UgoTrade

Imagine an L-System forest, a herbivore simulation and a carnivore simulation all developed separately without each having its own graphical front end. Each object in the separate simulations would communicate locally or via the network using some agreed upon protocol. Next, picture one or more 3D front end “view portals” with all the bells & whistles that visualize what is going on in the engines and traffic, putting any local “area” together into a coherent scene.

If it existed, such an A-life system could be run as a true grid, an “Evolution Grid” or “EvoGrid” if you will, with the computation not limited to one processor or one 3D scenegraph’s rendering step clock. Developers could focus on their areas of strength while the quality of the collective simulation grid would improve much faster than any one individual effort. And perhaps best of all, new developers could connect their engines, protocols or view portals into the grid or take up development of existing engines and protocols so that no projects need stagnate or die. So with this vision in hand, is something like the EvoGrid possible, workable, desirable, and doable? (Bruce Damer, 2008)

When Bruce Damer told me he is working on evolution technologies (ETs) that will come “alive” towards the end of the 21st/beginning of the 22nd Century, I pricked up my ears!

A world renowned guru of our digital past and future (see of Bruce’s projects at his personal page Damer.com and his Digibarn Computer Museum), Bruce is in the advance guard of many emerging fields, including: social visual computing - avatars and virtual worlds (see his book Avatars, 1997 and compendium of Avatars events); NASA research - surface robotics, spacecraft and mission design, agent-based modeling, and real-time physics (see DigitalSpace for space projects from 2000-2008); and, artificial life - cellular automata, complex and emergent systems (see Biota.org and the Biota Podcast with Tom Barbalet).

Bruce Damer’s architectural notes for the EvoGrid router, a finite state machine that will consume XML

EvoGrid - an evolution technology grid

Bruce envisages a grid (EvoGrid.org) in which current work on artificial life research being done with teams at NASA, universities, and in the artificial life developer community, e.g., the work of Ventrella (see below), can interact in a common ecosystem.

Bruce plans to build EvoGrid on an open source framework, communication grid and protocol (Zhengyou & Yichuan 2004) allowing future developers to extend the EvoGrid and add their own objects or virtual creatures.

By running the simulations without visuals, the evolutionary algorithms of EvoGrid will be able to develop huge populations that can interact with other large populations evolving in real time. But, with their emergence into the social visual 3D space of a virtual world, they will hit the wall of physics.

The public 3D immersive portal into the EvoGrid will support the simulated evolution of biologically inspired forms. The portal will be a virtual space where they will interact with human users.

This window into the human world raises many interesting questions. Will the algorithms/artificial life forms themselves decide when to emerge into the public eye? Or, will they be pushed out by other life forms, or summoned forth by human voyeurs/god(s)?

But, regardless of how artificial life algorithms eventually emerge into cyberspace, this will be an important step in exploring the far reaching implications of the possible emergence of artificial life from algorithms into atom space.

From Algorithms to Atom Space

J. Doyne Farmer defined a living thing as a pattern in spacetime, able to reproduce itself using a stored information blueprint, employing an internal metabolism driving interdependent parts to interact with and deal with a chaotic environment. Above all, he put forth that a lineage of living things also possesses the ability to evolve through time (Farmer & Belin, “Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution,” 1991).

Our world and ourselves are products of this collective natural technology (whether one believes it is guided by an unseen God or not). Others have argued further that human culture, whether it is in the form of writings, music, ideas and the arts also employs some of the same underlying methods to spread and evolve (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986). Therefore, beyond the physical laws of nature, the most powerful force shaping the universe is what we might call “evolution technology.” (Damer 2008)

The picture above is from Jeffrey Ventrella’s website.” JJ Ventrella is a programmer-artist doing virtual world design and artificial life research. He was Principle Inventor and second co-founder of There.com, and most recently, Senior Developer at Linden Lab. “Ventrella writes papers and chapters on topics centered around evolutionary computation and creativity.”

Ventrella is also the creator with Brian Dodd of Darwin Pond.

Darwin Pond is an imaginary gene pool, a primordial puddle of genetic surprises. More technically, Darwin Pond is an Artificial Life Simulation: a virtual world exhibiting the emergence of life-like behaviors. But it’s more than just a fun and informative thing to watch, you can participate in this artificial life simulation by building scenarios and setting up experiments.

What are the possibilities for artificial life?

Evolution technology is the use of the principles of evolution as seen in nature to rapidly develop new software, chemicals, genes or materials, devices or full robotic machine systems.

Bruce is developing EvoGrid to ask some big questions about our future: Can simulation be used to deduce how life came about? Can simulated biological environments be used to create powerful and transformative technologies? Can artificial life evolve into semi-living machines that can clean our atmosphere and heal our bodies?

“Evolution is a powerful tool,” Bruce notes. It can be used in constructive or destructive ways. “We should use it to make tools - the mechanisms by which we will survive and thrive.”

When our bodies are married to this kind of technology we may live for hundreds of years.

Bruce sees the next generation of space exploration emerging out of these artificial life forms born in cyberspace.

They should be able to work in actual hardware - intelligent manufacturing done at the lowest molecular level.

If we are truly going to travel and live beyond the earth’s biosphere we have to go beyond the 19th century technology that space exploration has depended on up to now. Our spacecraft would be recognizable to the great steamship engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, made of pressure vessels and other hard parts. These craft are fragile and subject to “single points of failure” (i.e, one seal goes and there goes the mission).

In order for longer term survivable spaceflight, especially for human crews, these craft will have to almost be alive, or at least be made up of billions of individual micro or nano-parts that are self monitoring and self healing. In this scenario, human crews are going to be like the brain organs in a larger biologically inspired vessel. I believe we are decades, maybe even centuries, from this kind of technology, but it will come.

In addition, evolved biologically-inspired robotic systems will mine outer space resources and prepare the solar system for Earth-life.

