Sl and future technology.

Ok. Anyone who ever met me in Sl knows I need no exscuse to start rabitting on about technology. So now that I've started writing for the Sl forum, I thought I would present some neato technologies that could be available in the future. Some are quite near-term (they are already working in laboratories) while others may seem rather more....speculative. However, I assure you that everything presented is possible if the laws of physics are what we think they are.

So, let's start with...

Terabit Fiber-Optic Switches.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love my Sl. But it is rather laggy at times. No doubt all of us have prayed to the Techno Gods for a faster Internet. And the Gods have answered! Or at least, David Bishop, head of micromechanics research at Bell Labs has answered. According to him, fiber optic MEMS switches are a few years away, and they will uncork the Internet's bandwidth and set traffic roaring at light speed. The problem we have at the moment is that current routing technology cannot keep up with the amount of data that can travel through a fiber optic cable. You really need a gizmo that can handle thousands of terabits and if Bishop is to be believed terabit fiber-optic switches could be just the ticket. And it's cheap! "A typical optic switch might cost 1000 dollars, but using MEMS, you can achieve the same functionality for 10 cents".

Hi-Res Retinal Displays.

1st life may have its downsides, but one thing it does brilliantly is provide 20/20 wrap around stereoscopic vision. Which, obviously, we want for SL. Well, if the company Microvision has its way, within the next several years you won't be viewing Sl on a plasma hi-def display or anything archaic like that. Oh no. Instead you'll don a neat pair of eyeglasses into which is embedded a chip with a moving, pinhead-sized mirror that reflects a low-powered laser to beam full-colour, full motion images directly into your retina. You want it! But sadly, current versions project only red monochrome images into each eye, but Microvision says the basic technology is proven and that its full-colour specs are coming into focus.

Live speech translation technology.

Isn't Sl great? It lets you communicate with people from all over the world! But the trouble is, a lot of those people don't speak your language, which represents a communication barrier that we should work to resolve. And Alex Waibel, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, has done just that. He demonstrated a system that almost instantly translates speech from one language to another by giving a talk in English that was converted simultaneously into German and Spanish. At the same conference, they also unveiled a directional speaker system that delivers a translated audio feed to just one person in a room, removing the need to wear headphones.

Silent speech.

You know the situation. There you are, down at the sandbox, crafting something wonderful, when somebody comes along to ask questions about your work. Which is lovely, of course, but you can't type responses and work that mouse all at the same time. But why communicate with fingers when vocal chords can be used instead? Because then you would be talking out loud to yourself, like those annoying mobile-phone/ Xbox Live! junkies. Well, Stan Jou has had a neat idea. By attaching 11 electrodes to a subject's face and throat, he was able to get a computer to generate speech from mouthed gestures alone. And in case you don't want your voice to be generated by a computer, speech-to-text is just the ticket.

Foglets.

So far we've been looking at technologies that bring the benefits of 1st life to Second Life. But why should we residents get all the benefits? Can we not try and bring some of the fun of SL to 1st life? Well, surely the most fun thing about Sl is the ability to create whatever you want, and its a shame that 1st life is not so maleable.

Step forward Utility Fog. This is a device made up of trillions of tiny robots that have multiple arms, capable of grabbing hold of each other to form a solid mass in the shape of any object you could desire. The colour and reflectivity of an object are the results of its properties as an antenna in the micron wavelength region, so each robot could have an 'antenna arm' that it could manipulate to vary those properties, and thus the surface of the utility fog object could look just about however you wanted it to.

The purpose of Fog swarms, according to the person who dreamed it up (J. Storrs Hall) is to bring the virtual world into our 1st lives. " The material properties of this mass depend on the programing of the robots. If the programming says, maintain a constant total among the extension of all arms, but otherwise do whatever the forces would indicate; and when a particular arm gets to the end of its envelop, let go, and look for another arm coming into reach to grab"...you would have something behaving just like liquid. "If the program says, extend when the force is trying to stretch, retract when it is trying to compress, you have a soft material" well, you get the idea.

You could also perform...

Creation: Causing objects to appear and disappear on command.

