I joined Second Life a few weeks ago, and quickly found that my second generation 800 MHz G4 iMac just doesn't have the graphics or processing capacity to cope with the SL system requirements. In one sense I'm relieved because I don't have time to screw around on SL. But I really do want to see what's happening in there because I think SL is on the leading edge of some very exciting things that are just around the corner for all of us (or at least all of you that bother reading this).
It's not just the visualization or the social networking element of SL that turns me on, because all that's been done before. I do think it's kinda sexy that SL has a functioning (if fragile) economy, based on information exchange, on buying and selling non tangible objects (clothes, skins, actions, etc,) and on services (mostly sleazy, granted). Real businesses and orgs like Reuters, CNET and the US Democratic party are opening offices in SL to reach people and become actors in that economy.
And I think it's incredibly sexy that non-human actors and intelligent agents are involved in a big way. For example the SL EcoWiki project, which is designing "scripted species" that "...consist of independent, goal seeking agents whose interactions would emulate a real world ecosystem."
So with this kind of artificial life combined with autonomous intelligent agents already prowling around SL, it takes us a good step towards virtual intelligence if not true artificial intelligence. It's in the very early stages, and no telling where this is going to go or how long it's going to take. But when you can enter a virtual, evolving, self sustaining ecosystem, and can't be certain that any avatar or object you communicate with is controlled by a human or an intelligent agent (the old Turing test again), we get into some very interesting territory.
Second Life may not become the true metaverse in the Neal Stephenson sense--it's still a very fragile environment in too many ways. But the Internet we know today coalesced from lots of smaller networks that were created for different needs and grew together organically (Usenet, UUNET, ARPANET, X.25, JANET, Milnet, NSFNet, CSNet, CERNET, etc.) Why shouldn't Second Life engender and then merge with more robust, less proprietary systems in the future?
Anyway, here's a piece by Warren Ellis, who knows a lot more about all this than I do. Second Life Sketches: Two Worlds - Fame and Infamy
Posted by case at January 7, 2007 04:42 PM