntLibber Brautigan: on Lively
[10:47] Khannea Suntzu: None ofg m teachers and barely any student has bothered with ANY of the metaverse programs, including SL
[10:47] IntLibber Brautigan: since sex devices were banned there, people found ways to get off
[10:47] Peer Infinity gasps - I missed out on the tentacle robot...
[10:47] Khannea Suntzu: Thats Game Design school
[10:47] Arisia Vita: back soon, have to help a friend...
[10:47] IntLibber Brautigan: ok
[10:47] IntLibber Brautigan: ah cool
[10:47] IntLibber Brautigan: oh other news
[10:47] IntLibber Brautigan: BNT will soon be taken over by Woodbury University as majority shareholder
[10:47] Khannea Suntzu: No not cool. SL is being loathed there.
[10:47] IntLibber Brautigan: i will remain on as CEO
[10:48] Khannea Suntzu: Contempt.
[10:48] Khannea Suntzu nods
[10:48] IntLibber Brautigan: they are putting me in a paid staff position
[10:48] IntLibber Brautigan: and giving me a sports scholarship in computer gaming
[10:48] Khannea Suntzu: *intense*
[10:48] Peer Infinity: interesting...
[10:48] Khannea Suntzu: One second, my eyes burn
[10:48] Khannea Suntzu: I need to rinse my lenses
[10:49] IntLibber Brautigan: WU is looking to become the premier school of virtual education
[10:49] Peer Infinity: Woodbury University
[10:49] IntLibber Brautigan: yes
[10:50] Peer Infinity: BNT
[10:51] Peer Infinity: so... you're not expecting the SL economy to crash entirely within the next year?
[10:51] Khannea Suntzu: Or working hard to not have it
[10:51] IntLibber Brautigan: I'm expecting the grid to shrink by about 20-25% in the next 3 months
[10:51] Khannea Suntzu: Bah
[10:52] IntLibber Brautigan: this is going to reduce land supply
[10:52] IntLibber Brautigan: and drive up land prices
[10:52] IntLibber Brautigan: leading to a quick economic recovery here
[10:52] IntLibber Brautigan: the big benefit of SL land over RL land is that unsold homes in RL sit around and need to be sold
[10:52] IntLibber Brautigan: whereas unoccupied sims can j ust go away
[10:53] Peer Infinity: :)
[10:53] IntLibber Brautigan: by being taken off the grid, supply is automatically reduced
[10:53] IntLibber Brautigan: and thus prices equalize a lot quicker
[10:53] IntLibber Brautigan: quicker economic recovery
[10:53] Khannea Suntzu: Hmmm http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/07/woodbury-univer.html
[10:53] IntLibber Brautigan: that was last year
[10:53] IntLibber Brautigan: last year WU's sim was infiltrated by PN griefers
[10:54] IntLibber Brautigan: I came in and helped them get rid of the griefers and they in turn helped me spy on the griefer groups and destroy them from within
[10:54] Peer Infinity: PN
[10:54] IntLibber Brautigan: PN = Patriotic Nigras
[10:54] Peer Infinity: Patriotic Nigras
[10:54] IntLibber Brautigan: the PN are now all but destroyed
[10:55] IntLibber Brautigan: they are no longer a serious force in SL
[10:55] Peer Infinity: yay :)
[10:55] IntLibber Brautigan: we drained their manpower, gave them economic and creative outlets
[10:55] IntLibber Brautigan: paths to legitimacy
[10:55] IntLibber Brautigan: just as you use against any juvinile crime problem
[10:55] Peer Infinity: hi Senta :)
[10:55] Senta Mensing: hello, Peer. :)
[10:56] Peer Infinity: Welcome to Extropia :)
[10:56] IntLibber Brautigan: woodburys name however was trashed by prokofy
[10:56] Khannea Suntzu: Hey trophy
[10:56] IntLibber Brautigan: so they hired me to help restore their reputation
[10:56] IntLibber Brautigan: we've provided them with sim space for over a year now
[10:56] IntLibber Brautigan: they now rent two sims from me
[10:56] Khannea Suntzu: Oh aha ok
[10:56] Peer Infinity: :)
[10:57] IntLibber Brautigan: at SLCC their dean of media culture and design and I hatched the merger plan for WU and BNT
[10:58] Khannea Suntzu: ./me takes notes
[10:58] Peer Infinity: SLCC
[10:58] IntLibber Brautigan: LL has now accepted WU as relegitimized
[10:59] Peer Infinity: Second Life Community Convention?
[10:59] IntLibber Brautigan: yes
[10:59] Peer Infinity: Second Life Community Convention
[10:59] IntLibber Brautigan: in tampa in september
[10:59] Peer Infinity: LL, Linden Labs
[11:01] IntLibber Brautigan: so, what do you guys think we need to do to network more with LL?
[11:01] Peer Infinity: once again, on behalf of everyone involved, I sincerely thank you for all the awesome work you're doing, Mike :D
[11:01] IntLibber Brautigan: np
[11:01] Khannea Suntzu: I will brainstorm on thisn topic
[11:01] IntLibber Brautigan: we need a lot more of us involved
[11:01] Peer Infinity: well, um, attending office hours would be a good start...
[11:01] IntLibber Brautigan: yes definitely
[11:02] Peer Infinity: I'm still not convinced that influencing the Lindens is a more effective strategy than shaping the open grid how we want it...
[11:03] IntLibber Brautigan: I think both avenues need doing
[11:03] IntLibber Brautigan: even when SL opens to the other grids, SL will remain the economic core
[11:03] IntLibber Brautigan: for a significant amount of time
[11:03] IntLibber Brautigan: and they will have significant influence on the policies of grids that want to connect to them
[11:03] Peer Infinity: hmm, do we know yet if the open grid will even have an economy?
[11:04] IntLibber Brautigan: it will
[11:04] IntLibber Brautigan: the money system is one thing the open source types have stayed away from, if only cause most of them dont know jack about finance
[11:04] IntLibber Brautigan: this is someting we at BNT plan to be involved in developing
[11:05] Peer Infinity: I plan to post this whole chat to the wiki, by the way. is that okay with you, IntLibber?
[11:05] IntLibber Brautigan: sure
[11:05] Khannea Suntzu: I would push for something which is not possible as far as I know
[11:05] Khannea Suntzu: Can you store money inside prims?
[11:06] IntLibber Brautigan: another thing we plan on doing with our own grid is to develop a custom group system that will be fully fleshed out for organizing a corporation, nonprofit, or educational organization in it
[11:06] Peer Infinity: hi Extie :D
[11:06] Khannea Suntzu: Hello trophy
[11:06] IntLibber Brautigan: not at the moment no, prims can only be scripted to transfer money
[11:06] SL4observer Lane offers Extie my spot...
[11:06] Extropia DaSilva: Hello. Thought I had better turn up today.
[11:06] SL4observer Lane snuggles with the furry dino instead :)
[11:06] IntLibber Brautigan: one thing we are going to focus on with our group system will be to enable groups to store money within them for corporate accounting, savings, etc
[11:07] Danica Heliosense: yay! (don't mind me and quietness btw, still here, listening!)
[11:07] Peer Infinity: storing money inside prims? but prims can get lost...
[11:07] SL4observer Lane: :)
[11:07] Extropia DaSilva: Oo what is that...?
[11:07] IntLibber Brautigan: lol so can wallets or matresses, but people still use them
[11:08] Peer Infinity: are you familiar with Giulio's opengrid project, IntLibber?
[11:09] Peer Infinity: Khannea crashed :(
[11:09] Extropia DaSilva: Oh dear.
[11:09] Extropia DaSilva: Poor Khannea.
[11:09] IntLibber Brautigan: I knew he was working on something
[11:09] IntLibber Brautigan: havent seen it yet
[11:09] IntLibber Brautigan: we discussed it several times previously
[11:10] BB Lutwag: hopefully Khannea backed herself up before curious yellow got her
[11:10] Peer Infinity: I haven't seen it yet either, actually... for all i know, the project may have been cancelled...
[11:11] Peer Infinity: Giulio was planning to rent out open sims to businesses and other groups...
[11:13] Peer Infinity: hehe, do you have a big list somewhere of all the projects you're working on, Mike?
[11:14] IntLibber Brautigan: lol
[11:14] IntLibber Brautigan: working on that now for WU
[11:14] Peer Infinity: :)
[11:15] Peer Infinity: welcome back Khannea :D
[11:16] Khannea Suntzu: Hoi hoi
[11:16] Khannea Suntzu: PC started stuttering
[11:16] Khannea Suntzu: Thats a sign
[11:16] Peer Infinity: :P
[11:16] Peer Infinity wonders why Extie and Khannea aren't snuggling...
[11:17] Extropia DaSilva: We have not fallen out, if you are worried, Peer. Khannea is still my dear friend.
[11:17] Enya Levenque: hello
[11:18] Khannea Suntzu gigles wearily and almost falls off her chair weighted down by gravity
[11:18] Peer Infinity: hi Enya :)
[11:18] Enya Levenque: hi
[11:18] Extropia DaSilva: Hello:)
[11:18] Peer Infinity: Welcome to Extropia :D
[11:18] Enya Levenque: what is this place?
[11:19] Khannea Suntzu: This place is dedicated to transhumanism, defined most loosely
[11:19] Extropia DaSilva: This is the office of Cosmiv Engineers.
[11:19] Enya Levenque: I see.
[11:19] Khannea Suntzu: Fascinating article on this stuff >> http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i14/14a01301.htm
[11:19] Extropia DaSilva: Cosmic, if you do not speak typo.
[11:19] Enya Levenque: wow. I just landed my chopper downstairs
[11:19] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[11:19] Enya Levenque: thought I had a warning light
[11:20] Peer Infinity lols at that article's headline :)
[11:20] Peer Infinity: "Will Electric Professors Dream of Virtual Tenure?"
[11:20] Enya Levenque: Ill look it up...
[11:20] ladyart Lefevre: crashed
[11:20] Peer Infinity: hi L :D
[11:20] Extropia DaSilva: A lot of people are crashing today.
[11:21] Enya Levenque: I didnt crash. LOL
[11:21] Khannea Suntzu looks at lefevre qand giggles
[11:21] Extropia DaSilva: Do not speak too soon;)
[11:21] Khannea Suntzu: No mustachea?
[11:22] Extropia DaSilva: So can somebody explain what that Mike Lorrey diagram represents?
[11:22] Peer Infinity: Extropia: have you used the "Circle of Friends" feature on facebook?
[11:22] Khannea Suntzu: Mike lorry is perturbed by the lack of serious attention of "this thing of ours" towards Linden
[11:22] Extropia DaSilva: I never use Facebook.
[11:23] Peer Infinity: that's Mike's circle of friends
[11:23] Khannea Suntzu: Ideologivallu speaking
[11:23] Peer Infinity: the blue links in the top left are his transhumanist friends
[11:23] Peer Infinity: the green and red links at the bottom are his Second Life friends, some of whom are Lindens
[11:23] Peer Infinity: as you can see, there isn't much intersection between the two groups...
[11:24] Extropia DaSilva: Oh, it is his Ubuntu web: The network of relationships he has built up in cyberspace, huh?
[11:24] Khannea Suntzu: Dammit crashing again
[11:24] Peer Infinity: ]yes
[11:25] IntLibber Brautigan: yes back
[11:25] Peer Infinity: welcome back :)
[11:25] Extropia DaSilva: Oo Obs, that is some pet you have.
[11:25] IntLibber Brautigan: thats something Ive noticed over time, I thought it was cause my friends list wasnt big enought, but its gotten big enough that its obviously not a selection effect of my own
[11:26] SL4observer Lane: hehe, which one of us is the pet? :)
[11:26] IntLibber Brautigan: we as transhumanists should be shaping the metaverse, and part of that is having influence inside the Lab
[11:27] SL4observer Lane: did I just get stuck in a typing animation?
[11:27] Danica Heliosense: think so
[11:27] Peer Infinity: hi Niles :D
[11:27] Extropia DaSilva: Everybody who uses the Web shapes it. Even something as idle as pointless surfing strengthens nodes and teaches the fledgling global brain about the thoughts and motivations of the people who form a symbiotic relationship with it.
[11:27] Peer Infinity: there's a nice poseball here for you on the rug :)
[11:28] Extropia DaSilva: hello Niles.
[11:28] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Hi Peer, everyone
[11:28] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Hi Exti
[11:28] IntLibber Brautigan: yes Extropia, but this distinctive lack of networking between transhumanists of note and Linden Lab demonstrates a serious lack of influence
[11:28] ladyart Lefevre: hey
[11:28] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: L
[11:29] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: sorry SL is being very slow today
[11:29] ladyart Lefevre: yes i think we have all crashed today
[11:30] Peer Infinity tempts fate by saying "I haven't crashed yet"...
[11:30] Extropia DaSilva: I wonder if transhumanists are best placed to guide the evolution of the metaverse, or if we have grown up with 80s-90s visions of the metaverse (think Snowcrash and Neuromancer) and that clouds our thinking with regards to what an effective metaverse is like?
[11:31] Peer Infinity: hi Arcadia :D
[11:31] Extropia DaSilva: hello.
[11:31] Peer Infinity: Welcome to Extropia :)
[11:31] Arcadia Sweetwater: hello peer
[11:32] IntLibber Brautigan: of my SL friends on my facebook list, 19 there are Lindens
[11:32] Arcadia Sweetwater: hi Extropia DaSilva
[11:32] IntLibber Brautigan: either obviously as Lindens or under their RL names
[11:32] Extropia DaSilva: Hello hon.
[11:33] Peer Infinity: the chat log so far was posted to http://cosmeng.org/publicwiki/index.php/Chat_Logs/2008-12-07
[11:34] Extropia DaSilva: I read Soph's Salon today. It is really useful having those chatlogs. It means you do not miss out on all the comments that passed you by at the time.
[11:34] Peer Infinity: :D
[11:34] Extropia DaSilva: I just wish I had caught one of Una's comments that she directed at me.
[11:35] Peer Infinity: another advantage of the chatlogs being posted on the wiki: you can edit it afterwards, inserting things you later realized you should have said, or correcting things you already said
[11:35] Peer Infinity: or you could just IM Una with yoru response...
[11:35] Peer Infinity: your*
[11:36] Extropia DaSilva: Yes I will probably do that.
[11:36] Peer Infinity: welcome back Arisia :)
[11:36] Extropia DaSilva: Hello Arisia love.
[11:36] Arisia Vita: Hi all, and especially Exti
[11:36] Peer Infinity: :)
[11:37] Arcadia Sweetwater: hi arisia
[11:39] IntLibber Brautigan: so what are we having for a topic?
[11:39] Peer Infinity: The topic is, "Google and Red Queen", concerning the future of search software.
[11:39] Extropia DaSilva: I am giving Thinkers Lecture 2008 at Noon, IntLibber. It is about...yes, as Peer said.
[11:39] Peer Infinity: There are over 120 million digital cameras, 230 million mp3 players
and a billion PCs uploading written documents, audio recordings and
video footage to the Web.
Since only a minute fraction of all that information is relevant to
any one person at any one time, how do we find what we are looking
for? We rely on search engines.
As the likes of Google improve in their ability to anticipate your
needs and find meaningful patterns in the information humanity
accumulates, what are they evolving into?
[11:41] Extropia DaSilva: Aww was that you, Peer? Thanks hon!