Picture trillions of flakes of solar collecting chemical nano-factories working something like an “ET lichen” coating the surface of a richly endowed asteroid, processing its stores of water ice, organic compounds, or metals. Human crews would stop by such asteroids to allow themselves (and their ships) to “feed” on the ET lichen. Indeed if the ET lichen manage to hollow out the asteroid and generate the correct mix of gases then the human crew could step inside for a break.

Other versions of “ET lichen” would have the potent capability of terraforming our own planet enabling us to cope with climate change and other effects of our civilization. As many science fiction writers and Hollywood directors has shown us, out of control ET lichen may also lead us to total annihilation.

The Artificial Life Programmer, the New Alchemist?

Like the medieval alchemists before them, programmers developing “Artificial Life” software (often shortened to “A-life”) are drawn to the elusive yet seductive proposition that they have the power to animate inanimate matter (Steen Rasumussen), except that in this modern incarnation of alchemy; the inanimate medium is a microscopic substrate of billions of transistors. (from “God, Science, and Intelligent Design,” chapter by Bruce Damer, upcoming in World Scientific, Singapore)

Bruce points out there is frequently confusion between the two fields of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence. But this confusion, he notes, is a fertile field of inquiry.

A-life is a “bottom up” approach, wherein developers simulate “a large number of simple interacting components employing relatively simple rules from which complex behaviors of whole systems emerge (Chris Langton et al). AI on the other hand has tackled the ever receding goal of creating a “conscious” entity with which we would one day be able to communicate.”

God in the A-Life Universe

In his article for an upcoming book, “God, Science, and Intelligent Design,” Bruce undertakes a thought experiment in which he draws insights from the field of A-Life into a broader Intelligent Design/Creationism vs Evolution discussion.

The open question, “what is life?” underwrites the field of A-Life much as the question “what is consciousness?” does the field of Artificial Intelligence. And, these questions beg others on the role (or absence of role) of God(s).

Will Wright’s Spore: “God as the Intelligent Designer”

The screenshot above (see CNET for more) is from Spore the much anticipated new game from “Sims” creator Will Wright. Electronic Arts just announced that Spore, released through its Maxis Software brand, will go on sale on the weekend of Sept. 7, 2008. It is billed as “massively single-player” game, that “lets users create a universe, evolving from tiny organisms into civilizations capable of intergalactic travel.” (Canadian Press)

Bruce compares Spore with Karl Sim’s Evolved Virtual Creatures and argues they demonstrate two kinds of God in the A-Life universe:

Karl Sims’ - God the Mechanic setting up the initial conditions and then returning only occasionally to view the current state of the simulation; and the Will Wright, Intelligent Designer God, constantly providing opportunities to use and outside intelligence to steer the direction of the virtual universe.

The properties of A- Life software in its early phases can be represented along a continuum which at one end can be represented by Karl Sim’s evolving virtual creatures (see below) and on the other end Will Wright’s game Spore.

Karl Sim’s “Evolved Virtual Creatures” - “God the Mechanic”

Karl Sim’s creatures start life as a simple pair of hinged blocks in a virtual universe that simulates basic physical properties such as gravity, collisions and surface friction. From that point on the simulation was allowed to continue on its own without human intervention (although random mutations were introduced automatically into the “genome” of creatures between generations).

Bruce Damer’s: “God As the Intelligent Adapter”

Bruce analyzes “the copying rule,” as a fundamental principle of life in his article for the forthcoming book “God, Science, and Intelligent Design:”

A living organism differs from bare rock, gasses or a pool of liquid in ine very specific way: the living organism contains instructions that are copied, for the most part unaltered, from one version to the next.

Bruce argues, quite brilliantly, that the Copying Rule, along with the “Laws of Nature” and the element of uncertainty leads us to a notion of God not as an influencer of the future but as an “adept adapter” . And if you don’t see God in the picture the understanding of evolution by cumulative adaptation is even more remarkable for the fact no hand guides it.

Those who wish to celebrate the presence of a God in their lives and in all nature can believe that, God as the Brilliant Adapter, played a hand in the survival and glorious diversification of life on Earth as well as the blossoming richness of human culture and technology. Those who see no need to place an actor like God in the picture can celebrate and seek to better understand the process of evolution by cumulative adaptation, made even more astonishing by the very fact that no hand guided it.

“God who created all things in the beginning is himself created by all things in the end” Wrote Olaf Stapledon in 1937.

Performing the Future

The questions evolutionary technologies raise for human and planetary future are vast and far reaching. To explore the huge social and philosophical questions (Damer 2008) raised by the outputs of more advanced EvoGrids, as well as an enumeration of how evolution technologies will impact life on Earth and in space in the future, Bruce is planning a performance piece that will tour the world - “After the Evogrid.”

As a kind of cyber-hippie empresario (see Bruce above on right and his friend and Digibarn collaborator Al Lundell on the left) of nine virtual world conferences including one just three weeks ago featuring Virtual Worlds and Space for NASA, Bruce has always been deeply involved in firing the public’s imagination about the future. Now he intends to take his involvement with the public space to new heights with, “After the Evogrid,” - a “multimedia performance piece with a spoken word narrative, sound and music, and animated visuals.”

“After the Evogrid” will present both the promise and the perils of Humanity living in a symbiotic existence with the products of the new field of “evolution technology.”

The performance piece will bring together a unique combination of evolution technologies, personal and societal impacts, full biosphere implications and the expansion of life beyond the Earth. The EvoGrid itself will create the first open extensible grid protocol for evolution simulations.

So stand by for launch into an even weirder future, brought to you by “Doc Damer”?!