Levitation: Cause objects to hover and fly around (and, yes, it could support your body weight to give the impression of walking on thin air).

Teleportation: Nearly any combination of telepresence and virtual reality between Fog-filled locations.

Shape-Shifting: Want to be a mouse? The Fog around you simulates very large feet, baseboards etc, wile your telepresence drives a mouse-sized and shaped Fog program. Want to be a 100 foot robot....?

Mind Uploading.

Ok, so the Fog-filled city is great, but you wanna live in Second Life permanently. For real, that is, and not part of some techno-hallucination. But why beam second life into your mind, when your mind can be beamed into Second Life? So, scan a high resolution map of your brain and replicate its exact form and function inside a powerful enough nueral computer. Voila! Inside SL your Avatar wakes up with all your memories intact.

Computronium.

Well, now that your consciousness has been uploaded, what are you gonna do with that old fleshy body that used to house your mind? Well, why not turn it into computronium, which is matter reorganised to store the maximum amount of information? According to the 'Bekenstein Bound', a simple hydrogen atom can store a million bits, while one human body can store 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 bits. How much is that? Well, it would be enough to contain the efficiently encoded biospheres of a thousand galaxies- or a quadrillion individuals each with a quadrillion times the capacity of a human mind.

Matrioska Brains.

Well, the 10^45 bits of an efficiently coded human body is good for some projects, but your plans for Second Life Version 199.6 needs rather more computational grunt than that. So why not use all the matter and energy in the Solar System? Grind the planets to dust using self-replicating robotic technology, and then turn that dust into solar-powered micro or nanocomputers, to form a shell that encircles the Sun. Out from that would be another shell, and then another shell and so on, each one feeding off of the thermodynamic cascade of the other.

So, how much computational capacity do you get once you use the energy/matter resources of the ENTIRE solar system? According to J. Robert Bradbury, whose idea this is, 'the difference between a Matrioska Brain amd a human is on the order of ten million billion times GREATER than the DIFFERENCE between a human and a nematode worm! A single MB could emulate the entire history of human thought in a few microseconds'.

Ok, so maybe this all sounds crazy. But, you know, on the year my primary was born, the world's first games console was launched. It projected 2 dots onto a TV screen. Yep, that's it. Two dots. Sound? Don;t make me laugh. But now we have Second Life! I mean, wow, that is some leap forward. So just imagine if Third Life made Second Life seem as primative as just 2 dots on your monitor. The technology is waiting to be discovered and used, my freinds and it's gonna be an interesting century

LOL!!!!!!

Now, I must be crazy because I like your ideas

Foglets -- lol, now that reminded me of the Digital Fields in Digimon And the Mind Uploading...Hehe, just what I wanted

Matrioska Brains... er...problem is...where the computer can be located o.o If the powersupply is Solar System's size o.O


btw. when shall SL v200.0 be released? And will it went down for 2 hundred years because of a subatomic imbalance in a prim that leaded to supernova in nearby galaxy when they released v199.6?

I thought the full colored version, Spectrum SD2500, was already in use by the US army. It's kinda big though, and the new MEMS versions they're developing should be much smaller.

Well that's the trouble with futurist speculations these days. They are out of date as soon as you submit them

As for worrying about the power supply or where the computer is, well the power supply sits at the centre of the computronium shells and is called the Sun. And the computer itself is kinda like the grid that Sl runs on, which is comprised of many PCs linked together. Only here we are talking about countless solar-powered nanocomputers encircling the Sun, and the waste heat from the computation of one 'shell' is what the next one out feeds on.

It is kinda hard to imagine what you would do with this kind of calculating power, although Charles Stross did imagine in 'Accelerando' that the Sler's biggest bugbear would be alive and well in the Matrioska Brain..

"They don't go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low".

You hear that? Even when Linden Labs has comandeered the entire energy/material budget of the solar system, Second Life will still lag!

Merry Christmas dreamers

LOL! Merry Christmas also.

Hmm version 200..

I think the idea for version 200 is that Linden Labs, having finally made it to a Kardeshev Type III civilisation, have the energy budget of an entire galaxy to play with. By focusing all that energy onto a single mote of matter, they are able to open up a rip in the spacetime continuum and send a femtotechnological device back to the beginning of Time itself.