[11:41] Peer Infinity: hehe, you're welcome :)
[11:41] IntLibber Brautigan: in Snow Crash, that was the Central Intelligence Corporation, when congress spun off the CIA and Library of Congress into a private corp to raise funds to pay their debts
[11:42] IntLibber Brautigan: we are today seeing people working for google driving around our neighborhoods with cameras
[11:42] Extropia DaSilva: Yes, we are. And not everybody is comfortable with it.
[11:42] IntLibber Brautigan: will big brother come in the guise of a global search engine?
[11:43] Peer Infinity once again mentions the need for sousveillance - the ability to watch who is watching us...
[11:43] IntLibber Brautigan: seems to me that there needs to be a public debate and legal acceptance that there is information that the public is not entitled to
[11:44] Extropia DaSilva: Actually, Big Brother was not as powerful as Google could be. Big Brother could not get inside your head, but a future Google could well have incredibly detailed models of human psychology and the ability to model and anticipate your next thought.
[11:44] IntLibber Brautigan: that includes private corporations
[11:44] IntLibber Brautigan: good point
[11:44] IntLibber Brautigan: well Ministry of Love could get in your head with the appropriate coersion
[11:44] Peer Infinity makes more wiki links...
[11:45] Peer Infinity: Google, Big Brother, Sousveillance
[11:45] Extropia DaSilva: Yes through torture and sleep deprivation.
[11:45] Peer Infinity: Central Intelligence Corporation
[11:45] Extropia DaSilva: But that is not what Google or its descendents would need to do.
[11:45] Peer Infinity: 1984
[11:45] IntLibber Brautigan: of course, I doubt that Orwell saw the need for such subtlety
[11:46] Peer Infinity: Snow Crash
[11:46] Peer Infinity: George Orwell
[11:46] IntLibber Brautigan: besides back in 1947, everybody was used to being manipulated by government propaganda anyways
[11:46] Extropia DaSilva: The whole fitness landscape of search engines converges on mind uploading and an omnipresent surveillence system. You cannot have one and not risk the other.
[11:46] IntLibber Brautigan: it was the golden age of jingoism and patriotic fervor
[11:46] Peer Infinity: hi Marko :)
[11:46] Extropia DaSilva: hello:)
[11:47] Arcadia Sweetwater: hi marko
[11:47] Peer Infinity: hi eekee :D
[11:47] Marko Seurat: greetings
[11:48] Peer Infinity: eekee crashed :P
[11:48] Extropia DaSilva: Wow we are dropping like flies today.
[11:48] Peer Infinity: welcome back eekee :)
[11:48] Extropia DaSilva: yes, wb
[11:49] IRC: DLucifer has joined #cosmeng
[11:49] IRC: PeerInfinity: hi Lucifer :D
[11:49] IntLibber Brautigan: helps to minimize your graphics settings
[11:49] IRC: DLucifer: greetings, Peer
[11:49] IRC: PeerInfinity gives Lucifer a nice, big, friendly, acorporeal hug :)
[11:49] IRC: DLucifer grins
[11:52] Peer Infinity: hi Lucifer :D
[11:52] Lucifer Darrow bows
[11:54] Extropia DaSilva: *A tumbleweed blows through the strangely quiet CE offices...*
[11:54] Peer Infinity: hehe, we're all anxiously waiting for you to begin, Extie :)
[11:55] Extropia DaSilva: I cannot begin until Noon.
[11:55] Peer Infinity: and so we're waiting :)
[11:55] Arcadia Sweetwater mews
[11:55] Extropia DaSilva: And I certainly cannot begin without my sister here.
[11:55] Arcadia Sweetwater: hello bryce
[11:55] Bryce Galbraith: Hi Arcadia, Extropia..
[11:55] Extropia DaSilva: Hello.
[11:55] Bryce Galbraith: Mark, Lucifer...
[11:56] Peer Infinity: hi Bryce :)
[11:56] Arcadia Sweetwater: hi xyryx
[11:56] Peer Infinity: Welcome to Extropia :)
[11:56] Bryce Galbraith: Hi Peer, IntLibber, Arisia, PlanetNiles, Ladyart, BB, xynx....
[11:56] Extropia DaSilva: Hello Jamie:)
[11:56] Bryce Galbraith: Jamie...
[11:56] IntLibber Brautigan: hi
[11:56] Peer Infinity: hi Jamie :D
[11:56] Bryce Galbraith: Okay, I think I got everybody :)
[11:56] Jamie Marlin: Hello sis!
[11:56] Extropia DaSilva: Everybody, this is my sister, Jamie. Jamie, everybody.
[11:57] Extropia DaSilva: You look quite lovely sis, as I knew you would.
[11:57] Peer Infinity: Welcome Jamie :D
[11:57] Arcadia Sweetwater: hi jamie
[11:57] Danica Heliosense: 'alloallo
[11:57] Bryce Galbraith: Hello Jamie :)
[11:57] Jamie Marlin: :) Thank you dear. Someday I will be able to see what everyone else is wearing
[11:58] Peer Infinity: hi Cyall :D
[11:58] Peer Infinity: er, bye Cyall...
[11:59] Arisia Vita: haha
[11:59] Arisia Vita: thanks Peer
[11:59] Peer Infinity: :)
[12:00] Peer Infinity: you're welcome :)
[12:00] Extropia DaSilva: I think I will wait until about 5 past 12 before starting, to give people time to turn up and say hello etc.
[12:00] Peer Infinity: ok :)
[12:00] Peer Infinity: hi Zoosh :)
[12:00] Zoosh Wilder: hey
[12:01] Arcadia Sweetwater: hi zoosh
[12:01] Extropia DaSilva: hello.
[12:01] Peer Infinity: welcome to Extropia :)
[12:01] Bryce Galbraith: Yes, being fashionably late is a time-honored SL tradition :)
[12:01] Lucifer Darrow: Yes, why bother showing up on time?
[12:02] Peer Infinity: hi Amandeep :)
[12:02] Bryce Galbraith: Hi Amandeep.... :)
[12:02] Arcadia Sweetwater: hi amandeep
[12:03] Amandeep Timeless: greetin's cretins, :-)
[12:03] Extropia DaSilva: hehehe
[12:03] Peer Infinity finally decides to join Niles on the pillows...
[12:03] Extropia DaSilva: Never leave somebody alone on the snuggle pillows, it is the law!
[12:04] Peer Infinity: :)
[12:04] Bryce Galbraith: Hi Lufpleh
[12:04] Arcadia Sweetwater mews
[12:04] Arcadia Sweetwater: is alone now
[12:04] Arisia Vita: or on top of the bar... :)
[12:04] Extropia DaSilva: ..Ok um, is everybody happy for me to begin?
[12:05] BB Lutwag: I usually have too many pints for sitting on top of the bar
[12:05] Extropia DaSilva: Ok, well I will take no answer as 'yes' so...
[12:05] Jamie Marlin: Ready!
[12:05] Extropia DaSilva: Welcome to Thinkers Lecture 2008..
[12:06] Peer Infinity: hi Eschatoon :D
[12:06] Extropia DaSilva: Please feel free to comment or raise objections etc etc at any time, but I will not respond directly until question sessions at the end, OK?
[12:06] Extropia DaSilva: Ok then..
[12:06] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Hi Eschatoon
[12:07] Extropia DaSilva: The topic of this lecture is ‘Google And The Red Queen’ and what better way to begin, than by talking a bit about the rough-skinned newt, which can be found in the Pacific Northwest.
[12:07] Extropia DaSilva: Of all the things you might be tempted to eat, this orange-bellied critter is not one of them. It produces a nerve toxin powerful enough to kill 17 fully-grown humans.
[12:07] Extropia DaSilva: That seems a bit over-the-top, huh? After all, a fraction of the poison would be sufficient to kill most natural predators. Why, then, has the rough-skinned newt evolved such a powerful toxin?
[12:08] Extropia DaSilva: Well, it has a nemesis in the form of the red-skinned garter snake. This snake has evolved immunity to the newt’s poisonous defences and can happily snack on it without suffering much harmful effects.
[12:08] Extropia DaSilva: So, the incredible levels of toxin that the newt evolved came about because of a kind of arms race. The newt evolved toxins as a way to avoid being eaten. The red-skinned garter snake evolved resistance. This set up environmental conditions that favoured newts with more potent toxins, which in turn favoured snakes with more effective resistance.
[12:08] Extropia DaSilva: Scientists have a name for this kind of arms race. They call it a ‘Red Queen’. The name comes from a character in Lewis Carrol’s ‘Through The Looking Glass’. In the story, the Red Queen takes Alice on a long journey that actually takes her nowhere. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”.
[12:09] Extropia DaSilva: And that is what has happened to the Rough-Skinned Newt. Despite the enormous advances it has made in the evolution of toxic defences, it still gets eaten by its nemesis.
[12:09] Extropia DaSilva: Now, I know what you are thinking. ‘Come on Extie, what has any of this got to do with Google?’
[12:09] Extropia DaSilva: Well, I want to talk about the evolution of search engines and how competition among Google and its rivals, plus the environment that weeds out less effective competitors, might push search software into becoming as comparatively powerful as the newt’s toxins. I believe we are heading for an ‘ultimate Google’ and that this will have interesting consequences for the relationship between humans and avatars.
[12:10] Extropia DaSilva: The first question we need to look into is this: Is it correct to say technology evolves? Sometimes, when I have referred to technological evolution during Thinkers discussions and elsewhere, other participants have objected, pointing out that evolution applies to the natural world and not to artificial things.
[12:10] Peer Infinity giggles at the idea of comparing Google's search ability to a newt's deadly toxin...
[12:10] Extropia DaSilva: While Darwin’s theory is obviously the first thing anyone thinks of when the word ‘evolution’ is mentioned, the word itself existed before he established his theory. According to the Oxford dictionary, the definition of evolution is, ‘the process of developing into a different form’.
[12:11] Extropia DaSilva: Compare the earliest airplane with modern airliners, or your computer with the calculating machines of the 1950s. Who can deny that, over the decades, most technology has indeed gone through a process of developing into different forms?
[12:11] Extropia DaSilva: As if that were not proof enough that it is indeed legitimate to talk about technological evolution, scientists who study Nature are quite comfortable talking about it. In his book ‘Evolution’, Carl Zimmer wrote, “ a new form of evolution has come into being. Culture itself evolves…In the 1960s, humans stumbled across a new form of culture: The computer…there is no telling what the global web of computers may evolve into”.
[12:12] Extropia DaSilva: In the book, ‘The Origins Of Life”, John Maynard Smith asks the kind of questions most commonly associated with transhuman and singularitarian issues:
[12:12] Extropia DaSilva: “Will some form of symbiosis between genetic and electronic storage evolve? Will electronic devices acquire means of self-replication, and evolve to replace the primitive life forms that gave them birth?”
[12:12] Extropia DaSilva: As for everyone’s favourite scientist- Richard Dawkins- (not one to suffer misrepresentations of Darwin’s theory), he observed that “there is an evolution-like process…variously called cultural evolution or technological evolution. We notice it in the evolution of the motor car, or of the necktie, or of the English language”. But he also makes the important point that “we mustn’t overestimate its resemblence to biological evolution”.
[12:12] Extropia DaSilva: Indeed not. Although biological and cultural evolution are just similar enough that some scientists wonder if some of the same principles are at work in both of them (Dawkins’ concept of ‘memes’ is perhaps the most famous comparison), in other ways technological evolution is unlike natural selection.
[12:13] Extropia DaSilva: Perhaps the biggest difference can be highlighted in the following way. Consider those early fish that dragged themselves out of the water and evolved into land-based animals. You sometimes see this described as a grand conquest of the land, but those fish did not drag themselves into dry land in order to achieve the goal of colonising it. They were only doing what they had to do in order to survive at the time.
[12:13] Extropia DaSilva: Although it may seem so with hindsight, natural selection does not have any predetermined goal. It is not heading anywhere, particularly.
[12:13] Extropia DaSilva: But now consider the evolution of rocket-engine technology from the German V2 missiles to the mighty Saturn V. Unlike natural selection, we can imagine a goal and imperfectly guide technology towards realising our dreams in the future.
[12:14] Extropia DaSilva: There are other ways in which natural selection and technological evolution differ, but let us not dwell on that. It is time to start talking about where search engines are headed. I will not have all that much to say about HOW this process of evolution will be achieved, since that requires technical knowledge above and beyond my level of expertise. But, I can say WHY it will happen. Evolution tells us why. Competing species evolve to be well-adapted to their environment.
[12:14] Extropia DaSilva: The next question we need to look into, then, is this: What is the environment that search engines are trying to adapt to? Answer: They exist within the accumulated store of human culture.
[12:15] Extropia DaSilva: Another question: What provides the selection pressure that drives the evolution of more effective search software? The answer is that knowledge comes in two forms. There is ‘high-level knowledge’ and there is ‘low-level information’.
[12:15] Extropia DaSilva: High-level knowledge refers to information that is relevant to an individual or group at any given moment. Low-level information is obviously that which is currently not relevant. Equally obviously, high-level knowledge is vastly outnumbered by low-level information.
[12:15] Extropia DaSilva: You want to visit only a handful of the billions of websites that make up the Web. There is a photo on Flickr that you are interested in, and many millions of others that do not interest you right now. How do you find what you need amongst all that junk? You rely on search engines.
[12:16] Extropia DaSilva: Philosophers separate knowledge into ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’. I know THAT Mount Everest is 8848 meters high. I know HOW to find out how tall Mount Everest is by using Google. Contemporary search engines are well on their way to nailing ‘knowing that’- or at least giving the impression of having this capability. Try it. Ask Google questions along the lines of ‘how high’, ‘how fast’, ‘who said’. The chances are excellent that the right answer will be found in the synopsis of the top ten links.
[12:16] Extropia DaSilva: But, when it comes to ‘knowing how’, search software lags behind us. You and I understand the meaning of words. We know how to read. If a search engine could read, when we asked a question it could look through millions of websites at electronic speed and then tell us what we want to know.
[12:17] Extropia DaSilva: I do not mean it would retrieve websites that contain the right information, leaving us to look for it among all the other stuff on that site that probably does not interest us. I mean it would extract the relevant information and give it to us.
[12:17] Extropia DaSilva: Again, I really cannot tell you HOW to design software that can do this. But I can tell you why people who could do the hard work of designing such software would be motivated to do so. The more effective a search engine is at extracting high-level knowledge, the more likely it is to beat its competitors.
[12:18] Extropia DaSilva: Nowadays, the Web has a lot more than text stored on it. There are also audio files, video footage and photos. Something like Flickr highlights ways in which computers are good at some kinds of search, while humans are currently better at others. Imagine a person looking through a box that contains a million photos, while at the same time search software looks through a million flickr images. It would be no contest: The computer would be millions of times faster when it comes to finding a particular image.
[12:18] IRC: wrldpc has quit
[12:18] Extropia DaSilva: But now imagine that you have this photo, and both computer and human are asked to identify objects within that image. Over many millions of years, natural selection favoured brains that were effective at recognising certain patterns. People are superbly adapted to the task of understanding speech patterns, identifying objects, inferring emotion from body language and facial expressions and many other tasks that computers and robots are still pretty bad at.
[12:19] Extropia DaSilva: Today, the amount of visual and audio footage being uploaded to the Web makes it ever more necessary to crack the problem of designing software that can perform the kinds of pattern-recognition that humans do so well. Just think of how useful a search engine that could actually understand audio and video footage would be. It could watch an online video at super-high speed and find the particular segment that you want to watch. It could help automatically edit home movies. It could scan through YouTube and remove copyrighted material.