A Life, AI, artificial intelligence, Artificial Life, artificial life algorithms, artificial life programmers, artificial life research, artificial life simulation, biologically inspired robotic systems, Biota, Bruce Damer, cellular automata, Darwin Pond, Digibarn, emergent systems, EvoGrid, Evolution Grid, evolution technologies, evolutionary algorithms, evolutionary computation, evolved virtual creatures, Farmer and Belin, Genetic Algorithms, God in the A Life Universe, intelligent manufacturing, Jeffrey Ventrella, Karl Sims, L system simulation, nano factories, next generation space exploration, performing the future, semi living machines, simulated biological environments, Spore, virtual worlds and artificial life, virtual worlds and space, Will Wright will wrights spore

Recently I participated indirectly in the The Foresight Insitute’s Vision Weekend. I joined Melanie Swan’s tour of Nanotechnology Island on Second Life which she conducted live as part of her virtual worlds presentation to the unconference.

I was delighted to meet Melanie, the principal of MS Futures Group, for breakfast in New York City a few days later. She is a futurist and hedge fund manager based in Silicon Valley. Melanie has a highly nuanced understanding of the intersection of technology with social, political, legal, regulatory and economic regimes (see her post here). Melanie is also one of the organizers of She’s Geeky. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the lunch last Saturday here in New York City to discuss She’s Geeky EAST this winter.

Melanie and I had a fascinating discussion over breakfast about many aspects of the metaverse including it’s potential use as a platform for Artificial General Intelligence. Ben Goertzel (see my post on Ben Goertzel’s work here) also presented on “AGI meets the Metaverse” at the Vision Weekend and Melanie mentioned the very interesting work of Monica Anderson who presented her Artificial Intuition approach.

Picture is of Melanie Swan in NYC and on Nanotechnology Island in Second Life.

Last Saturday I went to the Book Party (and after hours party) celebrating the launch of, “Second Life Herald, the Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse” by Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar in SL) and Mark Wallace (Walker Spaight in SL).

The book, a history of the Second Life Herald which began in 2004 as The Alphaville Herald in The Sims Online, comes out at a very interesting moment.

The sun is rising higher on the metaverse(s) and there is much speculation about a bright day to come in some quarters (e.g. Ugotrade), more skepticism and a wait and see approach from others (e.g., Gartner), and fears of a “high noon” kind of show down between a “bottom up” user generated creation culture versus “top down” corporate control (e.g. Second Thoughts). For a thoughtful look at “Do virtual worlds liberate us?” see Ren Reynold’s post on Terranova.

Ludlow’s and Wallace’s book not only looks at a crucial time for the metaverse, its birth, it is also a study of some of the most important questions about the metaverse’s expansion. One question that motivates my own writing is quoted by Ludlow and Wallace in their intro. Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig in his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace:

the very architecture of cyberspace is up for grabs: “Depending on who grabs it, there are several different ways it could turn out.”

Ludlow/Wallace’s approach to this challenge is very different from my own. I focus on the blurring of virtual and real worlds and how this access and control to data and meta data that will certainly empower business and government can also be available to benefit people and the planet. Also I try to keep people who do not yet have access to cyberspace in the conversation where possible. Ludlow and Wallace, on the other hand, focus on stories from some of the first people who began living much of their lives in the metaverse and “the conflicts between the owners of virtual worlds and their users, and between groups of users, and between individuals.”

I found myself aware of The Herald’s “mission” very soon after I began blogging about Second Life. Prokofky Neva, with a typically irreverent Herald turn of phrase, dubbed me “the chirpy whitewasher from Ugotrade” (here ) for taking too lenient an attitude, apparently, to a notorious griefer. And, in the body of the post, I was lumped fairly and squarely in the camp of the chief Herald antagonist, Philip Linden, (aka Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab) who got a wicked Herald tongue lashing for what was described as his “granola crunching fatty huffing way” of dealing with the same griefer.

For those of you who were in Second Life during the time this book covers hopefully it will bring up narratives and memories that you might have otherwise forgotten. For late sleepers who missed out on the “dawn,” Ludlow and Wallace provide an opportunity to catch up (also see LA Times Review).

For me the book provides an opportunity to look deeper into the question of what the metaverse has to teach the paraverse and visa versa by providing an intimate “Herald style” history of a metaverse, Second Life, that has truly succeeded in creating communities around user generated content.

Zha Ewry, a key metaverse architect and thinker I met in the Architectural Working Group in Second Life, said something that I have really taken to heart recently. Though Zha herself said it with a *chuckle*:

I sometimes, when I am feeling.. difficult.. assert that I don’t really trust the judgment of anyone who has never

1) Lived in Second Life or Everquest Online, or The Sims Online long enough that they can get 20 or 30 residents who count them as someone they know by name and behavior

2) Cracked at least half way up the level structure in World of Warcraft, Everquest, or similar

3) Managed some sort of small social community (wiki, bbs, moderated maling list..etc)

The Ludlow and Wallace team have done all of these three things and done them deep. So when Ludlow and Wallace talk I prick up my ears. On the left Urizenus Sklar and on the right Walker Spaight at his wedding to Destroy TV.

The Metaverse and The Paraverse

Exactly how and when the metaverse(s) and paraverse(s) like Google Earth and NASA’s World Wind actually evolve (and likely merge) to become a phenomena that millions or rather billions of people participate in is unpredictable at this juncture. But the consensus is that is will happen soon.

My own optimism for the future of the metaverse is based on an underlying proposition that the blurring of the lines between “virtual” and “real” worlds can be an exciting and liberating juncture for humanity and the planet (see many previous posts). I asked Peter Ludlow the same question I asked Cory Doctorow in London (see previous post):

1) What happens when Virtual Worlds become flooded with data from “real life” objects, geo- positioning, etc., and extreme life–logging enters virtual worlds? Or as Cory D. rephrased it: “What happens when cyber space everts?”

Peter Ludlow:

well, the blowback of info from RL might be useful for some applications of virtual worlds, but I always found virtual worlds to be fun and interesting precisely because the bandwidth of communication with the real world was *narrow*. I don’t want that crap coming into my virtual space — it kills the atmosphere and sense of presence.