This device, able to manipulate the fundamental structures of Space and Time, engineers the fledgling Universe during the Planck epoch so that the constants of gravity, electromagnetim, and the weak and strong nuclear forces are fine-tuned to enable the eventual evolution of intelligent lifeforms.

Yeah that's right. First Life IS Second Life version 200.

LOL!!!!! WHeeee! Hail the Emperor Linden XXIV of the Galactic Empire of SecondLife!!

Er...wait. But then what created the life that create the Second Life in the first place? and why i haven't seen a cat-people or dragon here?

No offense, but everything after "silent speech" is pure hyperbole. Having lived long enough to see several decades of "futurism" fail, it's hard to get excited about this stuff outside of a sci-fi novel.

I am not against futurism as religion/storytelling etc., in fact I am a sci-fi junkie and find these kind of wild ideas facinating. Maybe it's the festivus season but I just find it annoying when folks pass these ideas off as anything likely to happen.

I am writing this from the Robert W. McCall spacestation in earth orbit where the corn crop has just been harvested. I am going to the dance tonight to celebrate the 10th year since the inauguration of the station and after that taking my family for a holiday on the Jupiter run.

Happy Festivus.

lol, who said it will happen? I just playing with daydreaming around It's amusing and fun Nothing serious nothing serious

Here is a few headlines, culled from technology websites.

'Robot demonstrates self-awareness'

'New Way To Switch Therapeutic Genes On And Off'

'DNA Self Assembly Used To Mass Produce Patterned Nanostructures'

'Work On The First Human-Made Species Is Well Underway'.

These days you have to check up on the relevent sites at least twice a week, or you fall decades behind in your reckoning of where technological progress is at

But, yeah, there is no end of speculation that turned out to be worthless. As for science fiction, I am often amused by the story of how Jules Verne wrote a story that was not published in his lifetime, because it was considered far too crazy.

It was about people talking with others around the world using boxes of light...

A real-life grey ooze attack....


<whimper>


Sorry. Had to be said...

Now, that's interesting. Really interesting



LOL! Oh

This thread needs more Singularity.

Perhaps after all the form-changing, galaxy conquering, and question answering, we'll find out that all we ever really wanted was a quiet sunset and good dinner with our mate, overlooking the jungle treetops...

...just a thought. I now return you to your regularly scheduled future.

*siggh happily and look up the beautiful golden sky as the sunset* ...perhaps you're right .....I should re-scheduled the future! lol

Yes, yes it does. Here's my Christmas version:OmegaPoint

Hmm yes, the Singularity. I have read Kurzweil's book cover to cover thrice, and I was quite impressed with it. Apart from the bit about using black holes as computational devices, on the grounds that Black Holes do not actually exist, except in the over-imaginative minds of theoretical physicists who still insist that gravity- and not electricity- is the driving force of the Universe.

I also wonder if he has ever heard of SL, because Kurzweil does have a habit of dismissing videogames as something that only appeals to Teenage boys. I guess he has a far grander vision of what videogames could be in the future when compared to the average shoot-em-up, but for me the interesting thing about SL is that it gives me the opportunity to explore first-hand a world on the brink of wild technological change.

I mean, everything the Singularitarians speculate could arrive in 40-140 years time (depending on who you agree with) can be found here. Atomistic construction? Check. Teleportation? You betcha. Ubiquitous access to information? Yeah, I can google wherever I please. Non-human intelligent species? Furries to you and me You might even experience the issue of identity if your best friend turns out to be someone else who knows their password.

As for the Omega Point hypothesis, anyone familiar with Halton Arp's observations will know the concept of a Big Bang is far from the cut-and-dried truism that popular science would have you believe. In short, he has falsified it. But you might be wanting to know what the computational capacity of the entire Universe would be, if we used every single mote of matter/energy in the Universe.We would have a computer that can store a maximum of 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 bits. And once we have achieved this, I'm not sure what Microsoft will do. I guess they will have no choice but to start writing efficient code. LOL

Maybe release MSWindows 20000, which crash every computer in the universe when one user hit a wrong key