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When Anthony E. Zuiker Creator, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, (in picture above with Philip Rosedale, CEO Linden Lab), CSI: Miami, CSI: NY delivered his keynote at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose last week, I felt I was listening to the world class player who would be the first big winner of the virtual world’s e-jackpot.

As a finale Zuiker dressed as Santa Claus and threw Snickers bars out to the audience to remind us that this is a time to celebrate and think about a sweet future - the convergence of virtual worlds, television, gaming, mobile and the web in delicious mash-ups like chocolate and nuts. But even without this jolly and tasty reminder, I doubt if anyone had missed the point.

It is clear that Zuiker has drilled deep into what it means to accomplish this convergence. This is no testing the waters of virtual worlds by a naive and timid giant from old media. Zuiker’s intimacy with everything it will take to accomplish this revolution from story telling, to gaming, to television, to social networking, to user generated content in virtual worlds is apparent.

In my exclusive interview with Anthony Zuiker (later in this post) you will hear a precise articulation of his vision.

The body of this post is interviews with four key players in the convergence of CSI and Second Life - Anthony Zuiker, creator of the CSI franchise, Sibley Verbeck the CEO of The Electric Sheep Company, Philip Rosedale CEO of Linden Lab and Chris Carella, Chief Creative Officer, The Electric Sheep Company.

On October 24th the CSI: New York story line will be taken into Second Life (check this promo out - definitely revved up but very true to the experience of Second Life). The Electric Sheep Company have gone to great lengths to prepare Second Life for the mainstream including the launch of a new viewer that will premier with CSI.

I asked Philip Rosedale for his thoughts on the CSI adventure.

I think it is a great project. We don’t look for traffic for Second Life in general we more look for opportunities to present Second Life to people in a more obvious way to people who don’t understand it, or haven’t experienced it.

And when I heard about the CSI plan roughly in terms of what they wanted to do with the show I really thought that it was something we should support. It felt like a fair and appealing presentation of Second Life and something that would get a lot of people intrigued in a way that it was difficult to do on the web site. I’m looking forward to it. I think it will probably overload all the systems associated with it but that will be a test.

The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo 2007 has been blogged by Eightbar, Crave, Mercury News, Metaversed, Mindblizzard here, here, here, and here, Out To Pasture, Raph Koster (on interoperability) SLNN, here, here, Virtual Worlds News, Vintfalken, Virtually Blind, Games On Deck (on mobile virtual worlds), ClickZ (picture of the mocap here), Joipodgorny, FT Tech Blog, The Entrepreneurs Guide to Second Life, The Hollywood Reporter, theage.com.au, Smart Economy, PC World (nice picture here from CSI Second Life spoiler of Sinise standing in front of his Second Life avatar), CNET news.com, A Media Circus, so you have an opportunity to see some of the many strands of the conference as well as more on the show stopper start from a variety of view points. This amazing collection of links is thanks to Malburns Twitter stream.

The conference was so rich and mutli-stranded it is impossible to cover all aspects of it. Fortunately the top notch team of Virtual World’s Management, headed up by Christopher Sherman, is making MP3s of the whole event available.

Vision For a Better Planet from HiPiHi

I will be posting an exclusive Ugotrade interview with HiPiHi Founder and CEO Xu Hui in my next post. With the great visionary speaker for the role of virtual worlds in a creating a better planet Philip Rosedale in the audience (a role Philip really seemed to enjoy!), it was Xu Hui who notably stepped up to the plate and spoke out for virtual worlds as the highway to positive global development. There is an excellent report on Xu Hui’s presentation on the Virtual Worlds in China panel on the Virtual Worlds News blog.

Blake Lewin, VP Product Development, Turner Broadcasting Inc., stopped by to chat with members of the HiPiHi team after the Visionary Panel. Raph Koster on the right shakes hands with someone off screen.

Things did get a little snippy on the Visionary Panel. Kaneva, Areae, Makena, HiPiHi, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, and The Multiverse Network were all represented and in fine form. But disagreement erupted (a polite war of the worlds) around the role of 3D in the future of online social networking/gaming environments. Raph Koster creator of Metaplace gamely and very convincingly challenged the absolute preeminence of 3D. But, in my view, at this conference at least, the potential of the open and rich immersive 3D environments exemplified by Second Life and HiPiHi stole the show.

Will HiPiHi and Second Life come together in the future?

I asked Xu Hui founder and CEO of HiPiHi what he saw for the future for HiPiHi and Second Life together (more of this interview in an upcoming post):

Yes, maybe a partner. We have a lot of similarity with Second Life and especially when we talked with Philip. We think that in the future that we are working together for the growth of virtual worlds.

Virtual Worlds and Television - A Revolutionary Convergence.

I wish I had a more immersive way than this blog to share some of the excitement of the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose last week. The billion dollar questions at the heart of the conference were the hows, whats and whys of the transition of virtual worlds from a “boutique” phenomena to the mainstream. Christian Renaud gave an excellent overview of this in his keynote. There are several posts commenting on his presentation including worldsinmotion, virtualworldsnews, mindblizzard, gamasutra, and a Keynote Shorthand on the Cisco Virtual Worlds blog.

While the message that “Chrismas is a coming and …….” was clear in Zuiker’s keynote. There was also a bit of spring fever in the air. Match making was going on everywhere. Omnicom has acquired a stake in Millions of Us and HiPiHi is partnering with MoU. The Electric Sheep are taking an equity stake in a new children’s virtual world, Star In Me. These are just a few of the notable examples. Like Electric Sheep, Millions of Us has a deep portfolio of partnerships now including some very interesting new faces like SceneCaster. And while Rivers Run Red did not come to San Jose I am expecting them to roll out some interesting news at The Virtual Worlds Forum in London next week.