I don’t doubt that massive info blowback will have a role in virtual worlds, but that is the point where they aren’t really virtual worlds anymore but just boring communication devices — information rich telephones.

So if the blurring of the virtual and the real is inevitable (which in my view it is) and I agree with Ludlow that mere blowback of data into virtual worlds is potentially a boring phenomenon: “What can the metaverse teach the paraverse?” And, “How do virtual worlds avoid becoming just another boring communication device?”

“What is most likely to become boring when the lines between virtual and real worlds blur is the physical world.”

As David Orban pointed out as we chatted in skype:

My view actually of the blurring is not that the online worlds will be invaded by the physical worlds’ data but absolutely the other way around. The richness and variety of the online worlds will explode into the physical via interfaces and mashups and we will look back and see the physical world as boring and static.

“Huh, a tree that doesn’t even tell its own species?” without the augmentation, or “How could you meet people who didn’t send ahead their v-agents?”

“If you can drape real information across the physical world there is no reason why you can’t drape imaginary information over the real world.”

Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future said this in his presentation at the Stanford University’s Metaverse Meetup (much more on his presentation later in this post).

This room may be a conference room in Wallenberg Hall. But with a click of a mouse or a flip of a switch, I could convert this room into a meeting room on Starship Enterprise. Or right outside the walls in the quad in Stanford you could have a Medieval Tournament going on. You can drape total fantasy, total fiction, total imaginary reality on the physical world.

He showed an example of some dramatic new thinking in the world of video games - a mock up of a game idea from a Nokia sponsored research program in Finland. And Liebhold noted, this is only a hint of the kind of ideas people are working on.

How Not To Be Just Another Boring Communication Device.

And even if cyber space everts it will not become just another boring communication device if the read-write culture that has defined the metaverse (exemplified by Second Life) continues to flourish.

Again I refer to the brilliant Larry Lessig who in his TED talk points out that read only culture was ushered in with the telephone. Lessig demonstrates how the digital age has created new opportunities for read write culture again, even though many of our laws are at odds with this.

In my view, whether virtual worlds remain the heart of a reemergence of read write culture or turn into “boring communication devices” is not so much about “massive info blow back” itself, but more about how the culture that has arisen around social networking and user generated content, again the great exemplar of this is Second Life, is worked out in the confluence of metaverse, paraverse, and meat space.

My interview with Peter Ludlow was conducted by email because the book party was too much fun. I could not ask one of the hosts and a man in demand to retire into a quiet corner. The book party was also a metaverse meetup and packed with Second Life movers and shakers including, Nathan Freitas of Cruxy, Joshua Fouts, Rita J. King of Dancing Ink Productions (Eureka Dejavu in SL - see her blog for more on meetup), Marvel Ousley (see he post on SLNN), Andrea Foster of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Reuters, Jessica Segal (aka Pica Paperdoll, Electric Sheep Company, Andy Fundiger, Marshall Sponder (see his post), Morton Swimmer, California Condor, Donald Schwartz Image Link Productions, Dean Pence, and many many more. I posted some pictures to Flickr.

Notably the party was held in 3rd Ward the artists/entrepreneurs city in a warehouse that is home to WelloHorld - the start up that is the brainchild of co-author Mark Wallace, with Christian Westbrook and Jerry Paffendorf. They are on stealth mode so Mark declined an interview until their launch. But I did snap this chart pinned to their office door that might give some clues to their direction.

The after hours party that Peter hosted back in the Marriot by the Brooklyn bridge was also too entertaining to interrupt. It included both a screening of Peter’s screenshots taken through “dawn of the metaverse” and a very rock ‘n roll drama with the hotel security who were bent on ending the party early. In the picture below Ron Blechner (aka Hiro Pendragon) talks with Peter Ludlow about Peter’s early experiences in Second Life. Mark Wallace is on the left and Boris Kizelshteyn of Combined Story (aka Adonis Bussy in SL) is seated on the couch.

Interview with Peter Ludlow.

I collaborated on questions for Peter with my friends Gwyneth Llewelyn, David Orban and Hiro Pendragon. I will indicate which are their questions.

1) Who/what will be the future competition to the SL - based metaverse?

As you probably know, there are lots of alternatives to second life under development, but I continue to believe that ultimately Trevor Smith of Ogoglio has it right: the metaverse is not going to take off until we have widely available web 3.D development tools in the hands of tens of thousands of website designers. When that happens we will each be building our own little corners of the metaverse and supporting them on our desktop computers. Communications protocols will govern how we move between these worlds and what we can take with us.

2) Your current work is in RL on Philosophy of Language? The new book you are working on - is it a collaboration with the Prof. from NYU I met briefly at the party?

There were a couple of profs from NYU at the party. I’m not collaborating with them, however David Velleman has interesting things to say about narrative and avatars and agency, so I recommend that your readers check out his web site.

Right now I’m working on a book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, which has to do with conceptual puzzles that arise in computational/representational linguistic theories like Chomsky’s. Basically I’m obsessed with that at the moment.

3) What is the future of the SL Herald as an SL institution and what will be your role in it? Will the Herald go the way of SL Insider and start to cover 20 other MMOGs like Massively. That is will it become the Metaverse Herald? (This question was suggested by Gwyn)

In the past the Herald has covered other MMOs, but in the way that a hometown paper covers other towns. Typically we would only cover events in other MMOs if they involved a political protest or some dispute with the game company.

The Herald will stay in Second Life at least until our readers and the people we report on move elsewhere. That is, we aren’t really reporting on Second Life so much as a community that currently resides there. We followed them from TSO, and if they go nomadic on us again we will follow them.

4) What is the relationship between Peter/Uri -similarities/differences? Do you have alts and avatars in other verses? (Hiro’s question)

We all have many different avatars that we use in everyday life. We dress and act differently depending on whether we are conducting business, socializing or whatever. If you think of these ways of acting and dressing as modes of presentation, then you see that it is the same as using an avatar to present yourself or mediate your social interactions with others. Like you I have lots of different alts and avatars even in the real world. You’re talking to one of them now!