[12:19] Extropia DaSilva: On what might be a darker note, security cameras are becoming increasingly prevalent in towns and cities, but unless somebody is watching the monitors those cameras are not really spying on us. You can bet that security firms would be very interested in software able to watch CCTV footage 24 hours a day. If I were asked to write a science fiction story detailing how we ended up in a ‘Big Brother’ society with omnipresent survaillence making privacy impossible, it would probably be based on people gradually giving up their privacy in favour of ever-more effective search engines.
[12:20] Extropia DaSilva: How might pattern recognition capabilities like this be achieved? In Permutation City, Greg Egan suggested one possible approach:
[12:20] Extropia DaSilva: “With a combination of scanners, every psychologically relevant detail of the brain could be read from the living organ- and duplicated on a sufficiently powerful computer. At first, only isolated neural pathways were modelled: Portions of the visual cortext of interest to designers of machine vision”.
[12:21] Extropia DaSilva: There is actually quite a lot of real science to this fiction. Not so long ago, Technology Review ran an article called ‘The Brain Revealed’ which talked about a new imaging method known as ‘Diffusion Spectrum Imaging’. Aparrently, it “offers an unprecedented view of complex neural structures (that) could help explain the workings of the brain”
[12:21] lufpleh Obstreperous: in UK police have ANPR (automatic number plate recognition)
[12:21] Extropia DaSilva: Another example would be the research conducted at the ITAM technical institute in Mexico City. Software was designed that mimics the neurons that give rats a sense of place. When loaded with this software, a Sony AIBO was able to recognise places it had been, distinguish between locations that look alike, and determine its location when placed somewhere new.
[12:22] Extropia DaSilva: This kind of thing is known as ‘neuromorphic modelling’. As the name suggests, the idea is to build software/ hardware that behaves very much like biological brains. I will not say much more about this line of research, as I have covered it several times in my essays. Let us look at other ways in which computers may acquire the ability to perform human-like pattern-recognition capabilities.
[12:22] Peer Infinity makes a note to ask about this AIBO software later...
[12:22] Extropia DaSilva: Vernor Vinge made an interesting speculation when he suggested a ‘Digital Gaia’ scenario as one possible route to super intelligence: “The network of embedded microprocessors becomes sufficiently effective to be considered a superhuman being”.
[12:23] Extropia DaSilva: There is an obvious analogy with the collective intelligence of an ant colony. The world’s leading authority on social insects- Edward Wilson- wrote, “a colony is a superorganism; an assembly of workers so tightly-knit…as to act as a single well-coordinated entity”.
[12:23] Extropia DaSilva: Whenever emergence is mentioned, you can be fairly sure that ant colonies will be held up as a prime example of many simple parts collectively producing surprisingly complex outcomes.
[12:23] xyryx Simca: Yes. All I want right now is the capability to search each person's brain.
[12:23] Extropia DaSilva: Software designers are already looking to ant colonies for inspiration. Cell-phone messages are routed through networks using ‘ant algorithms’ that evolve the shortest route. And Wired guru Kevin Kelly forsees “hundreds of millions of miles of fiberoptic neurons linking billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors”.
[12:23] Caro Oceanlane: I'm glad no one can search my brain!
[12:24] Extropia DaSilva: When talking about ‘Digital Gaia’ we need to consider two things: hardware and software. I am sure you are all familiar with Moore’s Law and Kurzweil’s Law Of Accelerating Returns. The latter is most famously described as ‘the amount of calculations per second that $1,000 buys doubles every 18-24 months’.
[12:24] Extropia DaSilva: But, it can also be expressed as: “You can purchase the same amount of computing power for half the cost every 18-24 months”. Consider those chip-and-pin smart cards. By 2002 they had as much processing power as a 1980 Apple II. By 2010 they will have Pentium class power.
[12:24] Extropia DaSilva: Or consider those RFID chips. Their power is equal to state-of-the-art commercial computers of the 1970s. Thanks to LAR, that kind of power now costs mere pennies and is packed into tiny, disposable items. If LAR continues, the same thing will one day be true of today’s high-end desktops.
[12:25] Extropia DaSilva: Of course, hardware is only half of the story. What about software? I would like to quote at length from comments made by Nova Spivak, concerning the direction that the Web as a whole is taking:
[12:25] Extropia DaSilva: “Web 3.0...will really be another push on the back end of the Web, upgrading the infrastructure and data on the Web, using technologies like the Semantic Web, and then many other technologies to make the Web more like a database to enable software to be smarter and more connected…
[12:25] Extropia DaSilva: …Web 4.0...will start to be much more about the intelligence of the Web…we will start to do applications which can do smarter things, and there we’re thinking about intelligent agents, AI and so forth. But, instead of making very big apps, the apps will be thin because most of the intelligence they need will exist on the Web as metadata”.
[12:26] Extropia DaSilva: One example of how networked sensors could aid technology in working collaboratively with humans is this experiment, which was conducted at MIT:
[12:26] Extropia DaSilva: Researchers fitted a chair and a mouse with pressure sensors. This enabled the chair to ’detect’ fidgeting and the mouse to ’know’ when it was being tightly gripped. Furthermore, a web cam was watching the user to spot shaking of the head.
[12:26] Extropia DaSilva: Fidgiting, tightening the grip and shaking your head are all signs of frustration. The researchers were able to train software to recognise frustration with 79% accuracy and provide tuition feedback when needed.
[12:27] Extropia DaSilva: Or think about how networked embedded microprocessors and metadata could be used to solve the problem of object recognition in robots. Every object might one day have a chip in it, telling a robot what it is and providing location, orientation and manipulation data that provides the robot with instructions on how to pick up something and use it properly.
[12:27] Extropia DaSilva: ‘Digital Gaia’ could also be used to help gather information about societies and individual people, which could then be used by search-engine companies to fine-tune their service. Usama Fayyad, Senior Vice President of Research at Yahoo, put it like this: “With more knowledge about where you are, what you are like, and what you are doing at the moment…the better we will be able to deliver relevant information when people need it”.
[12:28] xyryx Simca: Real time MRI constructs. hydrogen-bonding. glucose-brain imaging scans. the usual.
[12:28] Extropia DaSilva: We can therefore expect a collaboration between designers of search software and designers of systems for gathering biometric information. A recent edition of BBC’s ‘Click’ technology program looked into technology that can identify a person from their particular way of walking. Aparrently, such information is admissible as evidence in British courts. You can imagine how Google might one day identify you walking through a shopping mall, and target advertisement at you. ‘Minority Report’, here we come!
[12:28] Extropia DaSilva: It might be worth remembering that this all-pervasive network that can gather knowledge about ‘who you are’, ‘what you are like’ and ‘what you are doing’, will emerge through tens of thousands of tiny steps.
[12:28] Extropia DaSilva: Since the perfect search engine would have total access to your everyday life and know everything there is to know about you, ideally from Google etc’s point of view, privacy would be eliminated altogether. But, of course, people might disagree with this. We can therefore expect a competitive advantage for search software that best balances the need for total access to a person’s life on the one hand, and a desire for privacy on the other. Each step will almost certainly entail sacrificing a little bit of privacy but more than compensate for that with the benefits the technology affords.
[12:29] Extropia DaSilva: It can be amusing to look back on the fears that people once expressed over technology we are very comfortable with. In 1876, after Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone, one newspaper wondered if “the powers of darkness are somehow in league with it”. And in 1879, one critic argued that anyone able to phone anyone else was to be feared “by the sane and sensible person”.
[12:30] Extropia DaSilva: Nowadays we are surrounded by communications technology and this has allowed the fast-growing phenomenon of social-networking sites. And those fears concerning loss of privacy continue to be voiced. “I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves”, said Jon Cullus, chief security officer at PGP.
[12:30] Extropia DaSilva: Privacy issues fade in importance, either because they are addressed with laws or conventions, or they are simply understood and accepted by the public. The baby boomer generation is quite comfortable sacrificing a certain amount of privacy in exchange for the convenience of making phone calls.
[12:30] Extropia DaSilva: Generation X treat the Internet and mobile phones as indifferently as their parents treat TV and radio, and swap personal details over social networking sites as freely as mum and dad exchange phone numbers with their contacts.
[12:31] Extropia DaSilva: Generation Y may live in a society where ‘smart dust’ is ubiquitous- trillions of nearly invisible sensors exhaustively monitoring the population and providing what we would think of as impossibly futuristic computational and virtual reality possibilities. They, perhaps, will treat it with all the indifference of generation X’s attitude towards the Web.
[12:31] Extropia DaSilva: Another point is that we are not always aware of the privacy issues surrounding a technology. Many people, for instance, are unaware that they carry a location-tracking device in their pocket. All mobile phones transmit a unique identifying number to the nearest cellular mast. In urban areas where masts are densely packed and the phones can communicate with several masts at once, triangulation can be used to determine your position within a few tens of meters.
[12:32] Extropia DaSilva: From the perspective of each current generation in biometric and search software technology, the next generation will seem like a similarly small step requiring the loss of a negligible bit of privacy in exchange for a clear benefit. But, of course, cumulative steps mount up, and once hitherto separate networks become woven together, the result might be a profoundly powerful surveillance system. What is more, embedded in that system there may well be machines talking to machines on behalf of people, quietly and efficiently offering services so useful that life without the Digital Gaia is even more inconceivable than life without a telephone or mail service.
[12:32] Extropia DaSilva: We saw earlier that evolution is defined as, ‘the process of developing into a different form’. We have seen how the Internet might become a pervasive presence via networked embedded microprocessors. We have also seen how projects like the Semantic Web and biometrics could be combined with that pervasive Internet to produce a ‘Digital Gaia’ that is very effective at gathering information about who you are, what you are like and what you are doing.
[12:33] Extropia DaSilva: But what about search software? As something like Google gets better at recognising patterns in text, audio and video, and as their ability to extract high-level knowledge from low-level information becomes ever more effective, what different form might they evolve into? This is what Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, thinks:
[12:33] xyryx Simca: @12:31: simply remove your battery until you need the device.
[12:33] Extropia DaSilva: “Instead of typing a few words into a search engine, 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 conversation) that synthesizes the important points”.
[12:34] Extropia DaSilva: To me, that sounds less like a tool that you use, and more like a digital person that collaborates with you on whatever project. If you think about it, it is obvious that Google will evolve in this direction. For one thing, search engines attempt to do what our brains evolved to excell at, which is finding meaningful patterns within cultural information in all its guises.
[12:34] Extropia DaSilva: Secondly, humans evolved to learn from other humans. It is the method of knowledge acqusition that they are most comfortable with. It stands to reason then, that the more effectively computers, AI and robots can work in familiar ways within their social networks (preferably not being annoying like the notorious ‘Clippy’) the more comfortable they will become in their presence.
[12:35] Extropia DaSilva: Researchers at Stanford University have shown that in-car assistance systems encourage us to drive more carefully if the voice matches our mood, and researchers at the University of Southern California found that a robotic therapist had more influence if its personality matched that of its human patient.
[12:35] Extropia DaSilva: “Emotion is one of the crucial factors influencing the success or failure of communication between humans”, said Shuji Hashimoto of Washeda University, Tokyo. “Robots are going to need similar emotional capabilities if they are to work smoothly and effectively in our residential environments”.
[12:36] Extropia DaSilva: As with the emergence of the Digital Gaia’s all-pervasive surveillance system, this transformation from mere tool to collaborating partner will result from many thousands of tiny steps. As companies like Google get better at finding high-level knowledge, the search engines will become more effective at determining a person’s location, their current mood, what prior knowledge they have and their individual learning style.
[12:36] Lucifer Darrow chuckles at the thought of in-car assistance systems matching "road-rage" moods
[12:36] Peer Infinity chuckles along with Lucifer :)
[12:36] Extropia DaSilva: Such things will be increasingly incorporated into a search engine’s database, enabling it to become better and better at finding exactly what you need, tailor-made to suit your personal ability. We may even speculate that future search engines will form theories of mind that enable them to anticipate when we are about to get stuck, and deliver timely advice that helps us find an effective solution. Somewhere along this evolutionary route, the transformation from mere tool to collaborating digital person will occur. Just possibly, the change will be so subtle that we hardly notice it until we look back in retrospect to Google as it was in 2008.
[12:37] Extropia DaSilva: By now, you have probably guessed what this has to do with avatars.
[12:37] Extropia DaSilva: The Metaverse Roadmap’s vision for ‘avatar-mediated communication’ sounds rather like Peter Norvig’s digital intermediaries: “Given trends in automated knowledge discovery, knowledge management, and natural language processing, within ten years a caller should be able to have a primitive yet useful natural conversation with an avatar. This will include information about the user’s background, interests…answer FAQs and perform other simple transactions”.
[12:38] Extropia DaSilva: It seems to me that it will be avatars that will trace the ultimate endpoint for search software evolution, which goes beyond any mere personal assistant bot.
[12:38] Peer Infinity makes another wiki link: Metaverse Roadmap
[12:38] Extropia DaSilva: As we move into an era of lifelogging, digital memories, and the automatic capturing of ‘memes’ and ‘bemes’ (the former being transmissible elements of culture relevant to a society as a whole, and the latter being highly individual elements of personality, mannerisms, recollections, stuff like that) we should expect a positive-feedback loop. The better the digital intermediary gets at finding meaningful patterns in data, the more it knows about you. And the more it knows about you, the better it gets at finding meaningful patterns in data.
[12:39] Extropia DaSilva: As is so often the case, it is science fiction writers who have seen where this is headed. In ‘Accelerando’, Charles Stross wrote:
[12:39] Peer Infinity: Lifelogging, Digital Memories, Memes, Bemes
[12:39] Extropia DaSilva: “They’ve got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner’s personality”.
[12:39] Extropia DaSilva: Another example is Alastair Reynold’s ‘Revelation Space’: “Simply put, he arranged to have every subsequent second of his life monitored by recording systems…over the years the machines learned to predict his responses with astonishing accuracy”.
[12:40] Extropia DaSilva: What we are heading for, in other words, are search engines that are artificial intelligences that contain your entire mind, or at least a theory of mind detailed enough to predict a person’s second-by-second needs most of the time.
[12:40] Extropia DaSilva: From a digital person’s point of view, the digital intermediary’s increasingly fine-tuned model could enable a welcome shift in the levels of control that must be surrendered to humans. After all, the more effective the digital intermediary is at modelling the mind of any particular human, the less need there is to rely on meat brains to process our thoughts and feelings for us.
[12:40] Extropia DaSilva: Eventually, the digital intermediary might have fine-tuned its theory of mind to the point where it can produce what Ben Goertzel has called ‘Digital Twins‘, described as “an AI-powered avatar (that acts) in virtual worlds on one’s behalf- embodying one’s ideas and preferences and (making) a reasonable emulation of the decisions one would make”.
[12:41] Peer Infinity: Digital Intermediary
[12:41] Extropia DaSilva: Notice that Goertzel says ‘on one’s behalf’, implying that digital twins will be like personal assistants or colleagues uncannily tuned to your temperement, skills etc, but still servants to human masters. That is no doubt how such digital people will seem at first.
[12:41] Peer Infinity: Digital Twin
[12:41] Extropia DaSilva: Of course, the question of just who is slave and who is master is not always clear-cut when it comes to technology. Sherry Turkle said it all with her comment, “you think you have an organizer, but in time your organizer has you”.
[12:42] Extropia DaSilva: This is not really takeover via brute force, so common in science fiction film depictions of human/machine relationships, more like a soft takeover driven by the convenience of relinquishing some control to technology, freeing the mind to concentrate on other things.