Reuben Steiger, CEO of Millions of Us showed some awesome films made in Second Life that take Scion City into new territory.

Reuben very eloquently explained why the evolution of television into virtual worlds would not only be the killer app for Second Life but a revolution for television. Reuben presented a wonderful image of the connection between Philip Rosedale’s pioneering genius and that of the brilliant young inventor of television Philo Farnsworth.

The picture above shows the door to Linden Lab reflecting an image of the building that now stands on the site of Farnsworth’s original 202 Green Street laboratory.

Above is inventor Philo T. Farnsworth with his invention, the first electronic television, in Sept. 10, 1928 in San Francisco

The San Francisco Chronicle made the following announcement on September 3rd, 1928 (The SF Museum )

Two major advances in television were announced yesterday by a young inventor who has been quietly working away in his laboratory in San Francisco and has evolved a system of television basically different from any system yet in operation.

It wouldn’t take much editing to use the same words to describe the recent innovations of Second Life.

After listening to Anthony Zuiker’s great convergence plan and watching the intriguing spoilers for CSI in Second Life produced by the Electric Sheep Company and the fabulous clips from Millions of Us. It was hard not to start thinking that the convergence of film and television with virtual worlds will be the game changer.

Interview with Anthony Zuiker

Me: I was impressed that you were ready for the adventure of integrating mainstream TV into an open user-generated virtual world like Second Life. Could you tell me about that?

Anthony Zuiker: Yes sure. I think I understand the future of television is going to be highly interactive and going to utilize multiple platforms. And in doing that when the opportunity arose to be able to tell a narrative story in first life meaning on air and to continue that narrative into Second Life meaning on-line and a 3D experience it was just perfectly made for CSI: New York. The future of television, in my opinion, really is television, on-line, mobile and gaming.

The days of sitting in front of your television at a specific time to watch really have come and gone. And I believe that the viewer wants a deeper experience in other platforms we are very device driven at this juncture and if we can continue the story line and give entertainment that is specific to the devices, specific to TV, specific to the web, specific to mobile, specific to gaming.

I believe that you will live in a world where you can win this fight two ways. One you can do a great TV show and deepen the experience across platforms and when the TV show continues drive people back to television and never ever miss a beat. So if you actually are watching and you only watching TV you won’t be behind but if you go for the deeper cross platform experience it will be a deeper experience but you are also not ahead. And that is how you win this war.

Me: Yes I am actually one of those people who threw their TV out and the only way I think it might come back is if there was some kind of integration.

Anthony Zuiker: I understand. The second line of thought in that discourse is as follows. The television set is going to need to get with the program. It is going to need to be highly interactive, touch screen, have voice applications, encompass e-mails, encompass the phone, encompass all on-line interactivity, and really be the one stop shop for the living room. if that does not happen then we are going to have to try to make TV the primary device and then go into other ancillary devices and hopefully drive people back to television. It is one of two things.

Me: The other question I had is that you really are pioneers, I think as far as I know, in bringing a mainstream broadcast narrative - well there is the L Word and a few others - but what I mean is you didn’t take the VLES (Virtual Lower East Side) route going for a closed world.

Anthony Zuiker: Correct. It is very important you said that. Because the L Word - and of course it is part of our family so we want to talk to positively - but there is not a continuous story line in L Word. It really is a one stop shop - a community has taken over that world. It is highly successful for the Electric Sheep and we applaud that.

But for CSI: New York we are definitely continuing narrative not only on Oct 24th into world but on February 6th paying it off on the air. And continuing the story line in Second Life beyond February 6th and the sky’s the limit. I believe that at some point it will go so deep that I will start creating original programming inside Second Life - literally like a South Park in Second Life that is original with characters that I create that continues the storyline also.

And the possibilities in Second Life are endless much more than First Life. My best example is I can’t sink the Titantic in First Life it is just too much money but I can sink it all day long in Second Life.

Me: Yes, I have a background in special effects film and animation and I have been wondering when successful creators from mainstream media like you would look at Second Life and start playing with it. Second Life brings things to the table that have not been there before - a new palette of possibility.

Anthony Zuiker: Hopefully in my presentation I was clear that since my background is Las Vegas, since my background is gaming, since I was an only child and I was bored ….what I didn’t say was that I used to role dice and play cards and when I was kid and I was always pretty much a gamer.

So when it comes to addressing some of the problems in Second Life in terms of having companies come and write checks to have their products incorporated inside Second Life you now have the narrative creator of the biggest TV show in the world that understands gaming.

Me: I have noticed that there are very few professional game developers in Second Life. I think there are a number of reasons for this including a preference for high production values.

Anthony Zuiker: Halo 3 is one experience Second Life is another. I understand that. But I believe that all of these devices and all of this content can co-exist. I believe that you can bring top notch gamers into Second Life and make that experience grand. Like I said I’ve launched through the Second Life in the CSI: New York virtual simulation casual games on different levels to make sure the confidence of mass is there.

I was very clear to the Electric Sheep I have no interest in dazzling the Second Life veteran. That is not what I am doing. I am trying to get mass here and really create a community that is a lot deeper than 38 to 40, ooo [concurrency] and 9 million membership.

Me: That seems to me to be a good analogy when you say South Park in Second Park because that is great entertainment that isn’t based on hi def.