5) The digital doesn’t fossilize in one out of a billion specimens, but allows perfect preservation of time-sequences, in the changing metaverse. This means that unavoidably in time it is going to become richer than the physical world itself. How are we going to equip ourselves in coping with this? (Question from David Orban)

it can’t become richer than the actual world because information has to be encoded in physical states of the world. That having been said, I’ve never been impressed by the preservatory aspects of the digital so much as the fleeting and fragile aspects of it. This has been made salient to me by my years in Second Life. I’ve seen so many interesting builds and groups come and vanish. Part of the project of our book was to preserve some of this history. But rereading the book yesterday I was reminded of a lot of events that didn’t make it into the book and may be lost forever.

More generally though, digital media does not give us perfect preservation. You can’t fight the second law of thermodynamics. High entropy will trump low entropy, and there will be lots of bit rot between now and the heat death of the universe.

6) Are we living in a simulation? (David Orban)

There’s a philosopher at Oxford who says that there is something like a 75% chance that we are. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say “I don’t think so.” Actually, I know we aren’t, but if you want that story you have to take my course on skepticism.

7) What is the future of identity and IP in the open metaverse? The call for identity authentication grows louder by the day.

Identity shouldn’t be a problem. It should be possible to establish identity even for avatars using a version of public key encryption for digital signatures. IP is another matter. Technologically, preserving IP is getting close to impossible, but on the other hand if the US Congress keeps passing draconian laws that “give” IP rights for patents like crustless peanut butter sandwiches well then maybe it can be preserved by old fashioned meat space head cracking. Zero tolerance for crustless peanut butter sandwiches. Sell one and you go to prison. The only question is how much of that kind of crap people will put up with. When they finally figure out it is a scam (of if they do) then that will be the end of IP.

Is the blurring of the lines “between us and them” - human and machine the “high noon” of the metaverse? Or as Ben Goetzel writes here in his post on Global Brain Memes. ” I think this ties in with Ray Kurzweil’s point that by the time we have human-level AGI, it may not be “us versus them”, it may be a case where it’s impossible to draw the line between us and them…” (Also see David Orban’s Conversation with Ray Kurzweil on YouTube).

I don’t buy this for a nanosecond. First of all, is there even such a thing as “general intelligence”? I’d be surprised. “intelligence” is just a covering term for a basket of cognitive abilities that we prize. If you are impressive at enough of those abilities we say you have intelligence. It’s like athleticism. There is no single property of athleticism, there are rather lots of different physical abilities that we prize. If someone has enough of them we call that athletic. When we say something is “intelligent” we are just saying that we are impressed by it. I remember when playing tic tac toe counted as “intelligent” in AI. It doesn’t anymore because the problem is too easy. We aren’t impressed by it anymore.

Now, on the question of whether we are becoming indistinguishable from machines (and I can’t help but think of Blade Runner here) I am also dubious. First of all, I seriously doubt that we will ever see a machine that can pass the turing test for any significant amount of time and broad range of contexts. But that just goes to the question of whether we could be fooled in conversation. The real question is whether machines are actually like us, and here the real problem is that we have no idea what *we* are like. We have just a glimmer of a picture of the nature of our cognitive architecture and zero idea how that architecture supervenes on our wetware. Well, if we don’t know what we are like, then it is difficult to know how to build something like us. It is not an engineering problem. It is a basic science problem. If we knew *what* to build I don’t doubt we could build it. But what to build?

The State of Play

If you are unfamiliar with the state of play between paraverse(s) and metaverse(s) Susan Kish has an excellent roadmap. My friend VJ also has a nice collection of paraverse links tagged in Delicious. In her report, “Virtual Worlds: Second Life and The Enterprise,” Kish notes, “The combination – whether a Google Life or a Second Earth or another similar entity - could be the ultimate enterprise in Virtual Worlds.”

The question is also: Will this confluence be as important and beneficial to non-profit centered enterprises. For example, the notion of Amazon.org is a social software entity that Bruce Sterling evokes in Shaping Things.

And, of course, very importantly, the question that Peter Ludlow raises - will the confluence NOT be boring.

3D Data For Real Virtual Worlds

I was fortunate to attend the very inspiring presentation of Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future titled, “3D data for real world virtual worlds” at the Stanford University’s Metaverse Meetup organized by Henrik Bennetsen. The meetup was streamed into the International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life last week. It was an amazing lens into the state of play in the paraverse. Henrik published the talk abstract before the event:

Abstract 3D data, maps, and software will change the way we compute and interact with spatial services. Moving beyond simple texture mapped terrain and boxes, new 3D mapping frameworks are rapidly evolving into platforms for real world virtual world media, interaction, commerce, and science. In this talk I’ll review work of various groups who are building different components of a 3D Geoweb. I will first describe how their 3D data and software will work as a platform for a 3D real world virtual world, and then, what kinds of new applications and user experiences might be developed on these platforms, and then finish with a brief discussion of prospects and mechanisms for data interoperability allowing users to create, discover, use, and exchange 3D data across platforms.

And Leibhold truly covered everything outlined above! The fascinating talk will hopefully be posted to the web soon here. But there is a very entertaining and thought provoking post up on Wrxli FlimFlam’s Second Life blogSecond Front already. I chatted a little with Wrxli who is a performance artist with Avatar Orchestra Metaverse during the meetup and look forward to more conversations.

Highlights of the talk - Leibhold’s responses to some of the questions.

Once again I asked the question that came from call to action that Cory Doctorow made in my previous post:

1) How can the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that are frequently only available to big companies and used by them in order to realize profit and control also be put into the hands of individuals?