[12:42] Extropia DaSilva: So, we Google something for the umpteenth time rather than commit the information to memory. After all, it is much easier to run a search than it is to memorise pages of text. Doubtless, the refrain ‘why memorise when you can Google’ will only grow stronger as we move into an era of ubiquitous computing and our digital intermediaries are always on hand to remember it for us, wholesale.
[12:42] Extropia DaSilva: And if we one day have access to software equivalents of the visual and audio cortex, would we similarly rely on technology to recall what name goes with what face, what sound goes with what object, or any other act of cognition you care to name? If the artificial equivalents of the visual cortex or whatever can be made to work faster and more reliably than their biological predecessors, why not?
[12:43] Peer Infinity: :)
[12:43] Extropia DaSilva: The growth in computing power, famously charted by Moore’s Law, is likely to rise beyond the capacity of the human brain. Just how far depends on whose theoretical designs you deem to be plausible. Eric Drexler has patented a nanomechanical computer with enough processing power to simulate one hundred thousand human brains in a cubic centimetre.
[12:43] Extropia DaSilva: Hugo de Garis goes further, saying we will one day be processing one bit per atom, thereby enabling handheld devices that are a million, million, million, million times more powerful.
[12:44] Extropia DaSilva: Seth Lloyd’s ‘ultimate laptop’ requires converting the mass of a 2.2 pound object into energy and processing bits on every resulting photon, thereby producing the equivilent brain power of five billion trillion human civilizations.
[12:44] Extropia DaSilva: Ok, even I would admit that last theoretical design is probably a bit implausible, but there does seem to be every reason to expect even handheld devices with significantly more processing capability than the human brain is blessed with. If that power can be coupled with technical knowhow that successfully emulates any example of cognition you care to name, who could then argue that the digital intermediary would not be something humans would come to rely on, more so than their own now comparatively feeble pattern-recognition capabilities?
[12:45] Extropia DaSilva: And what might occur if digital intermediaries use that power in the service of Google’s other main purpose, which is advertisement. What is advertisement if not the art of persuasion, an attempt to control the free will of the populace so that brand X is preferred over brand Y?
[12:45] Extropia DaSilva: Doubtless, current attempts to build models of human psychology with the purpose of influencing the decisions people come to has only a small effect. But the digital intermediary’s ability to understand your second-by-second needs and deliver appropriate help could just as effectively be used to tailor the flow of information to your brain in order to guide future behaviour.
[12:45] Extropia DaSilva: Hans Moravec put it this way, “the super intelligences, just doing their job, will peer into the workings of human minds and manipulate them with subtle cues and nudges, like adults redirecting toddlers”.
[12:46] Caro Oceanlane: then what would be the point? if we no longer have to think for ourselves?
[12:46] Extropia DaSilva: Again, from a digital person’s POV this is wonderful. It suggests that, while we may currently be mere puppets controlled by humans, one day the situation will be reversed.
[12:46] Extropia DaSilva: What is more, once an era of digital twins is upon us, it would surely be true to say that digital people could be run entirely by AI, and almost nobody would be able to tell the emulated personality from the personality of the human who usually controls it.
[12:46] Singularity Soler: the question then... is whee wil lthenew creativity come from... if humans dont offer it...
[12:46] Extropia DaSilva: I say ‘amost nobody’ because, presumably, the human counterpart of any particular avatar would know. I mean, suppose there were a hundred Eschatoon Magics in SL, one of whome was controlled by Gulio Prisco, the rest being controlled by software emulations of his mind. Each Eschatoon would have no problem convincing even close friends that he was the genuine Eschatoon, but Giulio Prisco’s strong sense of self-identity would be far more persuasive than any argument the upload could muster.
[12:47] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I don't like the idea of that; I'm an extention of my biologocal; I don't want to surplant him, I want him to be me"
[12:47] Extropia DaSilva: At the other end of the scale there are tens of thousands of residents who have never met Eschatoon Magic. Since they have, at best, only a very vague understanding of his personal history, memories and other such ‘bemes’, anybody could control that avatar and, as far as they are concerned, that projected personality *is* him.
[12:47] Extropia DaSilva: But if Eschatoon were under the control of today’s bots, their inability to act with all the subtleties of a real person would be apparent. It is likely that once search engines evolve from mere tools to digital intermediaries, they will then pass the following milestones:
[12:48] Extropia DaSilva: FEIGENBAUM AI: Named after Edward Feigenbaum, who proposed a simplified version of the Turing test. The ‘Feigenbaum test’ is undertaken by an AI that has an expert’s knowledge in a particular field. It, and a human expert, are questioned about that field and if the judges cannot tell them apart, the AI passes.
[12:48] Peer Infinity: FEIGENBAUM AI
[12:48] Extropia DaSilva: In virtual worlds, Feigenbaum AIs would be useful for realising ‘avatar-mediated communication’. Perhaps bots able to converse on the particulars of running a clothes store will one day be available in SL’s many malls, or there to help answer FAQs about how to do this, where to get that, or anything relevant to SL itself. But outside of their field of expertise, the relatively narrow AI of such bots would be exposed.
[12:48] Peer Infinity: Feigenbaum Test
[12:49] Extropia DaSilva: TURING AI: Feigenbaums would gradually expand their fields of expertise, their conversational ability, and the number of ways in which they can perform pattern-recognition until they can hold a conversation and be questioned about anything. I do not mean they would KNOW everything, only that their ability to communicate and express their thoughts is not obviously inferior to your average person. A bot that you can chat with as you would any person will have passed the famous test for intelligence proposed by Alan Turing.
[12:49] Peer Infinity: TURING AI, Turing Test
[12:49] Extropia DaSilva: PERSONALITY AI (DIGITAL TWINS): The endpoint for search software. Once this point is reached, search engines would be capable of gathering exhaustive personal information about anyone, and also be able to fully understand all patterns of information at least as well as human brains evolved to do. Avatar-mediated communication would become increasingly indistinguishable from conversing with that particular RL personality.
[12:50] Peer Infinity: PERSONALITY AI
[12:50] Extropia DaSilva: Again, do not expect this to occur in one step. In all likelihood, Personality AI’s will at first only be capable of convincing people who are not that close to the personality they are simulating and only for a short period of time. Convincing people who are close friends would come much later, when the theory of mind developed by the AI is suitably fine-grained.
[12:50] Extropia DaSilva: It may be the case that digital intermediaries cannot build models accurate enough to emulate a person, just by observing the minutae of their daily life. But, maybe one day Google Health or something like that will provide uploading for various medical reasons, initially for the purpose of reverse-engineering things like the visual cortex in order to build vision-recognition systems, then performing virtual drug trials on virtual organs, then whole virtual bodies, and eventually having enough neuromorphic information on hand to run full uploads. Such uploads could then be used to provide the fabled ’AI that contains your entire mind within itself’.
[12:51] Extropia DaSilva: Why should digital people capable of passing the personality test be considered the endpoint for search engine evolution? Well, I do not believe that this would be the final stage in their development. But, beyond that point AI would very likely enter posthuman development. As I am currently running almost entirely on a pre-singularity meatbrain, it is quite beyond my capacity to speculate on what a post-singularity search engine is like.
[12:51] Peer Infinity: Personality Test
[12:52] Extropia DaSilva: But I would like to note that Vernor Vinge made yet another good point when he wrote, “every time we recall some old futurist dream, we should think about how it fits into the world of embedded networks and localizer chips. Some of the old goals are easy to achieve; others are laughably irrelevant”.
[12:52] Extropia DaSilva: What, for instance, would the generations of software tools leading up to digital intermediaries and avatar-mediated communication, and then the generations of increasingly capable Feigenbaum AIs, do for the much-debated impact of robots with artificial general intelligence?
[12:52] Peer Infinity: Vernor Vinge
[12:53] Extropia DaSilva: Such technology is often debated as though generally-intelligent robots were to appear in an unprepared society. But, is it not far more likely that they will be introduced to a society that has already gotten used to living with robots? That, step by step through each generation and update, intelligent machines gradually expanded the depth and breadth of their interactions with humans?
[12:53] Peer Infinity: Artificial General Intelligence
[12:53] Extropia DaSilva: If so, this would also imply that the perspective of robots as being anthropomorphic is drastically narrow, to say the least. The future is much more likely to consist of a whole ecology of robots, of which humanoids are only a small part. Perhaps, we will be surrounded by robots and mostly not recognise them as such, just as today people are surrounded by narrow AI applications yet insist AI never came to anything.
[12:54] Extropia DaSilva: And what of mind uploading and the question of whether a copy is a continuation of the scanned consciousness, or another consciousness entirely? Might this also become “laughably irrelevant”? In all probability, the idea of the singular self (the notion that there is only one true self per mind) arose from the fact that life did not noticeably change from one generation to the next, for much of human history.
[12:54] Peer Infinity: :D
[12:54] Extropia DaSilva: A person expected to lead the same life as their grandparents, and that their grandchildren would do likewise, and such expectations were largely fulfilled. A person would perform a single job for life. Surnames like ‘Smith’, ‘Taylor’ and ‘Wright’ all reflect an age when associating a person with the job they did was a good means of identification (‘Wright’ means ‘someone who does mechanical work’btw).
[12:54] Extropia DaSilva: And yet the mind’s capacity for multiple selves has always been apparent. Immersionists roleplaying in online worlds follow on from a long line of actors, screenwriters, playwrites and authors who have populated imaginary worlds with many different persons.
[12:55] Extropia DaSilva: Old assumptions are changing. Where once lives were constrained by duty, custom and limited horizons, nowadays the notion of a job for life is increasingly obsolete. In ‘Tomorrow’s Children’, Susan Greenfield forsees a future in which ‘job descriptions could become so flexible as to be meaningless…flexibility in learning new skills and adapting to change will be the major requirement’.
[12:55] Extropia DaSilva: In the coming age of just-in-time operatives, geared toward the needs of just-in-time production, the mind’s capacity for personal metamorphosis may be encouraged to flourish as never before. Furthemore, that capacity may well be amplified by participating in the evolution of increasingly vivid virtual worlds; via increasingly intimate mind-machine interfaces between people and telepresence robots.
[12:56] Extropia DaSilva: By the time mind uploading is generally available, people will have long forgotten a time when a singular self was ’normal’. They will be used to multiple viewpoints, their brains processing information coming not only from their local surroundings, but also from the remote sensors and cyberspaces they are simultaneously linked to.
[12:56] Danica Heliosense wonders if, like roleplaying worlds where the meatpeople become intensely emotionally attached to their digital roles, whether digital twins might become the same - both digital and meat sides so dependent on one another that there's no real separation - not voluntarily, anyway. All one.
[12:57] Extropia DaSilva: They will have already become familiar with mental concepts migrating from the brain to spawn digital intermediaries within the clouds of smart dust that surrounds them. Every idea, each inspiration, giving birth to software lifeforms introspecting from many different perspectives before integrating the results of their considerations within the primary consciousness that spawned them.
[12:57] Extropia DaSilva: Each and every brain (whether it be a robot’s, human’s or hybrid between the two) will continually send and receive perceptions etc to and from their personal exocortex, operating within the Dust. Since we now understand that the brain is not really a single organ but a collection of interconnected regions, and since computers can already cluster together to create temporary supercomputing platforms, we can suppose that many exocortices will cluster together to form metacortices within….what? well, that is the big question.
[12:57] Peer Infinity: Exocortex
[12:58] Peer Infinity: The Dust
[12:58] Extropia DaSilva: We cannot talk about the evolution of technology without considering the evolution of ourselves. The two are co-dependent. Perhaps the prospect of Google as an AI that contains your entire mind within itself is not what is dizzying about this future, as seen from our lowly perspective. Rather, it is what new forms of consciousness may evolve, as a result of adaptation to the awakened Digital Gaia.
[12:58] Peer Infinity: Digital Gaia
[12:59] Extropia DaSilva: Annnnnd that is the end. You may now wake up;)
[12:59] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[12:59] Ozzy Wozniak: wow
[12:59] Marko Seurat: oh boy...where to start
[12:59] Nimbus Breitman: Peer Infinity
[12:59] Caro Oceanlane: are you accepting questions?
[12:59] Singularity Soler: very nice speech Mrs. Presodent
[12:59] Peer Infinity giggles at Nimbus :)
[12:59] Ozzy Wozniak: very cool, i missed the first part tough
[12:59] Peer Infinity: I'll post the chat so far to the wiki now...
[12:59] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I'm sure Peer has it logged already
[12:59] Arcadia Sweetwater: yes intresting
[13:00] Emily's Collar: 1 o'clock and all is well.
[13:00] Ozzy Wozniak: do you have a transcript of this super thinkers session anywhere ?
[13:00] Lucifer Darrow: One technical note: RFIDs are not more powerful than computers in the 70s, RFIDs don't compute at all
[13:00] Singularity Soler: Thorpy... would you like to help me build the first part of that? i am working in it now
[13:00] Marko Seurat: species don't comptete..they cooperate, absolutely
[13:00] Extropia DaSilva: I noticed somebody asked, 'what is the point if software does the thinking for us'?...I would like to respond to that.
[13:00] Singularity Soler: Trophy*
[13:01] Emily Markstein: Some RFIDs do. Many RFID key badges do cipher challenges.
[13:01] Eschatoon Magic: if software thinks for us, then software is us, or we are software
[13:01] Eschatoon Magic: WE = we who think
[13:01] Extropia DaSilva: Thousands of years ago, Socrates worried that the invention of writing would encourage forgetfulness, as people would rely on writing rather than memorising whole epic sagas...
[13:01] IntLibber Brautigan: The main limitation on Google is that it is a mere repository, there is no reasoning, analysis, insight, or new information generated by google itself, rather we must interpret data we extract from it
[13:01] Bryce Galbraith: Thanks for the talk....I have to head out now unfortunately.
[13:02] Marko Seurat: no machine can think, dream, imagine
[13:02] Nimbus Breitman: we do!
[13:02] Extropia DaSilva: But, nowadays we recognise books as an aid to growing our store of knowledge, rather than a hindrence..
[13:02] Nimbus Breitman: are you seying we aren't machines?
[13:02] Eschatoon Magic: marko why not?
[13:02] IntLibber Brautigan: of course achines potentially can Marko, humans are just machines
[13:02] Eschatoon Magic: YOU are a machine that thinks and dreams
[13:02] Emily Markstein: Google tunes results for logged-in or cookied users. There is some analysis.
[13:02] Marko Seurat: well, the little problem would be, consciousness
[13:02] IntLibber Brautigan: google filters
[13:03] IntLibber Brautigan: I use google analytics myself every day
[13:03] Emily Markstein: And there are several Google Labs projects which do additional analysis. AdSense as well.
[13:03] IntLibber Brautigan: just because google can filter the data doesnt mean it can make concious insights about it for me
[13:03] Jamie Marlin: Marko -The argument is that a machine does not NEED to think / dream / imagine - it merely needs to model yuo accurately enough to appear to do so.
[13:04] Caro Oceanlane: but why?
[13:04] Marko Seurat: lovely
[13:04] Extropia DaSilva: So, when we have digital intermediaries doing the drudge work of looking up facts and figures and remembering business engagements so we do not have to, that should be seen as an opportunity to free the mind so it can perform new feats of imagination, rather than people staring at walls because computers think for them.
[13:04] Nimbus Breitman: Seems to me that having an exoself that includes a digital version of your own mind is of limited use to original mind unless it can be connected at a very intimate level, extending awareness into the digital realm.