Anthony Zuiker: Well unless you were being pelted in the head by Snickers bars you had to have thought to yourself during my speech especially during the 90 second machinima that when I was running after the killer that feels like it could be a show in some way, shape or form.

Me: Yes Second Life seems a natural environment for CSI stories!

Anthony Zuiker: Here is what is true. Everyone likes a great story. And everyone loves great great characters. And in my business it is character over concept. And in Second Life character and concept have equal footing.

Interview With Sibley Verbeck:
CEO, The Electric Sheep Company

Me: How did it all happen? - the connection between the Electric Sheep and Anthony Zuiker that is?

Sibley Verbeck: So Anthony Zuiker works at Jerry Bruckheimer Productions - they make the shows and networks pick them up and show them. So in our case we talk to a lot of the networks and work with some of them and someone at CBS said who you should really talk to is Anthony. He is not at our network but he would really understand this and write stories and is always interested in cross platform - not just the promotion of shows but taking the story to cross platform.

So it is not just that if you miss the show you can see it on your phone or your ipod - the same show - its lets do something different that’s appropriate for that medium that extends the story that makes sense on an ipod or in this case a virtual worlds. He is passionate about that so then we made that connection.

Then we were up an running with the CSI franchise saying: What can we do? How can we make this a great experience? It will be a great experience for the current users of Virtual Worlds including Second Life of course and that is important to us. But more importantly there is even more die-hard fans of CSI. And those people are not currently using virtual worlds so we better have them in mind as well as we design this.

So you have done an orientation in Second Life for CSI fans?

Yes we have done an orientation, a registration process, we are actually launching an entirely new viewer. So on Oct 24th when this goes on television on CSI we will also be launching a new viewer for Second Life.

In this case for CSI, but eventually it will be for lots of other things. Whenever anything is mentioned in CSI people Google it. They go to the CSI website because there are often connections there. So they will go to the CSI website. There they can register for this virtual experience, download the software, come right in and yes immediately they are in an orientation where they are greeted by Anthony’s avatar and they can start getting into Crime Scene related content right away.

So they become a Crime Scene Investigator. And they go around the virtual experience and there is a crime and they have help to solve it, look for evidence take it back to the crime lab just like happens in the show. So all these fans will be very familiar with that but here they can interact with it. Most importantly the story continues so there is a story arc that starts with the TV show that continues in the virtual world.

It is not just if you like CSI here is the CSI game. Its connected and that story continues then comes back on to TV on February 6th. So you want to be part of that so you know what is going on and then it comes back on TV again.

How many people have you got running these avatars to greet people?

As works with virtual worlds most of the content is the other people - its the other people coming in. So yes we will have to have a lot of greeters. Because one the things we find in virtual worlds in general and this is not Second Life specific - one of the metrics on whether people are retained and come back is the time between when they log in and when they start talking with someone - of course it is also who they meet. But the shorter that time the more likely they are to stick around.

We want to have that great social experience. But it is in large part it is also automated and scaled so that people can come in and hang out with each other then go collaboratively through that experience.

What are the obstacles to doing this. It sounds so great. Why hasn’t it been done before?

We still look at the obstacles every day! There will be things that work well and things that don’t. This is a first of a kind project for us. We’ll learn and keep on improving this project as it goes on and others after it.

And finding people in a different medium who can work together [is a challenge]. We have of course had to film a lot of machinima for the show. We have been working very hard on that. And that was an exercise in merging two different worlds.

How TV is shot is just different - with live actors - even though machinima is more like live TV than it is like animation it is still different. And getting those two worlds to talk to each other and working out that production process, of course that was a challenge. So there is challenge with the conceptualization - What should we do?

Did you have to rethink gaming for Second Life?

When you look at social virtual world in general I think they are a fantastic platform for casual games for example and the casual game market has only been increasing and even larger than the video or deeper game market.

So here we have a set of tools that are very flexible, Second Life and other virtual worlds, where you can create a lot of content - whether it is social games, puzzle solving games etc. where it is not running around action games for that you would need virtual world platforms that are also game engines like Icarus or others. But even in these virtual worlds you can get into this whole great social gaming space that I think is underdeveloped.

You have to program for the medium. We are doing some real game mechanics and game elements for the CSI experience. There are some other things we are coming out with here in the very near future for example movie promotions and other things that do involve other types of games for virtual world as well.

An iphone type experience for Second Life with a new viewer that makes the virtual scene shine

Here is a photo of the new viewer - an elegant, attractive (great new color scheme!), intuitive, and simple. But The Sheep have really just reorganized the functions not actually removed any. This is not a castrated browser. And, no they didn’t take building out as some mistakenly have thought. They have just made the most used functions for a mainstream user more accessible and elegantly arranged with mouse over menus.

The menus and navigation are more intuitive, for example, there is a back button so you can go back and forward between locations and one for your home. Also the search function is much closer to what you would find in a web browser. You can type an URL into the same location bar you use to hop around SL and the web site will pop up.

Web browsing and active html incorporated into Second Life.

The new viewer to Second Life incorporates web browsing. I was jumping with joy as I saw Chris Carella demo this. I will be able to happily blog, search, twitter and gmail from within Second Life without missing a beat! No more going out to the web to do things with your machine grinding to a halt.

Apparently Linden Lab had embedded a working browser in Second Life a while back but did not release it because Flash was not working yet. The Sheep began working on their new viewer when Linden Lab first open sourced the client. There are some things are still being worked on. You cannot watch YouTube from inside Second Life yet. There is a detailed description of the viewer on Out To Pasture and sneak preview on New World Notes and more from NWN here.

