THIS WAS THE FUTURE

ABC News | 5 December, 2008

Humans may soon be able to develop long-term relationships with virtual humans that are capable of reading and adapting to our emotions, say French researchers.

Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology presented her research this week at a meeting of the ARC Network in Human Communication Science in Sydney.

Professor Pelachaud and colleagues are developing virtual humans, called Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), that can act autonomously in a virtual environment.

As well as speaking, the agents communicate with facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze.

Professor Pelachaud and US researcher Professor Justine Cassell developed the first autonomous agents in 1994. Since then the focus has been on making the agents more expressive and more able to read and adapt to the emotions of users.

Professor Pelachaud says people have high expectations of virtual humans and often lose interest quickly in them because they do not appear to be very ‘human’.

Professor Pelachaud hopes to develop agents that maintain the interest of users over a longer term.

In one project, called Semaine, the researchers are developing four agents with different personalities.

“We’ve been working on creating distinctive agents,” she said.

They are testing how real humans respond when confronted by agents who are variously aggressive, gloomy, energetically positive or pragmatic.

Professor Pelachaud says this is providing basic data for developing agents that could be useful in teaching and medical programs, and for virtual assistants in information kiosks or virtual characters in entertainment.

Empathetic agents

In related research, the researchers are developing an agent that they say can empathise with real humans.

For example, a virtual agent on a screen can be taught to detect, via webcam, the emotion of a person looking at the screen.

The agent can then react appropriately.

Professor Pelachaud says this could be useful in applications where a person is seeking information from the agent.

She says if the agent gets it wrong and detects the person becoming upset, it could show empathy through non-verbal signs, and this could help reduce the frustration the person feels.

“Having an agent that shows empathy can enhance the relationship between a user an agent,” she said.

“The user may still not get the information, but at least they won’t feel so negative from the the interaction.”

Interactive story-telling

Professor Pelachaud and colleagues are also researching the use of agents in interactive television and storytelling as part of the CALLAS project.

One prototype demonstrates emotional interaction between the audience and an agent, who acts as a virtual audience member, which is able to relate to the human audience via webcam and microphone.

“The agent, through its participation of watching the movie and its display of emotion, could enhance the emotional experience of the audience,” she says.

Both human and virtual audience members react to a virtual scenario in which a second agent is involved.

In the scenario the second agent is walking around in a kitchen, in which normally inanimate objects do randomly frightening things.

For example, a knife might suddenly fly through the air towards them or the stove might suddenly catch alight.

The human and virtual audience react with fear as these things occur and the agent in the scene responds to their fear.

The research is funded by the French Government and European Union.

Scientific American | 12 June, 2009

Having proved in 2004 that plugging a sensor into the human brain’s motor cortex could turn the thoughts of paralysis victims into action, a team of Brown University scientists now has the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) institutional review board to expand its efforts developing technology that reconnects the brain to lifeless limbs.

Brown’s BrainGate Neural Interface System—conceived in 2000 with the help of a $4.25-million U.S. Defense Department grant—includes a baby aspirin–size brain sensor containing 100 electrodes, each thinner than a human hair, that connects to the surface of the motor cortex (the part of the brain that enables voluntary movement), registers electrical signals from nearby neurons, and transmits them through gold wires to a set of computers, processors and monitors. (ScientificAmerican.com in 2006 wrote about one patient’s experience using BrainGate during its first phase of trials.)

The researchers designed BrainGate to assist those suffering from spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, brain stem stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and other motor neuron diseases. During the initial testing five years ago, patients suffering from paralysis demonstrated their ability to use brain signals sent from their motor cortex to control external devices such as computer screen cursors and robotic arms just by thinking about them. “The signals may have been disconnected from the (participant’s) limb, but they were still there,” says Leigh Hochberg, a Brown associate professor of engineering and a vascular and critical care neurologist at MGH who is helping lead the research.

Due to the high risk of plugging a device directly into the brain, the FDA in 2004 granted the BrainGate system an investigational device exemption so that researchers could begin testing the unit in patients and collect data about its safety and effectiveness. Thanks to the success of those early tests, the researchers last week kicked off a pilot clinical trial, dubbed BrainGate2. Although the technology is similar to what was used in the original testing, the researchers are looking to enlist up to 15 patients this time and gather more information that will help them better understand brain signals as well as “the method by which we decode them,” Hochberg says. Since the initial four-person clinical trial launched five years ago, “we have a better appreciation for things that we need to learn.”