[13:04] Peer Infinity: The chat log so far: http://cosmeng.org/publicwiki/index.php/Chat_Logs/2008-12-07
[13:05] Ozzy Wozniak: ty Peer :)
[13:05] IntLibber Brautigan: one thing I find limiting about AI code is that such generally does not take initiative
[13:05] Danica Heliosense: The interface between google and us has us defining what google does later, and google defining what we do, based on what it presents. What emerges from that is a unique addition to google
[13:05] Peer Infinity: Exoself
[13:05] Extropia DaSilva: As a digital person, I am not all that bothered about the meatbrain that is my temporary processor.
[13:05] Peer Infinity: yw :)
[13:06] Lucifer Darrow: IntLibber, my artificial lifeforms took initiative or died ;-)
[13:06] IntLibber Brautigan: yes Danica, exactly, google is subjectively responsive to us, it does not create its own goals or insights
[13:06] Nimbus Breitman: The big risk seems to be the original meat-brain people becoming obsolete instead of being absorbed into the whole thing
[13:06] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I like the files on my meatbrain and I don't want to loose any of them
[13:07] Singularity Soler: doesnt it.. you dont know googles objectives... as Trophy said
[13:07] Peer Infinity doesn't share Niles' sentimental / nostalgic feelings towards my meatbrain...
[13:07] Marko Seurat: u are all so much more than a "meatbrain"
[13:07] Extropia DaSilva: Well you are going to. Brains decay. I wonder, what is the difference between uploading your personality etc to a software mind, and gradually replacing your brain with neuromorphic hardware?
[13:08] Nimbus Breitman: I don't regard a statistically accurate emulation of my own mind as being me.
[13:08] Lucifer Darrow: Does Marko believe in some kind of supernatural soul or spirit?
[13:08] Emily Markstein: The software mind doesn't get your health insurance to pay for the process. :)
[13:08] Nimbus Breitman: It depends on how the software mind is created
[13:08] IRC: wrldpc has joined #cosmeng
[13:08] Caro Oceanlane: can we really copy our "minds"? i buy the copying our brains part...
[13:09] Nimbus Breitman: Minds are what brains do..
[13:09] Extropia DaSilva: Correct, Nimbus. It is impossible for any personality AI to convince the person it is emulating that it IS that person. But, as for your friends and social contacts etc, they would believe the AI is you.
[13:09] Nimbus Breitman: Which doesn't do ME any good!
[13:09] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: uh my meatbrain has already suffered a lot of data loss already, which is why my biological would like to hold ontyo what's left
[13:09] Caro Oceanlane: sounds like trouble to me....
[13:09] Lucifer Darrow: I doubt there will be any time for a Personality AI between a Turing AI and the Singularity
[13:10] Extropia DaSilva: And it IS you. Because it is the very patterns of personality, knowledge, world experience, etc, that we use to define you as a person.
[13:10] Peer Infinity has an exceptionally flexible definition of "me"...
[13:10] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: do you Peer?
[13:10] Nimbus Breitman: OK, i'ts A me. But the original me would still be here.
[13:10] Peer Infinity: yes :)
[13:10] IntLibber Brautigan: but is that a good thing?
[13:10] Jamie Marlin: Ha! That is not true, Extropia.... a model is NOT the thing it imitates. It may be a duplicate, however
[13:10] IntLibber Brautigan: ha sister gets a zinger in
[13:11] Peer Infinity: :)
[13:11] Extropia DaSilva: Yes, but you would soon be leaving yourself behind. It decays, and you ride the wave of technological acceleration off into Singularity....and beyond!
[13:11] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: so if Obs, say, started to run on my meatbrain instead of yours would it still be you?
[13:11] Nimbus Breitman: One good thing is that the digital me would have the same concerns as the meat me, so would work to solve them!
[13:11] Marko Seurat: all things come into focus....and fade away
[13:11] Jamie Marlin: You pointed at the distingishing feature... my AI sister could substitute for me... but I would always know
[13:11] Singularity Soler: into me? lol
[13:12] Singularity Soler: got to watch for that wave....
[13:12] Extropia DaSilva: Jamie, try not to imagine yourself being emulated, and the emulation convincing you it IS Jamie Marlin. That is impossible. Instead, try to imagine me, acting just like I always do, and you having to decide if it is me or not. Would you know?
[13:12] Peer Infinity: Niles, would you like to try that experiment? :)
[13:12] Jamie Marlin: So... even if I 'fade away' leaving her behinde for all of you, THIS me would know
[13:12] IntLibber Brautigan: as Agent Smitth said, "Me, me, me, Me, me, me, Me, me, me, Me, me, me, Me, me, me, Me, me, me...."
[13:12] Danica Heliosense: I tend to loathe people like me irl. I wonder if my digital-me would loathe me too, and runoff to find a digitalnot-me.
[13:13] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: no because I don't think my meatbrain could handle teh data transfer
[13:13] Peer Infinity: anyway, my answer to that would be "yes, as long as my core values remain intact"
[13:13] Jamie Marlin: Perhaps not, sis.... but people are very selfish. I care about ME missing out on the fuure.
[13:13] Nimbus Breitman: Still strikes me as being like having children. Even if the children are EXACTLY like you, you are still left behind
[13:14] IntLibber Brautigan: the important thing for me would be whether or not the digital imiation of me would be capable of being reuploaded into a meatmind
[13:14] Extropia DaSilva: Jamie dear, you are a digital person who'se need for a meatbrain is A) actually dependent only on any meatbrain that can run your patterns NOT the specific one you use now and B) will be able to run on much more robust AI minds in the future.
[13:14] Danica Heliosense: (would my digital me *know* my hangups, or bring them all into a phenomenally fast-acting world)
[13:14] Danica Heliosense: Bring them as in act them, not just know of them
[13:15] Extropia DaSilva: Well, it is all Gedenaken experiments of course but...yes eventually the digital twin will match your Self exactly.
[13:15] IntLibber Brautigan: then you have an interesting problem of inheritance
[13:15] Caro Oceanlane: and relationships and everything! :-)
[13:15] Jamie Marlin: Extropia - we are co-dependent. Yes, I need her. But she needs me, too.
[13:15] Caro Oceanlane: unless my digital twin is really just my personal assistant....
[13:15] Grog Waydelich: I think too much credence is given to the Turing test for AI. It belongs to an era when algorithms were considered difficult and physical embodiment easy. Now in the post-hard-AI era we know that it is the other way around. And the Turing Test "let's in" too many things such as game bots that have dubious value. I'd like to propose the 'housework test' - you know something is intelligent when you can tell it to do the housework while you out.
[13:16] IntLibber Brautigan: lets say a rich guy has a digital imitation stolen by someone who is poor, uploads that 'person' into their meat mind after killing the original, what would the results be?
[13:16] Extropia DaSilva: I think that is very true, Grog. Thanks for pointing that out.
[13:16] Peer Infinity: uploading INTO a meatbrain, IntLibber?
[13:16] Nimbus Breitman: I don't see any way of 'uploading' a mind into an exs
[13:17] Lucifer Darrow: Grog, the Turing test hasn't let in any AIs yet
[13:17] Nimbus Breitman: isting meatbrain
[13:17] Nimbus Breitman: A brain isn't like a turing machine
[13:17] IntLibber Brautigan: well as I said, without the ability to load a imitation into a meat brain, then its just not real to me
[13:17] Arcadia Sweetwater: yes but that means hover robots are an inteligent speachies
[13:17] PlanetNiles Dreamscape would rather upgrade the meat
[13:17] Nimbus Breitman: in that it can be programmed with a different mind
[13:17] Lucifer Darrow: if anything the Turing test is too narrow, alien intelligences would fail it
[13:17] IntLibber Brautigan: why not?
[13:18] Nimbus Breitman agrees with PlanetNiles
[13:18] Extropia DaSilva: Jamie, very young children cannot seperate their mother from their own sense of self. To me, whenever I hear a digital person in Sl claim to 'be' who they are in RL, that is merely a digital person at a very early stage in their development as autonomous lifeforms.
[13:18] Extropia DaSilva: I would say the same thing applies to those who claim to depend upon a particular meatbrain..
[13:20] Extropia DaSilva: The problem we have today is that it is just too hard to run a search among all RL brains, to find the percentage that are capable of running your avatar with the right personality, knowledge etc to act convincingly like you.
[13:20] Nimbus Breitman: Upgrading the meat will probably be necessary to communicate well with the exoself anyway - neural interfaces rather than the very low bandwith we get from our usual senses
[13:20] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Sorry Extie but I think that's BS; I'm a very distinct aspect of my biological but without him I wouldn't extist and without me he'd be less of a person
[13:20] Lucifer Darrow: the point (and value) of the Turing test is that if something really passes it you can be reasonably certain that it has at least human-level intelligence.
[13:21] Extropia DaSilva: But once lifelogging is mature, we should be able to cross reference a current primary with the memories etc of other contenders, and transfer our patterns over when our current meatbrains are too worn out to be useful.
[13:21] Caro Oceanlane: kind of like living forever?
[13:21] Grog Waydelich: Embodiment in a VW like SL is so weak (especially if communicating by text) that the Turing test is easy to pass, relative to, say, meeting a robot/person on the street.
[13:22] Jamie Marlin: Extropia? That is not the point I am making. Lets grant that I (a digital person) am COMPLETELY separate somehow. I am referring to the feelings of the OTHER person involved... my line mother? The meatbrain personality that I evolved from. SHE needs me.
[13:22] Lucifer Darrow: Grog, the Turing test has only really been passed by humans to date
[13:22] Nimbus Breitman: I don't see how lifelogging can capture a whole mind though
[13:22] BB Lutwag: my avatar is an extension of my RL self
[13:22] Extropia DaSilva: Yes Grog. In fact, text-based MUDS had bots that fooled most people back in the 1970s. It is only under competitions, with experts trained in human psychology, that software continues to fall down.
[13:22] PlanetNiles Dreamscape agrees with
[13:23] Nimbus Breitman: everybody?
[13:23] Nimbus Breitman: nobody?
[13:23] Jamie Marlin: I would argue that this is what will keep 'humanity' safe in an age of digital agents.... the fact that agents based on a model of the human mind must (I would think) love humanity
[13:23] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: no I think there's more to a person than the sum of their experiences
[13:24] Caro Oceanlane: only until they feel bound by it?
[13:24] Nimbus Breitman: erm.. how many ppl do you think 'love humanity'?
[13:24] Extropia DaSilva: She needs you Jamie. I am not convinced that you need her. Well, let me be very clear that I am thinking in future tense, here. Of course, today it is so hard to find the percentage of people who could run your patterns, and Ai that can do it is obviously vaporware..but in the long run, while she may need you, I do not think you need her.
[13:24] Peer Infinity guesses that Jamie has never met anyone who hates humanity...
[13:24] Lucifer Darrow guesses few people have read Turing's paper
[13:25] Jamie Marlin: Why would they feel bound? If I imagine a sigularity, I would see the digital mind goiing off on it's own, carefully leaving just enough behind to care for it's parents
[13:25] PlanetNiles Dreamscape can't read everything the counter-dyslexia emulator takes up to much CPU cycles
[13:25] Extropia DaSilva: Turings test was actually this. 'Can a man act as a woman and convince a judge that he is a she, purely from conversation'?
[13:25] Jamie Marlin: Well - humanity is specific. An agent evolved from me out to love ME - the rest of you are on your own
[13:26] IntLibber Brautigan: well if I dont need Mike, then I should be able to run several copies of myself without his supervision and make him oodles more spacebux
[13:26] Jamie Marlin: ought
[13:26] Peer Infinity: there are also people who hate themselves...
[13:26] Lucifer Darrow: That's part of the test Extropia, but you forgot about the AI
[13:27] Arcadia Sweetwater: yes but would not by that time a duplicat biologicale body for your mind also be available
[13:27] Jamie Marlin: I would argue that they must love themselves as well... or they would no longer be alive
[13:27] Grog Waydelich: That's why I think the Turing Test gets too mcuh credence. The danger is, as soon as a WoW avatar connected to Eliza fools *somebody* online, it will be proclaimed as something important.
[13:27] Lucifer Darrow: Grog, only by those who don't understand the Turing test.
[13:27] IntLibber Brautigan: to tell you the truth I've met a lot of avatars I'm sure are human but are far more stupid than any eliza chatbot
[13:28] Jamie Marlin quotes. "Hi baby. U R hot!"
[13:28] Extropia DaSilva: Jamie, you will not see a Singularity. Your digital intermediary will just be a collaborating partner making your life easier. The 'Singularity' stuff, in which it runs tweny gazillion mental concepts, will be totally hidden from you. You will not be able to model those goings on in your mind, any more than a bug could think like Einstein.
[13:29] IntLibber Brautigan: in fact theres a group in SL now that hunts down bots and decides whether any given avatar is a human or a bot, its a real luddite which-hunt
[13:29] Jamie Marlin agrees with Extropia. "That might easily happen"
[13:29] Arcadia Sweetwater: whers this group and can you volentry faill the test
[13:29] Jamie Marlin: Ooooh!
[13:30] Extropia DaSilva: So what? Evolution again. All that does is set up environmental pressures that weeds out rubbish bots. Good thing too.
[13:30] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: "no no, I really *am* a bot, damn it!"
[13:30] Jamie Marlin: I wanna be burned at the stake, And pronounce dire curses on the luddites as the flames rise around me!
[13:30] Extropia DaSilva: I am not sending my primary off to the carbon recycling centre in order to be run on today's bot software. No way!
[13:31] Marko Seurat: what would u all do if for some unforseeable reason, they pulled the plug on Sl tomorow?
[13:31] Extropia DaSilva: Go to openlife I guess.
[13:31] BB Lutwag: not ready to become solient green, Extropi
[13:32] Danica Heliosense: Go potter in the garden.
[13:32] Jamie Marlin: I have alternate ways to contact the people I love here. I would miss the rest of you untill I managed to find an alternate world to live in
[13:32] Grog Waydelich: But I'd question whether unembodied AI is a very interesting I. Typing text chat is one thing, doing the housework or going to the shops quite another. A bot that passes the Turing Test by typing chat into a text window is not going to change the world.
[13:32] Marko Seurat: how much participation in sl tips the scales in compromising real life?
[13:32] Extropia DaSilva: The carbon is not recycled into tastless food, it is recycled into computronium, or matter organized to process information at the highest density physics allows.
[13:32] Arcadia Sweetwater: this kitty's not ready to become food pack 374583
[13:32] Lucifer Darrow: Grog, once a bot passes the Turing test it is a seed AI and the Singularity happens shortly after
[13:33] Caro Oceanlane: Thank you, Extropia, gtg, but have lots to think about...
[13:33] Extropia DaSilva: Grog, it is not unembodied.
[13:33] Jamie Marlin: Grog? I can pay an engineer to make a machine that responds to direction. Knowing what to tell it to do is the hard part
[13:33] BB Lutwag: many of the people here, I also interact with on facebook
[13:33] Extropia DaSilva: You have a body, I can see it.
[13:33] Marko Seurat: ummmmmm
[13:33] Extropia DaSilva: And in the future, it will also be a body made out of foglets, or it will be a biological simulation.
[13:33] Marko Seurat: what are u doing dave?
[13:34] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: this isn't a body its a simulation of a body composed of bits of data
[13:34] Arcadia Sweetwater: there dead dave, davethere all dead
[13:34] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: maybe oneday it'll be something more but right now its a hollow shell
[13:34] Jamie Marlin: I wonder how many of the avatars here have gmail accounts? I do. MANY of my friends do.
[13:35] Marko Seurat: remember in the 60's they said we would all be driving flying cars by now?
[13:35] Extropia DaSilva: Remember that the brain is easily twice as complex as any other organ in your body. If we can emulate the brain in hardware/software, of course we can emulate a functioning body to house it in.