I asked Chris, “So have you stashed a lot of sims in preparation for CSI!”

We are well prepared with many sims. We have a lot of islands ready. There will be multiple copies of the same sim for that first day when everyone tries to hit it at the same time. it like sharding in a video game where you get a different server for a different shard but here you will be dropped on a different sim. We are doing load balancing so all sims should stay within thirty or forty people.

What is coming……highly evolved impactful 3D graphics

Paul Steinberg, Intel Software Network and Intel Software Solutions Group sent me this picture yesterday of Tim Mattson (lead of the software development team working on an 80 core test chip).

This seems to me the perfect image to keep in mind in the coming months as we sale down the rapids of virtual world growth. I asked Paul for a picture because I heard Nitin Borkar and Tim Mattson would be presenting at a Second Life Event: Scaling from 2 Cores to 80 Cores and Beyond, Oct 23rd, 9am SLT. Intel Software Network Zone on Second Life

Intel created an 80 core test chip that is running a real application kernel at over one trillion single precision floating point operations per second. In this talk, two developers, Nitin Borkar (the overall leader of the project) and Tim Mattson (lead the software development team), will talk about the project and the lessons it holds for the future of many core chips as well as the compute platform as a whole.

I asked Paul to comment on the conference:

What I think is tremendously important, not to be self-serving, is what I know is coming - highly evolved and impactful graphics based on platform innovations from Intel.

I spent about half of my presentation at the conference talking about this. Enhanced graphics and compute processing will enable virtual environments with a stronger emotive impact. I am sure that these innovations will expand the appeal of virtual worlds to a more general audience. So I disagree with the flat (earth) graphics guys

Obviously, sometimes you want a lightweight presentation but on the whole, people love and respond to a rich environment.

Some of the best conversations………….the business model of the future “50 billion one person enterprises”

As usual in a conference, some of the best conversations went on in casual settings. Wednesday evening I was thrilled to discuss the business model of the future “50 billion one person enterprises” with Peter Rodriguez, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Manager of the Emerging Technology CIO Office, Tony O’Driscoll from N. Carolina State University who presented on the future of e-learning, and Ian Hughes a speaker for IBM who I have met many times in Second Life as his avatar epredator potato (his blog). IBM had a strong presence at the conference. See Ian’s round up here.

And I had a very interesting dinner conversation with Christian Renaud, Cisco Systems, Sean E. Kane a New York attorney who spoke on IP Wealth and the Pitfalls of Virtual worlds, Paul Steinberg, Intel Software Network and Intel Software Solutions Group who spoke on creating a user community in Second Life, Professor Robert Bloomfield who is pioneering Metanomics with Metaversed, and Ron Burns of ProtonMedia who had some very interesting things to say about ProtonMedia’s experience using their platform for enterprise diversity training.

And then of course there were several chats with “the unstoppable” Ren Reynold’s from Terranova who spoke on his project, “The Virtual Policy Network,” to engage industry, academia and governments in discussions about virtual worlds and public policy. I am pretty sure his amazing blue patent leather Fluevog shoes must be starring somewhere on Flickr by now.

Also Wello Horld despite being on “stealth mode” with their project were high profile with their elusiveness! Linden’s were everywhere enjoying themselves even though there were only a few Linden speakers.

I had some excellent chats with the CEO of Novamente Ben Goetzel on whether venture capital would be antithetical or helpful to the goals of Artificial General Intelligence (see my earlier post on SGI in Second Life here). And I really enjoyed my long conversation with Henrik Bennetsen, formally Henrik Linden and now Research Director, Stanford Humanities Lab. He is author of the blog SL Creativity. Also it was a real pleasure to meet Adam Hertz (consultant to Mitch Kapor). We talked at length about The Level Playing Field Institute and Freada Kapor Klein’s new book Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and HOW YOU CAN HELP THEM STAY.

Some Metarati I met……

The top row is Eric Rice, Jerry Paffendorf and Gene Yoon.
Second row is Robin, Logan and Philip Linden, then Corey Bridges.
Third Row Wello Horld and Reuben Steiger

3D Internet, 80 core test chip, 80 cores and beyond, Anthony E. Zuiker, cross platform experience, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: New York, epredator potato, gaming and virtual worlds, HiPiHi, Intel Software Network, interactive television, Jerry Bruckheimer Productions, Linden Lab, Millions Of Us, mobile and TV, new viewer for Second Life, On Rez, Philip Rosedale, Philo Farnsworth, Scion City, Second Life, Sibley Verbeck, social gaming, television online mobile and gaming, the convergence of TV mobile, The Electric Sheep Company, the future of television, TV as one stop shop for the living room, Virtual Worlds and Television, Virual Worlds Conference and Expo 2007 Xu Nui

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

Atomic Force Microscope, Buckminster Fuller, bucky ball, carbon nanotube, Chris Ewels, Dave Taylor, Davee Commerce, David Orban, disruptive technologies, Engines of Creation, EOLUS One, fullerenes, havoc 4 physics engine Second Life, K.Eric Drexler, metaverse and nanotechnology, molecular manufacturing, nano revolution, nanoscience, nanotechnology, nanotechnology island, nanotubes, National Physical Laboratory, SciLands, Second Life, Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry, self assembly, singularity, virtual operations centers on Second Life virtual worlds and nanotechnology

Coincidently Justin Bovington (avatar Fizik Baskerville) from Rivers Run Red invited me to join the beta trial of Vodafone InsideOut in Second Life on a day I really wanted to send messages from Second Life to all my friend’s “real” life mobile phones.