Leibhold’s response was concrete and detailed but due to the sound cutting out in parts I will have to refer to the recording myself when it is posted here later this week for all the details. But Leibhold mentioned several examples including police crime maps that were increasingly available, and the sensor web project at Microsoft where they have networks of all kinds of environmental sensors out there available freely in GRSS format on Microsoft Virtual Earth. Leibhold pointed out the sensor web architecture at Microsoft is built on common standards will work on a variety of sensors. He continued:

We are also seeing a lot of sensor data collected by life scientists and physical scientists available. A lot of biological information and weather information is going to come on line. There are citizen sensing projects Eric Paulos at Intel Labs, Berkley who has being doing all kinds of things using mobile phones as sensors. There is a group at UCLA called CENS (Center for Embedded Network Sensing) that has a whole project to allow citizen sensing. And Nokia has a project called Sense Web, I think. And they have sponsored research programs at about ten universities world wide to come up with interoperable standards and mechanisms for ordinary people to create and share 3D sensor information and to visualize it as well.

Another very interesting point he made re a larger vision of interoperability was that:

while there was division between the worlds of geospatial standards, the worlds of scene rendering and Hollywood, the video game worlds, CAD, Google will prosper. And Google is creating defacto standards around KML and Collada that we are all going to have to live with.

But when I raised the notion that Second Life’s expansive vision for a new open grid architecture might mean noting that, in my view, “Second Life is also the furthest along re open sourcing of the 3D immersive worlds” (someone from Sun disputed this assertion pointing out Project Wonderland has been open sourced top to bottom since March, and I realized I should have limited my assertion to previously closed immersive virtual worlds). But Leibhold’s response was interesting:

I would dispute the fact that Second Life is furthest along. I think that quite frankly I believe that any day now Google is going to announce avatars and avatar based social networks for Google Earth and the rumors are rampant that they have already tested it. And if that is the case they are farther along. There are structural problems with the computer server architecture in Second Life that restrict the kinds of applications you can run. I think that Second Life is one of the greatest social experiments but technically I think they are going to be eclipsed.

I had IMed Ginsu Linden at the start of the meetup to offer him a TP (teleport) if he wanted to attend. But unfortunately he was busy. But, of course, immediately I shot off an IM to him reporting this prediction of Second Life’s eclipse by Google’s imminent launch of avatar based social networks for Google Earth! Ginsu sent me back this reply:

[8:32] Ginsu Linden: Thanks Tara5. I am actually really looking forward to Google’s entry into the market. Will give people something to chew over.

Yes, it will! And IMed my friend Zha Ewry too reporting this prediction of Google supremacy. In response she pointed out how much depended:

19:25] Zha Ewry: on how Google approaches things,and how much freedom they give their residents, if they are even at all residents, not merely transitory avatars. It will interesting to see how they do at running it.

And of course there is the Linden Lab initiative to restructure the Second Life grid to be watched and participate in through the collaborative effort of The Architectural Working Group.

To return to the theme of this post:

The very architecture of cyber space is up for grabs, and: “Depending on who grabs it, there are several different ways it could turn out” (Lessig).

Don’t Miss the Next Stanford Meetup!

The event is taking place on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 from 6:00pm – 7:30pm SLT/PST and to attend via Second Life you go here:

http://slurl.com/secondlif e/Spaceport%20Bravo/66/74/184/

Physically it is at:

Wallenberg Hall, Stanford University

Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. His work regularly appears both in print and online, and he has spoken around the world on issues such as the global environment, technological transformation, and political change. In 2003, Cascio co-founded WorldChanging.com, the Utne Independent Press Award-winning website identifying models, tools, and ideas for building a “bright green” future. In March, 2006, he started OpenTheFuture.com as his online home. Cascio presently serves as a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, as the Director of Impacts Analysis for The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and as a founding fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Talk abstract: The Metaverse — what does it include, where is it going, and how will it change our lives? Based on my work for the Metaverse Roadmap Overview, I’ll look both at the underlying technologies of the Metaverse and at the social, cultural and economic impacts it could have.

3rd Ward, architectural working group on Second Life, artificial general intelligence, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, Brooklyn Metaverse meetup. Stanford metaverse meetup, citizen sensing, embedded sensor networks, geospatial standards, Ginsu Yoon, Google Earth, Lawrence Lessig, Linden Lab, Mark Wallace, metaverse, Microsoft Virtual Earth, nanotechnology, NASA World Wind, Ogoglio, paraverse, Peter Ludlow, positive global development, Project Wonderland, Second Life, Second Life Herald, Sensor Networks, singularity, social networking, The Dawn of The Metaverse, the metaverse roadmap, the open future, Urizenus Sklar, Virtual Reality, Virtual Worlds, Walker Spaight, Wello Horld, Zero Linden Zha Ewry

Nanotechnology Island has launched in Second Life with the goal to establish a place for the Nano Science and Technology communities to come together and to bring key ideas and research into public discussion.

Nanoscience and technology like virtual worlds are frequently cited as “disruptive” technologies. These fields should evolve in relationships between scientists, engineers, policymakers and regulators in a global setting with the opportunity for public debate and engagement.

Nanotechnology is a term used to describe the manipulation of materials at a nanometer of scale - a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Chris Ewels explains: “This is the scale of large molecules; molecular chains (like plastics), proteins (from biology), nano-crystals (for example nanocrystalline diamond) and new large molecules like fullerenes and nanotubes.” See his site for more info and many wonderful pictures including the picture above from his gallery fantastic.

While nanoscience is rooted in the physics and chemistry of objects at the nanoscale, it involves a broad collection of technologies and scientific research — from diverse fields such as physics, materials science, engineering, chemistry, biochemistry, bio-engineering, medicine, optics and more.

Shifts in thinking and technology emerging from nanotechnology have big implications for our future and may lead to the end of the age of industrial design, production and consumption (see the seminal book on nanotechnology Engines Of Creation by K. Eric Drexler).

Creating a community of communities in SL

The communities of nanotechnology and science are dispersed across disciplines and geography. This Second Life project aims to “create an exemplar for using SL as a community aggregator (community of communities).”