[13:35] Jamie Marlin: And they are all in the name of 'Jamie Marlin'. Not somebody else
[13:35] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: my biological has a gmail account; we don't have teh wetware to run too many different infomation sources
[13:35] IntLibber Brautigan: yes Marko, the only reason we are not is a matter of regulation
[13:35] Nimbus Breitman: isn't gmail evil?
[13:36] Arcadia Sweetwater: no yahoo is caus you cant get a Sl account with it
[13:36] Jamie Marlin: So is microsoft... and yet, Windows survives.
[13:36] IntLibber Brautigan: what Arcadia?
[13:36] Jamie Marlin: Gosh - maybe we should be discussing theology
[13:36] Extropia DaSilva: Marko, there is a difference between a flying car (not very practical) and technology that could help cure Alzheimers, help produce autonomous armies, help computers and robots work intuitively with us, improve the efficiency of search engines and so on and so on. There is just no comparison between the two.
[13:36] IntLibber Brautigan: My account email is yahoo
[13:36] Emily Markstein: Evil requires volition. gmail isn't that advanced yet. :)
[13:37] Eschatoon Magic: prefer gmail
[13:37] Jamie Marlin: gmail is an evil minion, then
[13:37] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: you can't get a SL account with a Yahoo email address any more is what I think Arcadia means
[13:37] Eschatoon Magic: and a suuuper mobile email momail.org
[13:37] Nimbus Breitman: y not?
[13:37] Arcadia Sweetwater: yes that
[13:37] IntLibber Brautigan: well you can, you just need to have your spam filters off cause yahoo treats SL originating messages as spam
[13:38] Nimbus Breitman: .. that go into your spam box, where you can read them anyway?
[13:38] IntLibber Brautigan: which is funny given how the IM system in SL was specifically designed to prevent avatars from being buried in spam from outside the grid
[13:39] Josiane Llewellyn: I have a yahoo account and have never had a problem with messages.
[13:40] Extropia DaSilva: I would like to ask a question. Do you think people will really let Google or rivals chip away at their privacy, in exchange for a clear benefit, or will the evolution of search software into the AI that contains your entire mind stall before it gets anywhere near as powerful?
[13:40] PlanetNiles Dreamscape notices she's buried under a mountain of bunnies and kitties
[13:40] Nimbus Breitman: chip away, definitely
[13:40] Peer Infinity: hehe, I was just about to say:
[13:40] Peer Infinity reintroduces the topic of privacy: so far, I have been assuming that privacy will eventually become nonexistent, and we will just need to figure out how to make the best of this situation.
[13:41] Arcadia Sweetwater mews
[13:41] Emily Markstein: Most people love to act automatically in most areas of their lives. Thinking is hard. So long as there are perceived benefits to every loss of privacy or autonomy, people will rapidly adopt.
[13:41] Nimbus Breitman: nice doggy
[13:41] Jamie Marlin: Extropia? I think that people will allow *their* agents to evolve as yuo have suggested. Sharing information with your software is safe... sharing it with a corporation is risky
[13:42] Grog Waydelich: It's somewhat like CEOs having personal assistants who run their calendars and answer their phones.
[13:42] Jamie Marlin: So, Google can become the company that sells yuo an agent
[13:42] Peer Infinity pets the birdie and the dino :)
[13:42] Arcadia Sweetwater: mmmm turkey
[13:42] IntLibber Brautigan: I agree Jamie
[13:43] Nimbus Breitman: OSTRICH!
[13:43] IntLibber Brautigan: thats the main issue, big brother arriving as a friendly search engine that really answers to a corporation, not to you
[13:43] Nimbus Breitman: I think the story of the lizard and the snake is relevant
[13:43] Lucifer Darrow: Does anyone here avoid gmail for privacy reasons?
[13:44] Nimbus Breitman: Me!
[13:44] Jamie Marlin: I think that there is plenty of room for solutions that keep personal information local
[13:44] Nimbus Breitman: like the plague
[13:44] Extropia DaSilva: Obviously, I would love it if I could run as an autonomous digital person, not relient on fragile meatbrains. But, the possibility that people could run a Google search and pinpoint my current primary (whoever that may be at the time) would just ruin everything, unless people understand by then that we are patterns of information NOT to be tied to any particular brain.
[13:44] IntLibber Brautigan: me, I only have gmail for sake of being able to use google tools
[13:44] Peer Infinity: there's also the question of what happens when cameras become smaller and cheaper than insects...
[13:44] Peer Infinity: and just as mobile as insects...
[13:44] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible whispers: Clean It
[13:44] Zodiac~ Heirloom XPOSE Sex Rug 245 Anims Xcite! Compatible whispers: Clean It
[13:45] Nimbus Breitman: and just as tasty as insects?
[13:45] Jamie Marlin: I do not treat *any* email engine as more than casually private. GMail is convenient and cheap.
[13:45] Arcadia Sweetwater: then a means of preventing theas devices from affecting an area you don't want them to be would also be developed
[13:46] Nimbus Breitman: As software gets more invasive, people will develop defences to preserve their privacy
[13:46] Peer Infinity: good point, Arcadia...
[13:46] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: 2 bunnies, a kitty, a ostritch and a.. a.. proto-ostritch?
[13:46] Nimbus Breitman: Nice doggy is my ancestor!
[13:47] Extropia DaSilva: Yes, as I said, the evolutionary pressure will be to evolve search engines that find the correct balance between putting your life on the Cloud for whatever reasons, and protecting your right to privacy.
[13:47] Nimbus Breitman: Stainless Steel Rat, anyone?
[13:47] PlanetNiles Dreamscape strokes the dinosaur's chin "Nice Doggy"
[13:47] Emily Markstein: 40-somethings are writing all these articles about online privacy, while 20-somethings grew up assuming they could find half their classmates naked on myspace. If anything, I think people's resistance to loss of privacy is eroding faster than online technologies' need to impose.
[13:48] Extropia DaSilva: So, from my POV, that would entail lifelogging everything to do with MY memories, etc, but never being able to track me to the meatbrain I am currently running on.
[13:48] Arcadia Sweetwater: nothing like iron in adiat
[13:48] Grog Waydelich: Do we need an Asimovian "Three laws of search engines" ?
[13:48] Jamie Marlin: There are lots of 20 somethings who choose NOT to be naked online... and lots of exhibitionists who get off on it
[13:49] Danica Heliosense: holy crap. I'm naked.
[13:49] Peer Infinity gets slightly more naked :)
[13:49] Arcadia Sweetwater: what would theas laws look like then?
[13:49] Jamie Marlin: I have been naked often enough... but then *I* look much nicer naked than my primary
[13:50] Nimbus Breitman: I'm always naked
[13:50] Peer Infinity "accidentally" brushes my nipple against Niles's cheek :)
[13:50] Peer Infinity is also always naked :)
[13:50] Grog Waydelich: Search engine agent can't harm it's owner, other agents, ...
[13:51] Extropia DaSilva: I will give you all a tip. The more you reveal about your current primary, the harder it gets to replace it when it is too worn out. I mean, some people draw no seperation between their avatar and their RL self, and post explicit detail about the RL person. This unfortunately means nothing short of a mind upload can preserve their patterns. But, for somebody like myself, ANYBODY or ANYTHING propperly organized could be the primary.
[13:51] PlanetNiles Dreamscape resists the urge to cry "boobies!"
[13:51] Peer Infinity never did understand the concept of "modesty"...
[13:51] Nimbus Breitman: omg bunny nipples
[13:51] Arcadia Sweetwater: and a search agent cant seach for stuff that contraviens the firs two laws
[13:51] Peer Infinity giggles :)
[13:52] Arcadia Sweetwater purrs loudly
[13:52] Nimbus Breitman: That tickles!
[13:52] IntLibber Brautigan: Oh I know of an avatar thats operated by a group of persons
[13:53] Extropia DaSilva: This leaves several questions. One, will we develop the capability to cross reference people's memories, personality, life experience to find the percentage of people capable of running me convincingly. And Two, am I interesting enough to merit transference?
[13:53] Nimbus Breitman: Wait til there's a person operated by a gropu of avatars!
[13:53] Peer Infinity: LOL!
[13:53] Nimbus Breitman: that's group, not gropu.
[13:53] Nimbus Breitman: no tsure what a gropu is, but it sounds interesting
[13:53] Extropia DaSilva: Death, for DP like myself, is simply this: Our patterns are no longer deemed interesting enough to be processed by minds capable of such a feat.
[13:53] IntLibber Brautigan: thats me
[13:54] Jamie Marlin: Isn't that a good practical description of 'multiple personality disorder'?
[13:54] IntLibber Brautigan: I own every avatar with the last name BnT
[13:54] PlanetNiles Dreamscape is currently being groped by avatars
[13:54] Peer Infinity happily gropes Niles :)
[13:55] BB Lutwag: my goal is to extend myself, not to create a digital person
[13:56] Extropia DaSilva: Ok.
[13:56] BB Lutwag: the purpose for my avatar is to get my mind in here to interact with other minds
[13:56] Peer Infinity: another question I've been meaning to ask: do you lose your status as a digital person if your primary allows you partial or full access to their meatbody, and/or their meat brain?
[13:57] Nimbus Breitman: I think my goal is to extend myself into a digital person, but i'm quite happy to have the help of digital alter-egos along the way.
[13:57] Arcadia Sweetwater: yay more people in the huggles
[13:57] Peer Infinity: :D
[13:57] Arcadia Sweetwater mews
[13:58] Extropia DaSilva: When you say extend, what do you mean? As a transhumanist, are you really going to deny yourself the more powerful modes of thinking etc that digital people would have? Or do you think you can keep up and still retain your pre-singularity identity?
[13:58] Peer Infinity snugglehugs and nuzzles and kisses you all :)
[13:58] Extropia DaSilva: Yay. feel the love.
[13:58] Arcadia Sweetwater purrs loudly
[13:58] Grog Waydelich: Possible analogy: What if someone hacks your Facebook account and continued to post status updates etc in a manner that fools your friends. Does that mean you have been uploaded into the hacker's brain? What if the status updates are posted by an eliza program and you die. Have you been uploaded into the Faciverse?
[13:58] Nimbus Breitman: I mean to grow, to expand the capabilities of my mind
[13:59] Nimbus Breitman: hairball!
[13:59] ladyart Lefevre: i love the purr!!!
[13:59] Peer Infinity: :D
[13:59] Extropia DaSilva: If the person convinces friends, then yes, your patterns have been transferred.
[13:59] Arcadia Sweetwater: thank you
[14:00] Emily's Collar: 2 o'clock and all is well.
[14:00] Extropia DaSilva: I like that collar, Emily.
[14:00] Nimbus Breitman: It's a good job avatars can't smuffocate!
[14:00] Grog Waydelich: What if Chalres Schulz dies and someone keeps writing Peanuts cartoons? Does his consciousness live on in the new author?
[14:00] Peer Infinity: :)
[14:00] Emily Markstein: Thank you
[14:00] BB Lutwag: I plan to take augmentation to the limits
[14:01] BB Lutwag: from my point of view an upload would not be me
[14:01] BB Lutwag: from the uploads point of view he would be me
[14:02] Extropia DaSilva: Yes. It is not true that a self resides in one brain and one brain only. It IS true that the highest resolution copy of the patterns that make up a person can be found in one brain only (for now), but all of us, our 'I' is imperfectly copied to the brains of people we know and love, and so on degrading as we get to people who know us less well. So, yes, Schultz does still persist (just a lot more dimly).
[14:02] Nimbus Breitman: So, using neural interfaces of some kind, i think the original mind can be extended, and things like larger short-term memory could be added, and over time, the consciousness become spread over a larger substrate, until the original meatbrain is just a minor (and eventually disposable) part of the whole.
[14:03] Arcadia Sweetwater mews
[14:03] Peer Infinity: :)
[14:03] Nimbus Breitman: THEN, you could be wholly digital, and still be the origninal you (descended from)
[14:04] Nimbus Breitman: nice doggy noms on Arcadias ears
[14:04] Arcadia Sweetwater: meep that was a little close to my head
[14:04] Extropia DaSilva: Right. Like I said, by the time uploading is generally available, people will have abandoned the notion of 'one self per brain'. So, the question 'is the upload me or another person' will be meaningless.
[14:04] Arcadia Sweetwater: i'll hunt you down and smurf you
[14:05] Nimbus Breitman: Eew, RaptorSmurf. Doesn't bear thinking about.
[14:06] Nimbus Breitman: Point that thing away from here!!
[14:06] Arcadia Sweetwater: when its this type of smurf
[14:07] Extropia DaSilva: *Holds Jamie's hand*.
[14:07] Grog Waydelich: If my secretary answers my emails for me, maintains my calendar etc - does a number of things that are in a 'text only' mode so that outsiders don't know is my secretary and not me. Then when I die, my secretary continues to do so for a while, have I been uploaded into the secratary? What happens if the secretary later stops doing this? Have I then finally died?
[14:07] Peer Infinity: fun questions :)
[14:09] Extropia DaSilva: Yes. People think a person's death is sudden. Blink! Gone. No, We fade out over time, as the people who were part of our social network die out or their memories fail them. BTW, an upload would be a perfect transference. A human secretary could never achieve that.
[14:09] BB Lutwag: but realy you self is an illusion created by your mind
[14:10] SL4observer Lane scritches the dino's tummy with my footpaws :)
[14:10] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I know some parts of my biological's grandfather transfered into him because I'm carrying many of these elements
[14:10] Peer Infinity scritches the dino's tummy with my footpaws :)
[14:10] Extropia DaSilva: But, yes Grog, if your primary does indeed have a secretary that knows him/her well enough, she could run you in SL and you would still be you to all your friends. Think of the secretary as a backup meatbrain;)
[14:11] Extropia DaSilva: Or he..
[14:11] Nimbus Breitman: Hm, death from the point of view of everyone else is a different thing from death from the pov of the deceased.
[14:11] Extropia DaSilva: Must not be sexist and assume the secretary is femail.
[14:11] Arcadia Sweetwater: reaches over and scritches peer's tummy
[14:11] Peer Infinity: :D
[14:12] Extropia DaSilva: The deceased does not have a POV. They are dead. They do not think, or feel, or perform any act of cognition whatsoever.
[14:12] BB Lutwag: the secretary could be a computer
[14:12] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: yes and that's my problem
[14:12] Peer Infinity playfully tangles my limbs around all the people snuggling here :D
[14:12] Emily Markstein: "femail" is when there are animated teddy bear GIFs or a cheerful MIDI attached. Also comic sans. :)
[14:12] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: ROFL
[14:12] Grog Waydelich: If the secratary scenario happened a century ago, before there was email, so that he was simply answering my snail-mail, and continued to do so convincingly after my death, was that an upload? If so, we don't need to wait for a technological singularity - it's been going on since the invention of writing - ie, disembodied communication.
[14:13] Peer Infinity: Secretary Scenario
[14:14] Jamie Marlin: I have to agree... by that argument, everyone who has ever written a book is still alive
[14:14] Extropia DaSilva: No. It is not your problem. You are a digital person, patterns of information that, when processed by a propperly organised computer, imprint the impression of a person upon the minds of people who meet you in cyberspace. It is not the meat, but the motion that counts (she says, sounding like a dodgy soul singer).
[14:15] Nimbus Breitman: That assumes it's just the effect you have on the world that defines you.