I wanted everyone to know that I was spending Saturday as my avatar Tara5 Oh standing in an avatar chain in Second Life to demonstrate for peace and justice in Myanmar (Burma). I was eager to ask my friends out enjoying the autumn weather in New York City to come and join me when they could in Second Life (see my previous post).

In the picture above I’m picking up my HUD from the Vodafone dispenser in Second Life. I’m wearing my T-shirt calling for the freedom of Burmese leader, Nobel Prize Winner and pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi.

I received a stream of useful URLs and ways to help the Burmese people from other Second Lifers at the peace demo. And, while I was there, I wanted to connect directly with my friends in real life as my avatar in Second Life. This is what Vodafone’s InsideOut is all about.

You can sign up here to join the beta trials and learn more about Vodafone InsideOut which “will allow you to communicate between virtual worlds and the real world via your mobile.”

Ingmar, Head of Technology for RRR, explained:

The service which has just come out of closed beta allows you to call and text in an out of Second Life. You get a HUD object (and a handset which is just for show and plays animations while you are on the phone.

You must sign up on the web page with your real mobile number and get verified. From then on you can call other users with your HUD, or text message them. If they are online, they get it on their HUD, but if they are off line they get the call or text on their mobile phone. The message/call comes from a virtual phone number, which hides your real one to keep your privacy. They can call or text the virtual number back at any time they want from their phone.

The virtual numbers assigned for the beta trial next week are from a German pool (+49) and, since it’s not restricted to users on Vodafone’s mobile network, when you call these your mobile network operator will charge you for whatever they charge for a call to Germany (based on where you are located in the world).

On the upside, for the beta trial the service will be free when used from Second Life which means free international calls and texts. We suspect some people will get a Second Life account just for that

The Second Wave in Second Life - Convergence and Relevance

Justin Bovington of RRR (a.k.a. Fizik Baskerville) spoke to me about Vodafone’s InsideOut project. RRR is working closely with Vodafone to bring the InsideOut to Second Life and other virtual worlds. Justin explained:

This is the start of Second Wave projects - the business tool world - convergence and relevance.

Open source is more than just a programming term, it should also apply to our thinking in terms of how we approach virtual world projects taking aspects of legacy systems [in this case Vodafone mobile communications], relevant technology and proven ways of working into Second Life will be the measure of future success.

InsideOut is very much about that. We’re not replacing the mobile phone. By trying to create a metaphor we’re using your real life moby as part of the experience. This is true convergence. Exciting stuff!

The emphasis has been on ‘modify the browser’, rather than looking at the bigger picture of integration. Open source is a call to action, not just a nerdy way to create cool interface changes. Integration is part of that message.

We’re seeing it more and more in relation to companies now viewing SL as a logical extension to their collaboration. We think that Vodafone is another level of validation in the same way Adidas did last October with the first true global brand presence [in Second Life].

I have written a lot in this blog about open source as a concept that is vital to develop “an operating system for planet earth.” And I have elaborated on how real life and second life integrations are paving the way for Second Life to play a big role in positive global development. I have argued that such integrations of open virtual worlds like Second Life will produce business and community applications that not only transform current modes of industrial production and design but are one of the keys to a sustainable future.

Integrating First Life and Second Life

There were other important landmarks last week for an increasing convergence and relevance between first life and second life.

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, spoke at length in Second Life on the important role he saw Second Life playing in domestic/global politics and civil life. You can find a full audio feed on the Clear Night Sky blog. It is rather ironic that a conservative should be one of the first major public leaders to come to Second Life to talk about the relevance of Second Life to “real” public life. Adding more weight to his words was the fact that he had actually engaged in the experience of being an avatar. He drives his own avatar and is knowledgeable about many aspects of Second Life (for more on this event, brought to Second Life by Clear Ink, see Reuters “Second Life Ready For Prime Time at Ginrich Event” and Rik Riel).

Public figures engaging with Second Life and innovations like InsideOut that allow Second Lifers to engage more fully with public life are certainly important markers of a Second Wave of relevance and convergence.

As with all technologies, the uptake of InsideOut by Second Life residents is sure to produce many creative and unexpected applications. And in Second Life especially because of the emotional bandwidth the experiential is a vital to understanding the possibilities for innovation in SL.

Certainly, for me, Justin’s words took on more significance as I stood in the avatar chain in Second Life thinking of all the ways this InsideOut HUD could enhance the already powerful experience of participating in something very close to my heart on Second Life that is showing my solidarity for the monks and people of Burma.

Creating an API and integrating Mobile Phones with Second Life

Another topic that I have written about on Ugotrade frequently is the important role mobile technologies have played in positive global development particularly in Africa. Also an underlying theme of Ugotrade is my hope that access to the global virtual economy and the immersive 3D space of virtual worlds like Second Life will be possible in all parts of the world soon.

I discussed with Philip Rosedale at SLCC the possibilities for the integration of mobile phone technologies with Second Life and how that might create new ways for people to access, participate, and benefit from the virtual economy of Second Life. Along these lines I had many questions for Rivers Run Red on how they had accomplished the integration for InsideOut.

I also wanted to know whether InsideOut was likely to expand into even more applications including a bunch of OutsideIn ones! Justin kindly introduced me to RRR’s head of technology Ingmar so I could discuss all the issues of integrating the mobile space with Second Life.