Nanotechnology Island is based in the multidisciplinary SciLands in Second Life. SciLands is an international cross-disciplinary community, currently numbering 34 islands, with its own orientation island and regular events. This is an ideal location for Nanotechnology Island to begin to encourage inter and intra-community dialogue and give an opportunity for many people to play a role in envisioning and defining the future.

Dave Taylor, of the National Physical Laboratory (in the UK), explains that some of the key objectives are to:

provide resources to nanotechnology-related individuals and organizations to help them get started in SL: mentoring, technical help, access to shared land and facilities, and subsidised SL development. This last part means that NPL will help cover the costs of developers for SL projects that are approved for display on Nanotechnology island.

Dave then added more specifics about the services that would be made available:

1) Free assistance with Second Life basics for Nanotechnology subject specialists new to Second Life. Nanotechnology Subject Specialists attending meetings can use the SciLands orientation zone and meet with our representatives in Second Life to learn about the basics (e.g. how to move around, how to communicate and give presentations, how to change your appearance, how to search, how to find more help).

2) Free assistance with preparing, promoting and supporting suitable events on Nanotechnology Island.

3) Free space (land) on Nanotechnology Island to host displays or exhibits relating to nanotechnology.

4) Funding to help build (develop) an exhibit or display to be shown on Nanotechnology Island. Note: some simple exhibits (e.g. posters or simple molecular models) can be made for free.

Nanotechnology and the OS for Spaceship Earth

In an earlier post, I discussed the role that online, immersive, collaborative 3D virtual environments like Second Life will play in creating the operating systems for planet earth. Buckminster Fuller, whose visions reemerge in nanotechnology, makes a call for human cooperation in creating a future in the final words of his book, “Operating System for Spaceship Earth,” 1963.

The phrase Spaceship Earth brilliantly suggests the relationships on a galactic scale that nanotechnology both emerged from and can be extrapolated to. And Buckminster Fullers’s operating system for spaceship earth foreshadows not only ideas of “self-assembly” that emerge from nanotechnology but the notion of virtual operations centers emerging from the collaborative networked intelligence of virtual worlds. See my earlier posts, here, here and here to learn more about Eolus One and other projects that are beginning to develop Virtual Operations Centers in Second Life for energy monitoring, environmental management, health care and more.

I was kindly given permission to use this picture and the picture opening this post by Dr Chris Ewel, Research Fellow at the Institute of Materials, Nantes where he models impurities and defects in nanostructures, and EELS microscopy of new nanomaterials. They are from his gallery fantastic. Ewels calls the one above “Dreams of Buckminster Fuller.”

Buckminster Fuller structures are reappearing in the chemistry of the nanoscale. And, as Ewels points out, Buckminster Fuller once designed a geodesic dome large enough to cover mid-town Manhattan. . “So why not extrapolate a little?!”

C₆₀, the carbon molecule [known as the “bucky ball"] arguably started the whole nanoscience revolution in the eighties, was originally discovered by accident - by a group of scientists trying to understand the formation and behaviour of carbon molecules in interstellar gas clouds.

Extrapolation on an unprecendented scale is intrinsic to the nano revolution. For as much as nanotechnology is rooted in a precise notion of measurement at a very small scale, the implications of the discoveries are far reaching. The famous and controversial heart of nanoscience thinking is the possibility of “self- assembly.” “Self-assembly” is the fundamental principle which generates structural organization on many scales, from molecules to galaxies.

Nanotechnology presents the opportunity to go beyond what natural mechanisms currently allow by creating assembly systems that can build complex devices from elemental atoms or molecules.

The manipulation of matter on an atom-by-atom basis to create specific configurations for molecules, or “molecular manufacturing”, is probably at least a decade away from being used at commercial levels, but self-assembly systems are widely used in nature and have already been harnessed in scientific experiments.

As Nanotechnology matures, it will likely prove to be revolutionary in reversing a fundamental basis of human-based manufacturing.

To date, human manufacturing has been a top-down process taking larger materials and cutting and shaping them down into parts of products. Molecular manufacturing, on the other hand, starts with the building blocks of atoms and molecules and combines them to form objects from the bottom up. This is how nature has worked for billions of years. Eventually this approach may replace many of today’s production processes and find applications throughout society. (UCLA Journal of Law and Technology).

Chris Ewels noted when I asked him to comment:

nanotechnology works with both bottom-up and top-down and there’s lots of cool stuff being done with top-down.

Chris also pointed out that many of the ideas In Drexler’s book in his view are more science fiction than science fact:

(scientifically they just don’t work – if you’ve seen pictures of molecular cogs made from individual molecules, these ignore the fact that molecules tend to stick together, for example). For me the thing that nanotechnology does and will do well, is it allows us to do stuff that happens now, but better! So solar cells that are much more efficient, catalysts that work better, etc etc – not quite so glamorous but if you can make a solar cell 4 times more efficient then you can change the world!

One of the most exciting things about nanotechnology communities coming to Second Life will be that the ideas in nanotechnology that are about exploring the fundamental limits of human ingenuity - provocations to possible futures on the one hand; and on ground innovations from nano science and technology that are changing our world now on the other - will be integrated into the networked human intelligence of the virtual frontier. And this virtual frontier, exemplified by Second Life, is itself a new adventure in human imagination and possibility

A Tour of Nanotechnology Island on Second Life.

Two avatars operated simultaneously by Dave Taylor from the National Physical Laboratory showed me around Nanotechnology Island. ‘Davee Commerce’ is the avatar on the right and on the left is ‘Innovation Projects’ an official NPL avatar.

While the prime objective is to help others make exhibits there are some very interesting exhibits that have already been developed by NPL. The first one (pictured below) Davee Commerce showed me is a SIMS instrument. SIMS stands for Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry - and is used to analyse complex structures.