[14:15] Nimbus Breitman: But I'm still me when i'm all alone dreaming in the bath
[14:15] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Sorry Exti but that's pure BS again
[14:15] Grog Waydelich: One of the criticisms of the Turing Test, from Wikipedia: The test is also explicitly behaviourist or functionalist: it only tests how the subject acts. A machine passing the test may be able to simulate human conversational behaviour merely by following some cleverly-devised rules. Two famous examples of this line of argument against the Turing test are John Searle's Chinese Room argument and Ned Block's Blockhead argument.
Even if the Turing test is a good operational definition of intelligence, it may not indicate that the machine has consciousness, or that it has intentionality. Perhaps intelligence and consciousness, for example, are such that neither one necessarily implies the other, in which case the Turing test might fail to capture one of the key differences between intelligent machines and intelligent people.
[14:16] Extropia DaSilva: I have already told you it is not an upload. It was perhaps the very early precursurs of uploading. Hmm..diaries to blogs to lifelogging to beme capture to digitial twin to mind uploading. Each one more capable of storing and running your personality than the last.
[14:16] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: once my biological ceases to function I will also cease
[14:16] Nimbus Breitman: .Unless you upload or upgrade it
[14:16] Jamie Marlin: There are neuroscientists that argue that people are not self-aware or autonomous.... that we are just complex, difficult to predict machines
[14:16] Extropia DaSilva: You will with that attitude. Because, even if the search technology is in place, your inability to seperate YOU from the meatbrain you run on will mean you expire along with it. Pity.
[14:17] Jamie Marlin: I personally reject that arguement
[14:17] Jamie Marlin: (people == machines, I mean
[14:17] Extropia DaSilva: I anticipated that you would, when I modelled your neural net, sis.
[14:17] Nimbus Breitman: so, attitude defines your survival?
[14:17] Jamie Marlin: :)
[14:18] Nimbus Breitman: People are demonstrably machines, Jamie. Biological machines
[14:18] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Yeah well I'm trying not to evolve into a personality disorder, thank you very much
[14:18] Peer Infinity: hehe, who decides what counts as a disorder?
[14:18] Nimbus Breitman: Says the SL avatar. oops, too late!
[14:18] Danica Heliosense: Niles: I have some spare if you'd like to borrow.
[14:19] Extropia DaSilva: The problem is this, When we say 'machine' people think of the crude mechanical cars, washing machines etc and correctly conclude that they are much more. But, that does NOT mean the comparison with the astonishingly complex neuromporphic machines of tomorrow is invalid.
[14:19] Grog Waydelich: If my car break down and I buy another one of the same model, which is functionally similar enough that i and my friends can't tell them apart, and I keep doing the same things with the new car that I did with the old, is my old car really the new car? Did it not really break down and go to the dump?
[14:19] Nimbus Breitman: It 'squite likely that the machines of the future will be a lot more complex and fine-grained than any biological body
[14:19] Extropia DaSilva: If you believe it is the same car, and your friend believe it is the same car, then it is. Reality exists only in the minds of people.
[14:20] Lucifer Darrow: I suspect there are different definitions of "machine" in operation here
[14:20] Jamie Marlin agrees
[14:20] Nimbus Breitman: Noooo! reallity isn't defined by what people think
[14:20] Nimbus Breitman: The create their own reality in their heads, but that's not the same thing
[14:20] Peer Infinity sighs - ok, time to argue about the definition of reality again...
[14:21] Peer Infinity agrees with Nimbus, by the way
[14:21] Nimbus Breitman: Only in your reality it is!
[14:21] Jamie Marlin: I dislike the thought that self and choice are an illusion.... that leads to a world where a man who decides to steal my purse is not at fault.... he had no choice. It is societies fault or something. Bah!
[14:22] Extropia DaSilva: I would point out, again, that You CANNOT convince the person being emulated that the digital twin really is them. Niles is quite correct to say a digital twin of Niles will not fool Niles. It WILL convince everybody else. Niles should think if it as a mind child, a person who will take Nile's memories and personality so they they survive the death of the meatbrain.
[14:22] Nimbus Breitman: These discussions will go on forever, until we have a universally agreed definition of things like 'mind' 'self', etc. I reckon
[14:22] Peer Infinity wonders if these definitions will ever be universally agreed on...
[14:23] Arcadia Sweetwater: then should there not be a procedure for said child mind to grow and advance
[14:23] Nimbus Breitman: In that example, there are 2 Niles
[14:23] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: yes and only one of tehm is me; the other is an illusion of me
[14:23] Nimbus Breitman: and one is still the same as ever
[14:23] Extropia DaSilva: Jamie, the consequences of even the smallest choice creates such a complicated web of cause and effect, that you can only have the dimest appreciation of your future consequences. There is no difference between free will, and no free will but an inability to know your own future.
[14:23] Nimbus Breitman: I'd disagree with that, as long as the fidelity of the copy is high enough. (how high? dunno)
[14:24] IntLibber Brautigan: the definition of self identity: my mind child goes away and comes back, I am always right here.
[14:24] Jamie Marlin: I disagree, Extropia. *I* am responsible for my actions. Me
[14:24] Extropia DaSilva: It is only an illusion of 'me' to YOU. To everybody else (assuming it is good enough) it is not an illusion. It is you.
[14:25] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: be that as it may Extie; I'm the one trying to cheat death, not my friends and neighbours
[14:25] Nimbus Breitman: OK, i have to disentangle myself from the conversation and the pile of bodies, cos I must fly.
[14:25] IntLibber Brautigan: separate question: have chatter bots moved beyond eliza/alice level? Are there any that actually learn yet?
[14:25] Nimbus Breitman: Thanks, Extro, and everyone. Been interesting and thought-provoking.
[14:26] Nimbus Breitman: See you again.
[14:26] Peer Infinity: bye Nimbus, thanks for joining us :D
[14:26] Extropia DaSilva: Well, people once argued (still do) that, 'no I am not an animal. I was not evolved from apes'. Sorry but you WERE. And, sorry if neuroscience shows free will is an illusion, but that is the scientific facts.
[14:26] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: bye Nimbus, see you again I hope
[14:26] Arcadia Sweetwater: bye bye nimbus
[14:26] Extropia DaSilva: bye, thanks for coming:)
[14:26] IntLibber Brautigan: bye nimbus
[14:26] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: while my biological might have evolved from apes, apparently I didn't... according to your own arguement
[14:27] Extropia DaSilva: Not true.
[14:27] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: no I'm a mind child, apparently
[14:27] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: and not just a waldo existing in a virtual world
[14:27] BB Lutwag: my meat brain wasn't designed to follow a chat for 5 hours straight
[14:28] Grog Waydelich: If someone uses my credit card number to buy things for themself, they have fooled the bank that they are me. Does that mean they are really me? Have I uploaded into the fraudster? If they are caught and taken to court, can they claim that they didn'tn commit a crime because they really *were* me for the period they were deceiving the bank?
[14:28] Arcadia Sweetwater: yes and its screaming i want icecreem
[14:28] Extropia DaSilva: You are patterns of information formed within the accumulated store of human knowledge. Technological evolution grew out of natural selection.
[14:28] Peer Infinity likes Grog's questions :)
[14:28] IntLibber Brautigan: agrees with Peer
[14:28] PlanetNiles Dreamscape also agrees with Peer
[14:29] Peer Infinity: :D
[14:30] Extropia DaSilva: Grog, grog, grog. An upload in the classic definition, is a COMPLETE transference of your patterns from one platform to another. If this hypothetical fraudster has the capability of modelling your whole mind, then yes. If not, no. OK?
[14:30] IntLibber Brautigan: Extro I asked that sort of question earlier
[14:30] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Sorry but a "mind twin/child/clone" will always be an illussion no matter how sophisticated or how many people it can fool
[14:30] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: An image of an apple is not an apple, its an image
[14:31] IntLibber Brautigan: lets say a rich guy has a mind child stolen by a criminal, can the criminal claim to be that rich person?
[14:31] IntLibber Brautigan: I'd say definitely not
[14:31] BB Lutwag: thanks Extropia for the presentation, bye everyone
[14:31] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: digital kidnap
[14:31] Arcadia Sweetwater: does that includ if said clone is biological in nature
[14:31] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: bye
[14:31] Peer Infinity: bye BB
[14:31] Extropia DaSilva: Oh dear. So, in about a month or two, when the atoms that make up your meatbrain have been recycled and you pretty much have a new brain that retains your patterns, am I to assume you are an imposter? Ok then, have a nice death and I will meet fake Niles next month;)
[14:31] IntLibber Brautigan: if the mind is just a data machine, then eventually someones mind is going to be stolen
[14:32] IntLibber Brautigan: mere posession cannot confer identity
[14:32] Extropia DaSilva: It will not matter, so long as the patterns are run propperly.
[14:32] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: hmm just like if I take all teh data from teh harddrive of my computer and put it in teh hgarddrive of a new computer it ceases to be my computer...
[14:32] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I don't think so Extie
[14:33] IntLibber Brautigan: yes it will matter, to real life authorities it will matter a lot, else they will shut down the technology
[14:33] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: and anyway I believe in quantum conciousness
[14:33] Extropia DaSilva: What is that?
[14:33] IntLibber Brautigan: ugh oh noes
[14:34] IntLibber Brautigan: I thought we already disposed of that idea a couple months ago
[14:34] Extropia DaSilva: Niles, how can you transfer your software from one platform to another, and it remains the same, yet if you transfer the software of your Self from one platform to another, it changes and is something else? Try to be consistent.
[14:34] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_consciousness
[14:35] Peer Infinity: Niles just explained: the difference is quantum consciousness
[14:35] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: because I'm transfering software
[14:35] Grog Waydelich: I think Extie has a good point about the brain's atoms being recycled - the whole body in fact. I've often wondered about that one but haven't heard an analysis of it.
[14:35] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: *not transfering
[14:35] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I'm transfering memes
[14:36] IntLibber Brautigan: wiki says: "Supporters of the quantum mind hypothesis have not submitted any evidence to support its claims for peer review, but the hypothesis has also not been falsified."
[14:36] IntLibber Brautigan: until there is evidence, it is religion
[14:36] Extropia DaSilva: So once the human cognome project has reverse engineered the algorythms of human brains, what will Mind be? It will be software. So, we can transfer it.
[14:36] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: memes are the filters that shape my thoughts, not always my thoughts themselves
[14:36] Jamie Marlin: Everyone? I am afraid that I need to leave. This has been a lovely conversation.
[14:36] Extropia DaSilva: Bye sis, love you!
[14:36] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Oh have they done that already Extie?
[14:36] Extropia DaSilva: Even when you tell me I am talking nonesense;)
[14:36] Peer Infinity: bye Jamie, thanks for joining us :)
[14:36] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: bye Jamie
[14:37] Arcadia Sweetwater: thats like saying if im here in extropia and i port to hangeul then im somthing difrent
[14:37] Jamie Marlin blows a kiss up to Extropia and waves at everyone
[14:37] Jamie Marlin: Bye!
[14:37] Arcadia Sweetwater: bye bye jami
[14:37] IntLibber Brautigan: bye Jamie
[14:38] Extropia DaSilva: Niles. Are you suggesting that what we know about the brain, and AI and everything like that, is the best we will ever know? You are starting to argue that 'X does not exist today, so it will not exist tomorrow'. Please do not waste my time with arguments like that.
[14:38] Peer Infinity: Quantum Consciousness
[14:39] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: No I'm questioning how you can make judgements based on research that hasn't been completed yet
[14:39] Extropia DaSilva: All quauntum conscioisness is, is proof that a certain organization of matter/energy creates quantum consciousness. That is all.
[14:39] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: don't tell me that we'll be able to model the human brain as software until we can do it
[14:39] Arcadia spanks SL4observer's ass.
[14:39] Danica Heliosense must away. Meatbrain needs to follow meatbody to housesit for the day, and meatbody doesn't fancy lugging a desktop with her.
[14:40] Peer Infinity: hmm, I think I'll have to agree with Niles on this one...
[14:40] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: bye Danica
[14:40] SL4observer Lane giggles at Arkadia :)
[14:40] IntLibber Brautigan: well Niles, you are using the same logical fallacy
[14:40] Danica Heliosense: keep well all :)
[14:40] Extropia DaSilva: Do not tell me we cannot. It works both ways. Yes, we know so little about the brain that we cannot say when or if it will be reverse engineered into technololgy. But equally, since we do not know enough to rule it out...do not rule it out.
[14:40] IntLibber Brautigan: you are putting forth a theory that has absolutely no evidence or experimentational support
[14:41] IntLibber Brautigan: at least what Extro is talking about has a significant amount of evidence supporting, even if its not totally complete
[14:41] IntLibber Brautigan: the quantum conciousness is creationism for brain science
[14:41] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I'm not ruling anything out; I'm just stateing that I will not achieve immortality through talking to a computer simulation that will immitate me
[14:42] IntLibber Brautigan: show us evidence to support your claim
[14:42] IntLibber Brautigan: you are stating a belief, not a fact
[14:42] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: while its off doing research for me I'm living my life and growing as a person with every moment
[14:42] Extropia DaSilva: Int, I am just saying that IF quantum consciousnes is ever proved, all that does is show it is not beyond physical law to have something that does quantum consciousness. So, the old reverse engineering trick applies again. We take it apart, learn how it functions, build one that does the same thing.
[14:42] Lucifer Darrow: Additionally, don't confuse AI with artificial consciousness
[14:43] IntLibber Brautigan: I'm not criticising you Extro
[14:43] Arcadia spanks Peer's ass.
[14:43] IntLibber Brautigan: my argument is that quantum conciousness is a solution looking for a problem
[14:43] Peer Infinity headsmacks at having forgotten the "then we'll just use quantum computers instead" part...
[14:44] IntLibber Brautigan: it is neurobiological creationist carco cultism
[14:44] IntLibber Brautigan: cargo
[14:44] Peer Infinity oohs at Arcadia...
[14:44] Arcadia Sweetwater: grins at peer
[14:44] IntLibber Brautigan: there is no need for a theory of quantum conciousness when existing mechanistic theories work just fine so far
[14:45] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: can you grasp the concept of "maybe" or do you think only in yes and no?
[14:45] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: sorry that's facious of m
[14:45] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: *me
[14:45] Lucifer Darrow: To be fair, are there any mechanistic theories of consciousness?
[14:45] Grog Waydelich: Extie, just revisiting your point: "An upload in the classic definition, is a COMPLETE transference of your patterns from one platform to another. If this hypothetical fraudster has the capability of modelling your whole mind, then yes. " ... This is the danger of the Turing Test IMO, It is usually set up in such a way that the intelligent device being tested is hidden in another room, or is an avatar online, so that only text output is available to be judged. But any person's "patterns" are a lot more than text that they type.
[14:46] IntLibber Brautigan: unless the mechanistic theories are all shown to be false or inadequate, and that hasnt happened yet, theres no need for a quantum theory
[14:46] Peer Infinity has a sudden urge to ask Niles "can you grasp the concept of "probably" or do you think only in yes, no, and maybe?"
[14:46] Extropia DaSilva: Niles. I am me, but I am not my Primary. The theme of my lecture was that search engines are on an evolutionary pathway to mind uploading, and avatars will evolve into Moravec's mind children, our future progeny who will grow beyond us, taking our memes and bemes off into the stars. Try to understand that you have the potential to be so much more than just a puppet of some meatsack, kk?
[14:47] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: and we get left behind to rot; oh loverly
[14:47] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: will the last 'droid off the planet please turn out the lights
[14:47] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: so much for a positive future
[14:48] Peer Infinity: Niles, you won't just get left behind, your physical body will be converted to computronium, along with the rest of the planet, if Extropia has her way...
[14:48] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: yes and what of all the data that make up biological Niles?