Prior to RRR Ingmar was working as an IT security consultant in Germany. “He started using the internet before web-browsing became widely accepted and has an extensive background in networking, security and system administration. Ingmar discovered Second Life in June 2003 and became immediately fascinated by it. He spent much of his time contributing to user created scripting documentation at http://lslwiki.net and creating interactive content in Second Life.”

I asked Ingmar a number of questions about the design of the API. I asked about how they had overcome some of the messaging bottlenecks that I frequently hear are an obstacle to developing APIs to SL.

We’ve designed and implemented an API together with Vodafone for both calls and text messages and all the other stuff we needed like account status and channel registration (so it keeps working when you go into another sim). All information exchange is encrypted and signed and the Vodafone servers are using Verisign SSL certificates to ensure we only connect to the authentic ones

The messages are near real-time, we just don’t need to send a whole lot of data, as SMS messages are fairly short in nature so bottlenecks with that weren’t that much of a problem (although they are for some things like contact storage).

LSL memory limits where a much bigger issue to the point were we couldn’t add some features we wanted because even with splitting the HUD up in a lot of scripts we eventually reached the point where the main code grew too large in bytecode size alone.

Securing Second Life: Will mobile phones be a gateway to virtual banking in Second Life soon?

I asked Ingmar what he saw in the future for Outside In applications for mobile phones and Second Life. And what were the challenges to making mobile phones an interface to virtual banking in Second Life? Re the second question issues of security are of course paramount. Ingmar began by pointing out that the introduction of Mono will make big differences for securing data messaging in and out of Second Life.

But the other major issue is that any bank (and all users) are trusting Linden Lab not to interfere - since Second Life currently runs on their servers. [I have written re LL 's intention to allow "trusted" providers to run Second Life on their own servers here.]

Mono is no manna from heaven. But it will hopefully help with the current limitations of LSL in that it will be faster and allow more memory - which is what’s currently limiting security because you can’t even fit a modern algorithm into LSL.

But you managed to do this project on LSL?

LSL is actually quite cool for what it is. I think this is one of the most complex items done in LSL The amount of linkmessages it uses internally is staggering (it spams you horribly when you actually make them visible).

Mono just runs bytecode so you have to have a compiler that converts any language to mono bytecode. I think LL was definitely intending for LSL to be one of those languages, and another hopefully will be Python.

Did you use Python for this?

No the backend is written in PHP. Personally I prefer Python but I did not write the backend, a Vodafone tech (Bruno Rodrigues) did. And we designed the protocol/API together. RRR did consulting work on the development of the backend (like explaining why some stuff should be done on the backend, because it’s such a pain to do it in LSL), but obviously left the telecomms stuff to them (things like integrating SMS messaging and calls).

Are you thinking of developing some OutsideIn project, e.g., mobile dashboards for SL?

Hm, interesting idea, but that’s really the opposite direction - bringing SL onto mobile devices. I can’t really talk about that at this time

Aung San Suu Kyi, avatar chain on Second Life, Burma monks, Clear Ink, creating an API for Second Life, Free Burma, Ingmar RiversRunRed, InsideOut, Justin Bovington, LSL, mobile banking, mobile phones and Second Life, mobile phones and the metaverse, Myanmar, Myanmar Monks, Newt Gingrich, Newt Gingrich on Second Life, Open Source, open source and Second Life, open source and the metaverse, Rivers Run Red, Second Life, the mobile space and Second Life, virtual banking, Vodafone, Vodafone in Second Life Vodafone InsideOut

There were many demonstrations across Second Life today in support of peace and justice in Myanmar (Burma) where hundreds of Buddhist monks are being arrested in government raids on monasteries after leading large protests against the military regime.

I joined one of the avatar chains organized by Second Life avatar Vivienne Casavettes. It stretched across multiple sims. Many of the participants wore robes or like me “went bald for Burma.” It was a powerful experience to meet so many people in Second Life finding ways to show there support for the monks and people of Burma.

There were T-shirts, placards and note cards giving updates on events in Burma handed out. I chose this T-shirt asking for the freedom of dissident Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi is a pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy in Myanmar, and a noted prisoner of conscience, advocate of nonviolent resistance. “A Buddhist, Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and in 1991 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a military dictatorship. She is currently under detention, with the Myanmar government repeatedly extending her detention.”

Rik Riel on his excellent blog has posted some of the Other steps you can take, suggested by the Peacemaker Institute:

1. Protest - Look below for details of worldwide protests. Contact US Campaign for Burma to sign up to hold a march, vigil or any sort of event in your area- thelma@uscampaignforburma.org .
2. Spread the word - Invite your friends to this group, email all your family and friends, write to local newspapers
3. Write to your elected official - they will respond if enough people contact them.
4. Wear red clothes on Friday.
5. Email the companies that still operate in Burma, their email addresses are listed here
6. Sign up for the petition! US campaign for Burma, Petition Online, AVAAZ

I am a second generation Western Buddhist. Today (Sunday) I will also observe 5 minutes of silent aspiration with members of the sangha of Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, in NYC, in support of the protest of the Buddhist monastics and lay sangha in Myanmar, and against the violations of human rights and suppression of religious freedom now being enacted by the government.

Second Life avatars Vivienne Casavettes, Sugar Seville, and Dizzy Banjo are just some of the Second Life Residents who are organizing support efforts in Second Life. Also see Cryogenix’s, Dizzy Banjo’s, blogs and here for more. Dizzy has a video of a vigil organized by Sugar Seville

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, cyber activism, Myanmar, national league for democracy, peace and justice in Burma, Peacemaker Institute, Second Life US Campaign for Burma

Virtual worlds are the golden path to achieving Artificial General Intelligence and positive Singularity, Dr Ben Goertzel’s, CEO of Novamente LLC and author of “The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind” explained in his presentation “Artificial General Intelligence in Virtual Worlds” given at the Singularity Summit 2007 earlier this month. According to Goertzel, Singularity is no longer a far future idea. About a year ago Goertzel gave a talk “Ten Years to a Positive Singularity — If We Really, Really Try.”