Nearby are giant animated models with an explanatory display to explain SIMS - a process in which “you basically fire charged molecules or atoms at stuff and see what comes out.”

I watched both an animation of a charged red bismuth ion and one of a “Buckyball,” striking a sample, developed for NPL by Troy McLuhan. Troy pointed out the red and yellow things that go flying are ions and they get pulled away for analysis. “It’s sort of like figuring out what the surface of a watch is made of by shooting it with a narrow-beam sandblaster and seeing what the sand knocks of.”

Also in the exhibit is an AFM - Atomic Force Microscope that works by dragging a very narrow point (atomic sized) across a surface and watching the point go up and down (with a laser beam bounced off a reflector attached to the point). “Sort of like blind people reading braille,” Troy noted.

See the NPL website for more on AFM. DNA structural change and single molecule detections are key areas of AFM research. Carbon nanotubes are ideal tips for AFM because they can have diameters as small as one nanometer.

Davee Commerce took me on a flying tour of a carbon nanotube.

Single-walled carbon nanotubes are being used for investigating surface-protein and protein-protein binding and developing highly specific electronic biomolecule detectors.

Dave took me on a tour inside a single walled carbon nanotube and also explained the structure of DNA to me (image behind the nano tube above and detail below).

Nanotechnology Island includes several interesting buildings produced for NPL by NMC Virtual Worlds and an auditorium that will host regular nano-related events.

The center piece, The Tower of Ten, will house a series of exhibits that change scale by a factor of ten at each level all the way down to the nanolevel. The AFM and SIMS exhibits are housed in an a reproduction based on the architecture of the NPL building in the UK. The laboratories inside were modelled on some of those at NPL, but are typical of specialist nanotechnology centres around the world. Outside there is an animated reproduction of “Newtons Apple Tree.”

A tree grown from a graft from an old tree in Newton’s family garden in Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire still drops apples outside the “real” life NPL building.

According to popular accounts, it was the fall of an apple from this tree that suggested to Newton that the force of gravity that caused the apple to drop to Earth was the same force that kept the moon on its path. The original tree was cared for until it was blown down in 1820 (”Notes and records of the Royal Society Vol 9″).

Playing With The Havoc 4 Physics Engine To Explore Nano Ideas in SL

Seeing Newton’s revered apple tree gave me an idea to ask some nano thinkers the question:

Can ideas of self assembly at least as concepts be explored on SL by playing with the physics engine - and could that be of value in communicating and understanding these concepts better and bringing the rapid prototyping and collaborative potential of the SL environment into nano thinking.

I gave this question to David Orban whose company Questar is in SL consulting, “but with our twists… No architectural building, but community creation, etc. ” David Orban is an entrepreneur interested in the Technological Singularity (see my earlier post) and Memetic Engineering. He is a member of the Singularity Institute, and is on the Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation.

We know how the world works in the macro-scale. That is why building real-scale stuff in SL in rather unexciting, at least to me. But we do not know well enough how stuff behaves on the nano-scale.

And in SL, or other online worlds, we have the chance to simulate the world as we would perceive it if we were able to directly participate in them.

We have to change the physics. For example: to us water is fluid but on the nanoscale it is not.

The bipolar nature of the water molecule manifests itself, with the Van der Waals forces becoming very, very important. The surface of water becomes an almost impenetrable barrier.

In my opinion, once again, it will be with the open-sourcing of the server that makes this kind of experiment.

You have to change just a few parameters, and see the consequences. Let me give you an example:

In the good old days of Virtual Reality 1.0 in the end of the eighties with VPL Research, Jaron Lanier, etc. the immersive RL was not fun to me as it was emulating reality.

What I wanted to do is emulate irreality so for example change gravity, and learn to juggle then turn the gravity knob up little by little, and once I got to Earth gravity take off the goggles and juggle for real!

I want to change just a few parameters as well, and learn from them. Right now the changes have to be programmed into each individual object, instead of being a feature of the background.

They way to do it is to tweak the underlying Havoc engine which is the basis of the simulation calculating the collisions and what happens to objects as they clash at given speeds, at given characteristics, etc.

For example, making stuff sticky: that is chemistry!

Or making stuff blow up: that is nuclear reactions…

Or model how the changing nature of mechanical resistance can help or hinder the building of self assembling structures.

I asked David Orban if he was willing to give me a cartoon to illustrate our conversation in skype. And he very gamely posted these two drawings to Flickr for me.

Start juggling with a low-gravity setting, and follow the balls with your conscious brain. Turn up…

Sticky objects simulate chemistry, and materials’ science.

But you can’t……..

But you can’t just tweak some parameters in the physics engine to simulate physics at the nanoscale. [this was Troy McLuhan's initial response to my question]. That’s fundamentally wrong. Quantum mechanics is NOT classical mechanics with some tweaked parameters. It’s qualitatively different?

I am sure that Troy is not alone in the scepticism he expressed to me on playing with the SL physics engine to explore nano ideas.

Early in my career I spent some time working on ways to represent time travel in film and for this we were constantly playing with ideas of light and motion through algorithms, lenses, and film printing technologies. Obviously this did not further the technology of time travel per se. But constantly pushing at the possibilities of time travel’s representation I believe enhances its possibility in human imagination and endeavor. So to me tweaking the physics engine of Second Life to explore the possibilities of nano thinking seems a logical next step. I asked David Orban if he could clarify further his ideas. He responded:

Quantum Mechanics is fundamentally different. But it is so much so that we have probably just no way of perceiving it in the ‘right’ way in any simulation just as we can’t in reality. We don’t even know what Quantum Mechanics means!

Playing with the havoc engine is just another way to play with an idea with cannot and never can see right!

Anyway: the realm of reality we perceive is one, that of the quantum is an other. Making that one visible is likely to be impossible.

But we can work around that. I think

We’ll see…if we don’t start from somewhere, and “tweak some parameters” we won’t get anywhere.

Picture from Chris Ewels’ Image Gallery

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