Kevin Warwick in SL

From Order of Cosmic Engineers

Prof. Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, gave a presentation in Second Life on Monday, April 23, 2007. The event was organized by the Second Life Chapter of the World Transhumanist Association under the operational leadership of VR Manoj (Manoj Undercity in SL). In the image above, Kevin Warwick in Second Life wearing a custom avatar designed by Rein Mitra.

When we look towards the capabilities of intelligent machines (AI) we can see that these hold some distinct advantages over human intelligence. Mathematical speed, memory, sensing range, multi-dimensional operation and respectable communication being examples. It seems sensible therefore for humans, if they wish, to benefit by directly linking their brain with that of an intelligent machine network. In this presentation Kevin looked at the possibilities, considered some of the experimental work presently going on around the world and described the practical experimentation he has already carried out.

The uvvy sim (Class 4) was full and we had to push the maximum occupation parameter to 50. Counting all avatars who attended at least a part of the presentation and the Q/A session, we had a total of 70 guests. Fortunately nothing crashed and participants did not experience too much lag. The real-time audio was delivered to the participants via a Shoutcast server, and the stored videoclips via a Darwin streaming video server.

The participants followed the talk with interest and asked many questions. This was the best talk in SL I have seen so far as far as the effective exploitation of combines SL and media technology is concerned. Of course this is true by definition (each event is better than the previous ones), but this time we had a world-class expert on a very hot topic, which, of course, was the really interesting point. Prof. Kevin Warwick' talk pointed the way not only to the next generation of man-machines interfaces (the interesting concept of brain implant for Second Life was mentioned!), but also to longer term options for the future evolution of our species.

In the picture below: Khannea Suntzu, yours truly, Rein Mitra (the designer of Kevin's avatar), Kevin himself and Manoj. On behalf of the WTA I wish to thank Prof. Warwick for the excellent talk, and Manoj and his team for the excellent organization work.