The slide that opens this post was in Goerzel’s presentation. It depicts an Archailect, Archai from the Orion’s Arm science-fiction world — a mega scale brain, “sophont or sophont cluster that has grown so vast as to become a god-like entity.”

What is singularity?

Singularity is the creation of the kind of “massively intelligent machines” Hugo de Garis discusses in his book “The Artilect War.” — “machine mega brains that may end up being smarter than human brains by not just a factor of two or even ten times but by a factor of trillions of trillions of time i.e. truly godlike.” De Garis presents these technologies in a clear and simple way. And he discusses the ethical, philosophical and political questions of Singularity.

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in the quintessential rapid prototyping environment for embodied virtual agents — Second Life - may well turn Artificial General Intelligence into an idea with traction. And the introduction of AGI into virtual worlds certainly gives a new context within which to suggest that Singularity is a mere decade away. With millions or soon perhaps billions of networked human minds working on it, Singularity may indeed happen sooner than we think.

Second Life Insider cracks “Do you want your pet whispering “Dave? Dave?” as you tear memory modules out though?” Remember Hal 9000 from 2001? But indicating also the sentiment that many Second Lifers will have when they hear of the plans Novamente and Electric Sheep Company have to collaboratively introduce AI into virtual worlds (the firms haven’t formally announced which virtual worlds, but Second Life seems an awfully likely guess to be one of them), the Second Life Insider post ends on a positive note. Eloise Pasteur writes “Seriously though, good luck to them all.”

What is Artificial General Intelligence?

Artificial General Intelligence has come to the fore in the last few years, Dr. Ben Goertzel explains. For a long time the AI field has been very task-focused and quite successful at that. Can you beat Deep Blue at chess? But as Goertzel points out Deep Blue can’t player checkers or Go. It cannot take what it has learned in chess over to other areas. Narrow AI has not proved to be a path leading to AGI. But fasten your seat belts Second Lifers! You may be the key to the emergence of AGI and the rapid prototyping of the Singularity.

An AGI is a system that can achieve a variety of complex goals in a variety of complex situations — something seems to require a system with the capability to understand what it is, what others are, and to understand what the problem is rather than just solving a problem or problems posed by programmers. In other words AGI achieves autonomy.

The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence
FedEx Institute of Technology, University of Memphis
In cooperation with AAAI , March 1-3, 2008

Second Life as an incubator of Artificial General Intelligence

Last week, Goertzel’s startup company Novamente LLC announced their collaboration with Electric Sheep Company to bring artificial intelligence agents to online virtual worlds (see BBC News Coverage). So things are definitely beginning to ramp up. Novamente and Electric Sheep will show off their plans for AI in virtual worlds at the Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo 2007, Oct 10th - 11th, San Jose, CA.

Goertzel explained to me some of the reasons virtual worlds such as Second Life have the potential to form very interesting environments for the development of AGI. Most importantly in online virtual worlds, if you roll out virtual babies or pets you also get a huge mass of people to teach them things. You get the opportunity to harness the wisdom of crowds. Many MMOG games have AI in them but games are narrow, not requiring much flexibility or adaptiveness on the part of the AI agents operating in them. The openness of virtual worlds creates many new possibilities for AGI. Also artificial intelligence can be embedded in a variety of embodied agents at a low cost. Robots, the previous alternative for embodied AGI development, have often proved very costly and time consuming to work with (there are exceptions, like Rodney Brooks’s robotic bugs, but these seem to lack the sophistication needed to support powerful AGI).

Skyping from New York City to China with Dr Ben Goertzel

Dr Ben Goertzel (SL name: Zarathustrapocalypse Zeta) was in China at the 2nd International Symposium on Intelligence Computations and Applications 2007 and visiting his friend Hugo de Garis in Wuhan when I spoke to him on Skype Saturday.

Ben very generously answered a range of questions I had about artificial general intelligence and Second Life, genetic algorithms and AGI, open source and AGI, and AGI in centralized and distributed virtual worlds, harnessing the wisdom of crowds, technological singularity, and monetizing AGI in virtual worlds.

My questions to Ben were in part influenced by some quite breathtaking virtual world events last week, including a discussion on the plans of the newly formed SL Architecture Group during Zero Linden’s office hours, see Dizzy Banjo - Soundtracking Virtual Worlds. Aleister Kronos picked out the headlines:

• Linden are not just talking about the sim limits we have now - they are talking truly epic scale: “to evolve the SL architecture into something that is internet wide.”
• Transition to “SL2.0″ (gah!) is being designed to be as seamless as possible.
• Now for the numbers: 60Million regions; 2Billion avatar accounts; maybe 50M to 100M on-line… though admittedly hypothetical
• And “on-line might mean something more lightweight in the future”

There is the first glimpse of what a Linden Lab open source grid architecture might look like on the Second Life Architecture Working Group Wiki, and more about this and how to get involved in the working group on Zero Linden’s blog.

Hey it sounds like there are going to be some big crowds around on the grid and a whole lotta wisdom around to harness. But, as Al noted, the discussion does not deal with issues of identity management and storage yet. And, from what I could gather when I attended Sunday’s, “Introduction to the new Second Life Grid Architecture Working Group” with Tao Takashi, the thorny problems of asset management and IP issues are definitely not on the table for the moment.