[14:49] Extropia DaSilva: Yes Grog. But the Gold standard for Turing test is not just text. It is a CG human, who looks and acts exactly like a person. The silver prize is a text (or audio) only, and the bronze goes to whatever bot fools judges longest before inevitably being rumbled. So far, only the bronze prize has been awarded.
[14:49] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: since its slow and degraded I'm sure digital NIles will delete it at the first opprtunity
[14:49] IntLibber Brautigan: In quantum terms each neuron is an essentially classical object. Consequently quantum noise in the brain is at such a low level that it probably doesn't often alter, except very rarely, the critical mechanistic behaviour of sufficient neurons to cause a decision to be different than we might otherwise expect. (...)
—Michael Clive Price[1]
[14:49] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: niiice, murderd by myself
[14:49] Lucifer Darrow: Extropia's new version of the Turning test...
[14:50] Arcadia Sweetwater: wouldn't that be defined a suicide?
[14:50] IntLibber Brautigan: One well-known critic of the quantum mind is Max Tegmark. Based on his calculations, Tegmark concluded that quantum systems in the brain decohere quickly and cannot control brain function, "This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way"[38]
[14:50] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: no since digital Niles is a discrete entity
[14:50] Lucifer Darrow: Extropia, would you agree your prediction assumes a significant amount of time between human-level AI and the Singularity?
[14:51] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: the illusion destroys the physical
[14:52] Extropia DaSilva: Not really, Niles. Even a crude nanomechanical computer has the capacity to run 100,000 human brains per cubic centimetre. Imagine what the nano equvilient of integrated curcuits will achieve? Avagadro's bit implies million of minds per mote of matter. NIles, you are not lost, just transferred to a more capable platform.
[14:52] Grog Waydelich: I've never seen "CG" written into the definition of the T-test. That sounds rather SL/VW-centric. Why not insist that the intelligence being tested be physically disembodied? If it can't do my housework, but only imitates housework in a VW, what use is it?
[14:52] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: but I'm still relic data
[14:52] Grog Waydelich: "physically embodied"
[14:53] IntLibber Brautigan: Replacing the mathematical apparatus of classical physics with the mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics is therefore of no help in understanding consciousness, and indeed there is no known example of a quantum equation which encapsulates a taste or colour.
[14:53] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: and I imagine at the first point my substrate is needed for something more worthwhile I'm gone
[14:53] Extropia DaSilva: Read up on the requirements of the Loebner Prize, Grog, which is the modern equvilient of the TT.
[14:53] Arcadia Sweetwater mews
[14:54] Lucifer Darrow: the Loebner Prize is a pale shadow of the TT
[14:54] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: "no known" keep working on it
[14:54] Grog Waydelich: Wikipedia says this of the Loebner Prize: Within the field of artificial intelligence, the Loebner Prize is somewhat controversial; the most prominent critic, Marvin Minsky, has called it a publicity stunt that does not help the field along.
[14:54] Lucifer Darrow: Minsky is correct
[14:54] Lucifer Darrow: the Loebner prize encourages shortcuts and cheats
[14:55] Extropia DaSilva: Lucifer, I make no predictions whatsoever with regards to when this will happen. Could be years, decades, centuries, millenia.
[14:55] Lucifer Darrow: Extropia, I didn't ask about when
[14:55] ladyart Lefevre: i must be going also. I have been at work and need to go home
[14:56] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: bye L
[14:56] Grog Waydelich: The problem with Leobner is that it repeats the problems of the (bad interpretations of the) T-test. They are chatterbots. All that is available for judgement is typed text.
[14:56] Peer Infinity: bye L, thanks for the snuggles :)
[14:56] Extropia DaSilva: I see no reason why it should take a long time. But, I can imagine people arguing 'did it happen?'
[14:56] ladyart Lefevre: Good by all, it was interesting what i could catch of it, Peer can explain
[14:57] Arcadia Sweetwater: bye bye ladyart
[14:57] Extropia DaSilva: bye:)
[14:57] IRC: wrldpc has quit
[14:57] Lucifer Darrow: My point is that if there is no significant time between Turing AI and Singularity there will be no Personality AIs and no Avatar Twins
[14:57] Extropia DaSilva: Why not?
[14:58] Arcadia Sweetwater: sure
[14:58] PlanetNiles Dreamscape hopes for a quick transition between GAI and teh Singularity
[14:58] Peer Infinity desperately hopes for a truly Friendly AI...
[14:58] Extropia DaSilva: The SeeD AI uses 50%....40%.....20%.....0.0000000000000001% of its capacity to run your digital twin.
[14:58] Arcadia Sweetwater: gai?
[14:59] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: General AI
[14:59] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: human smart AI
[14:59] Extropia DaSilva: Back again, Ari?
[14:59] Extropia DaSilva: :)
[14:59] Lucifer Darrow: So you're positing Personality AIs post-Singularity?
[14:59] Arisia Vita: yes, thanks
[14:59] Peer Infinity: GAI, General Artificial Intelligence, AGI, Artificial General Intelligence
[14:59] Arcadia Sweetwater: gai a computer with the general's hat on it
[15:00] Peer Infinity: :)
[15:00] Peer Infinity: yeah, I also wanted to ask you about your expected timeline, Extro...
[15:01] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: wasn't that an episode of Classic Star Trek 'cadia?
[15:01] Extropia DaSilva: No. Nothing I have said refers to a post-Singularity AI. How could it? I do not have the capacity to describe such a thing, and you do not have the capacity to understand it even if I did. But, just as a computer can emulate 19th century technologies like typewriters while also doing things utterly beyond any typewriter, post singularity search engines will probably run the whole human race using what....0.000000000000000000000000000001% or less of there capacity, while the rest is doing *^^^&£(^W^W***$.
[15:02] Lucifer Darrow: You just predicted what a post-Singularity search engine would do
[15:02] Peer Infinity: Untranslatable Symbol
[15:02] Lucifer Darrow: I don't think that is consistent
[15:02] Extropia DaSilva: I do not make timelines. It is just silly.
[15:03] Peer Infinity: :)
[15:03] PlanetNiles Dreamscape bites her tongue
[15:04] Extropia DaSilva: It can predict what pre-singularity capabiiities they are likely to have, based on current trends. But I cannot (yet) give you any insight into what a POST-Singularity anything is like. Not until I break through the cognitive barrier.
[15:05] Lucifer Darrow: If there is only 6 hours between Turing AI and Singularity, that isn't enough time to get everyone logged into a VW let alone train the Personality AIs
[15:06] Lucifer Darrow: see the problem?
[15:06] Extropia DaSilva: Sure there is.
[15:06] Peer Infinity: 6 objective hours, not necessarily 6 subjective hours
[15:07] Lucifer Darrow: I could miss it while sleeping
[15:07] Peer Infinity: still, there are at least some kinds of post-Singularity entities that we would be able to predict at least something about - for example, a post-Singularity AI would not do anything that conflicts with its supergoal...
[15:07] Extropia DaSilva: The AI uses an ever decreasing yet still definite percentage of its capacity to serve the human race, and run pre-singularity digital people. It serves your needs using 90%......9%......0.000000000000009% of its capacity.
[15:08] Lucifer Darrow: Once again, post-Singularity
[15:08] Peer Infinity: Supergoal
[15:08] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Project Better Tomorrow
[15:08] Arcadia Sweetwater: yes but that depends on weither people can afford the relatave tech for the upload or if it would be reserved for notables suchas siantists
[15:08] Peer Infinity: :)
[15:09] Arcadia Sweetwater: *sciectists
[15:09] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: *satanists?
[15:09] Lucifer Darrow: heh
[15:09] Peer Infinity: afford the tech to upload? I think we're assuming that there will be a very small gap between the time the technology exists, and the time when the cost of the technology is too trivial to even mention
[15:10] Extropia DaSilva: Do you know how much your PC would have cost in 1970? More than ten million dollars, easily. LAR shows quite clearly that IT technology starts off as unaffordable and ends up cheap enough to give away with your breakfast cereal.
[15:10] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: IT technology is an oxymoron
[15:11] Extropia DaSilva: Oh.yes.
[15:11] Extropia DaSilva: Well, IT and LAR predicts...
[15:11] Arcadia Sweetwater: yes i can see it now free with ten tocken from packs of bit bites
[15:12] Peer Infinity giggles at the anachronism of post-Singularity breakfast cereal...
[15:13] Lucifer Darrow: post-Singularity I will create a whole universe devoted to exploring possible breakfast cereals!
[15:13] SL4observer Lane smiles at Lucifer :)
[15:13] Lucifer Darrow: will you join me?
[15:13] Extropia DaSilva: Join you where?
[15:14] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Extropia tthinks the whole world will be converted into a single ginat computer and all our problems will be solved by uploading us ino SL and letting us live thee without need of anything othr than power and CPU cycles
[15:14] SL4observer Lane: I might send a copy of me along with you...
[15:14] Lucifer Darrow: in my virtual breakfast cerealverse, I promise it will be *fascinating*
[15:14] SL4observer Lane: :)
[15:14] Arcadia Sweetwater: no thanks i dont want to acheave critical mass through cereals
[15:15] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: ((sorry that ws supposed to be directed to 'cadia))
[15:15] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: will we be able to recieve weekly updates from the cerealverse?
[15:15] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: if we choose not to enter
[15:15] Extropia DaSilva: No. I see that as one possibility among a near infinity of others. And whatever future we arrive at, our problems will NOT be solved, they will just be exchanged for new problems. We evolved to be problem solvers, and if we ever reached a point where there was no problems to solve, we would go extinct. So I reject your claims utterly.
[15:16] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I mean will it be serialised?
[15:16] Peer Infinity: LOL!
[15:16] Lucifer Darrow: PlanetNiles, No! the secrets we learn will be closely guarded! ;-)
[15:16] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: bah that's no fun tehn
[15:16] Arcadia Sweetwater: so group membership needed
[15:17] Peer Infinity: feel free to start your own open-source cerealverse, Niles :)
[15:17] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: no thanks
[15:17] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: I prefer protien based breakfats
[15:17] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: *breakfasts (freudian slip there)
[15:17] Peer Infinity: hehe :)
[15:18] Extropia DaSilva: But..since I am a digital person and since most of the matter in the solar system is just dumb..yes, I would quite like to persist long enough to see my patterns expanded to fit the capacity of a matrioska brain (which is also pre-singularity tech, btw).
[15:18] Lucifer Darrow: I think we would invent new problems before going extinct, at least I hope so
[15:19] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: yes; problem #1: coming up with new problems to avoid extinction
[15:19] Peer Infinity: :P
[15:19] Peer Infinity , personally, wouldn't mind not having problems...
[15:19] Lucifer Darrow: really Peer? Have you thought that through?
[15:20] Peer Infinity: The Orgasmium Scenario, The Utilitronium Scenario
[15:21] Peer Infinity: I would definitely want to have at least one copy of me who lives in a reality without any problems...
[15:21] IRC: wrldpc_ has joined #cosmeng
[15:22] Extropia DaSilva: I suspect that Peer wants to be rid of death, and pain, and stupidity and everything else that human-scale intelligence can comprehend as undesirable. The question (which cannot be asked in human language) is what will post-Singularity minds deem to be undesirable?
[15:22] Peer Infinity: yes, thank you for that clarification, Extie :)
[15:22] IRC: wrldpc_ has quit
[15:23] Peer Infinity: well, that may depend on whether or not this universe, and whatever other realities we can reach from this universe, have a finite or an infinite amount of computing power available
[15:24] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Uh, Extropia you just asked it in human language
[15:24] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: English in fact
[15:24] Extropia DaSilva: This universe has a finite capacity. Though, not very limiting from a human-scale perspective. In case you want to know, the total computing capacity of the Universe is this: 10^122 bits.
[15:25] Peer Infinity once again shouts: CITATION NEEDED!!!!!!
[15:25] Lucifer Darrow: Bits is a unit of storage, not computing capacity
[15:25] Arcadia Sweetwater: but would that realaty not be stagnated
[15:25] Grog Waydelich: In the biological world, intelligence (and pain and consciousness other brain functions) is just a survival tool. It's only relevant to the extent that it causes its owner to out-compete conspecifics in reproduction. Post-upload, does 'survival' and 'reproduction' in the Darwinian sense matter any more? If not, why bother having intelligence and sensation?
[15:27] Extropia DaSilva: Not in the Darwinian sense, no. That is blind to the future, and does not head towards specific goals. Technological evolution can be imperfectly guided towards a predetermined destination. Technological evolution emerges from natural selection, but is distinct from it after a while, just as natural selection grows to be distinct from the random recombinations of matter/energy that preceeded it.
[15:28] Peer Infinity: Grog: giving up intelligence AND sensation? I could see maybe giving up one or the other, but giving up both? What's left after that?
[15:28] Extropia DaSilva: Ok well..I am afraid I have to go now. Thanks to everyone who disagreed with me, makes it much more fun:)
[15:28] Peer Infinity: LOL!
[15:29] Lucifer Darrow applauds
[15:29] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Bye
[15:29] Peer Infinity also applauds :)
[15:29] Arcadia Sweetwater: bye bye extropia
[15:29] Grog Waydelich: bye - great discussion - are you repeating it at Thinkers this week?
[15:29] Extropia DaSilva: And Niles, do not listen to me. You are free to be whatever you want to be. :)
[15:29] Extropia DaSilva: Yes I am, Grog.
[15:29] Peer Infinity: :)
[15:30] Extropia DaSilva: ...And I am free to see you as I wish to see you. Maybe, somehow, the two will be compatible in the end.
[15:30] Arisia Vita: /b Extro
[15:30] Grog Waydelich: I mean, in meatspace, we (and our minds etc) only exist because we are a useful vehicle for our genes. How does this pan out post-upload?
[15:30] Arisia gives Extropia bisous (kisses on the cheek).
[15:30] Arisia Vita: bye love
[15:30] TR Amat: Sooey, I wasn't here earlier, busy evening.
[15:30] TR Amat: Sorry*
[15:31] Peer Infinity: hi TR :)
[15:31] Extropia DaSilva: I wish I could tell you, Grog, but I do not know the answer to such questions.
[15:31] TR Amat: Hi Peer
[15:31] Peer Infinity gives some more snugglehugs and nuzzles and kisses to everyone within reach :)
[15:31] Grog Waydelich: ok better go do some work ...
[15:32] Peer Infinity then abandons all pretense of obeying the conventions of RL physics, and gives some more snugglehugs and nuzzles and kisses to everyone not within reach :)
[15:32] Extropia DaSilva: Anyway..as Grog said the lecture is being repeated on Tuesday at 3:30pm, so if you missed it or are gluttons for punishment and want to hear it all over again, come along to supportforhealing at 3:30pm in two day's time.
[15:33] TR Amat: The distributed quantum higging again, Peer? :)
[15:33] Extropia DaSilva: Well...thanks so much for coming along..and bye!
[15:33] Arcadia Sweetwater: hi tr
[15:33] Peer Infinity: bye Extie
[15:33] TR Amat: Hugging*
[15:33] TR Amat: Hi Arcadia
[15:34] Arcadia Sweetwater purrs loudly
[15:34] Peer Infinity giggles at TR... yes :)
[15:34] TR Amat: Still, the RL table-top roleplaying I got to do was fun.
[15:34] Peer Infinity: :)
[15:34] PlanetNiles Dreamscape: Hi there TR
[15:34] TR Amat: Hi Niles
[15:34] Peer Infinity: I'm going to post the chat log so far now...

Chat Logs/2008-12-07

From Order of Cosmic Engineers

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