But these are heady times — Singularity conceivable in less than a decade, plans from LL for a global grid with 50M to 100M on-line in a couple of years?

Harnessing The Wisdom of Crowds

I also attended the “deep content” bonanza of Dr Dobb’s Life 2.0 Summit in Second Life last week. Tapping the wisdom of crowds in Second Life came up directly and indirectly many times. David Orban proposed a reinvention of industrial design and production with a new model of design that brings objects, social communities and genetic algorithms together to the project of evolving useful objects where the measure of success in an on-line world like Second Life is interaction. David’s presentation and slides are available here. I interviewed David after his talk so more on this later in this post.

Then there was Julian Lombardi from Croquet’s presentation at Life 2.o. Lombardi didn’t mention harnessing the wisdom of crowds but he certainly presented a whole new concept for large scale metaverses with Croquet’s: “very extensible technology that can be used to support very large scale metaverse implementations without, and I have to underscore this, without the need for servers to support them.”

I also interviewed Keystone Bouchard and his Wikitecture collaborator Theory Shaw on their plans to revolutionize architectural design and city planning in Second Life. They are busy developing new ways to tap into the wisdom of crowds in their Wikitecture project. The Wikitecture 3.0 Experiment will have its first kick off meeting Tuesday, September 25th @ 9:00am PST/SLT. Here is the slurl link to the ‘Studio Wikitecture’ parcel in Second Life. Keystone presented at Life 2.o on implementing Wikitecture in Second Life “to develop disciplined opensourcing and collaborative creation of virtual and RL architecture components and structures.” I will be posting more on Wikitecture soon!

China and Artificial General Intelligence in Virtual Worlds

There was interesting news from China too. The Chinese Government is going to present virtual world infrastructure plans at VW Fall 2007 Conf. in San Jose! And I keep hearing a buzz about HiPiHi meeting with Linden Labs. Hiu Xu, Founder and CEO will definitely be in San Jose for the conference as he is speaking there.

Phew, it is clear we are in a hang on to your hat time for sure.

As Dr Ben Goertzel was in Wuhan, China when we spoke, I asked him about Artificial General Intelligence and Virtual Worlds in China.

Ben said there was certainly lots of interest in AGI in Chinese academia. And Chinese Universities were hiring AI and AGI researchers and powerhouses. “An American professor in China may have up to 20 top quality researchers working with them in a very short time. In contrast in the US they would have much of their research time taken up writing grants just to get started, and just to get funding for a handful of assistance.” Ben said that he was not sure what the status of AGI R&D was in Chinese industry. But he did note that the venture capital community and economy is growing so fast, many things are possible in China now.

I asked Ben to speculate about HiPiHi and Second Life. “Well, obviously, in some ways life in China is more restrictive than in the West, so there will be more of a contrast between ‘real life’ and the totally freewheeling virtual-worlds life, for Chinese users as opposed to Western users. And of course China doesn’t have the continuous tradition of property rights that the West does, whereas Second Life is all about property rights. But really, right now, China is just about the most capitalism-happy place I’ve ever seen, so the laissez-faire economics we see in Second Life would in some ways fit right in with the contemporary Chinese scene. It seems to me that the Chinese — at least the ones with high-bandwidth Internet connections — are going to eat this stuff up. I’m really curious to see the culture that will emerge in HiPiHi and how it may differ from the way Second Life culture has evolved.”

How Can Virtual Agents Work In a Virtual Economy?

Novamente in collaboration with Electric Sheep Company is bringing artificial intelligence to virtual worlds as a business venture. I was interested to know about ways Dr. Goertzel thought you could monetize intelligent virtual agents. Ben pointed out that the system of micro-payments has made many different things work in Second life. The many possibilities include, for example:

– micropayments for knowledge (buy knowledge, capability, etc. for your agent)

– payment for tuition (send your virtual baby to school, etc.)

– companies hire virtual agents as employees.

On the Novamente blog Ben has a very interesting post On the Merits of Parrots … or: “The Wisdom of Crowds” as a Strategy for Educating Young AI’s)

This is Bruce Klein (president/CFO) with a parrot at Novamente’s Second Life Headquarters. Also see Bruce’s blog for a report on Singularity Sabre Rattling at the Summit.

“Openess and the Metaverse Singularity”

Jamais Cascio’s, “Singularity Summit Talk: Openness and the Metaverse Singularity,” looks at Singularity through the lenses of the four scenarios/provocations to thought presented in the Metaverse Roadmap that he authored with John Smart and Jerry Paffendorf.

what has struck me more recently about the Roadmap scenarios is that the four worlds could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. Not just in terms of the technologies, but — more importantly — in terms of the social and cultural choices we make while building those technologies.

As part of his conclusion Jamais writes:

My preferred pathway would be to “open source” the singularity, to bring in the eyes and minds of millions of collaborators to examine and co-create the relevant software and models, seeking out flaws and making the code more broadly reflective of a variety of interests. Such a proposal is not without risks. Accidents will happen, and there will always be those few who wish to do others harm. But the same is true in a world of proprietary interests and abundant secrecy, and those are precisely the conditions that can make effective responses to looming disasters difficult. With an open approach, you have millions of people who know how dangerous technologies work, know the risks that they hold, and are committed to helping to detect, defend and respond to crises.

Novamente and Open Source

With all the talk about the possible opening-up of Second Life’s server code, it’s inter