A successful BrainGate2 trial could open up a number of new possibilities, including the use of a second sensor to stimulate both sides of the motor cortex, says John Donoghue, a Brown neuroscience professor and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. Researchers thus far have implanted the sensor in the side of the brain that controls a patient’s dominant side—the left cortex for righties and the right cortex for lefties.

BrainGate2 is part of a larger mission to help paralysis victims regain control of their bodies. “We want to reconnect the brain back to the muscles and eventually back to the entire limb,” Donoghue says. “We are attempting to recreate parts of the nervous system that have been disconnected from the brain.”

Hochberg expects this second phase to last for several years, “depending on what we learn and how quickly we learn it.” The research project has received about $8 million in funding over the past three years from a number of organizations, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

…

A promising start (see above), a possible ends? (see below)

A clip from series episode ‘Brain Scratch’ from the series ‘Cowboy Bebop’ directed by Shinichiro Watanabe.
In this possible future, ‘Scratch’ is a cult that believes in achieving eternal life by digitising the soul and uploading it onto the internet. As cult members start committing suicide a bounty is put out for their leader Dr. Landes. But there is no such man. He is a fictional figure created by 15 year old paralysis victim Ronnie Spangoen. While his body is vegetated, his brain is connected to the internet where he is free to live without the burdens of physicality.

Spike Spiegel: Why do you kill off members of your own group,Whats the point of that?
Dr. Londes: I am not forcing anything on anyone. They are merely practicing a faith they decided to believe in of their own free will. Tell me, Why do you think people believe in god ? Because they want to. It’s not easy living in an ugly corrupt world. There is no certainty, nothing to hope for. People are lost, so they reach out. Don’t you get it ? God didn’t create humans… No!, Its humans who created god

In Scratch, men can become gods. Living digitally means living without pain. Without pain and thus without fear. Without fear and thus with no restraint- freedom; absolute freedom. Is this a good thing? Well…. living without consequences means we lack empathy. No empathy, no morality. This situation inevitably breeds a new kind of criminal. Where there are no direct consequences we are more likely to operate without restraint. Moral boundaries are not only blurred, they cease to exist.

And of justice.
In the example of Ronnie Spangoen, a warrant was put out for his physical arrest. But it’s useless to arrest his physical body and so his brain is disconnected. Now with no way to engage meaningfully with the outside world, he is a prisoner in his own body. But is this ethical? Is this ‘justice’? In the new world ‘justice’ will be the next issue of contention.

ABC News | 2 June, 2009

Microsoft has revealed that it has been secretly developing technology that lets people play video games using natural body movements instead of handheld controllers.

The US software giant behind Xbox 360 video game consoles revealed a prototype of a project codenamed “Natal” – a system that combines cameras and voice and face recognition software to recognise people and their actions.

“The gamer in me went out of my mind when I got to be interactive with this,” famed film director Steven Spielberg said during a Microsoft press conference on the eve of the E3 video game trade show in Los Angeles.

“I got a feeling I was in a historic moment. What Microsoft is doing isn’t re-inventing the wheel; this is about no wheel at all.”

Natal lets people play driving games by simply moving hands as if turning a car steering wheel.

In-game characters in boxing, skateboard, soccer and other sports titles mimic the body movements of real-world players.

The system scans faces and voices to determine who is playing.

Xbox 360 consoles equipped with Natal will be able to respond to spoken commands for actions such as playing movies or connecting online with friends for video chats.

An expected completion date for Natal was not disclosed, but Microsoft on Monday (local time) released a software kit for video game makers interested in designing titles to take advantage of Natal’s capabilities.

“What developers do with Natal will change the way we play video games,” said British video game icon Peter Molyneux, chief of Lionhead Studios.

“This is a landmark in computer entertainment. This is true technology that science-fiction has not even written about and this works today.”

Natal will work on all Xbox 360 consoles, according to Don Mattrick, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox and games business.

Sorry to repeat myself but the man is on the money

From Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City’:
(Simulated love scene between two scanned human copies)

Peer seemed to be making love with Kate, but he had his doubts. He lay on the soft dry grass of a boundless meadow, in mild sunshine. Kate’s hair was longer than usual, tickling his skin wherever she kissed him, brushing him with an erotic precision which seemed unlikely to be left to chance. Insect chirps and birdsong were heard. Peer could recall David Hawthorne screwing a long-suffering lover in a field, once. They’d been driving back to London from her father’s funeral in Yorkshire; it seemed like a good idea at the time. This was different. No twigs, no stones, no animal shit. No damp earth, no grass stains, no itching.

…

She lifted herself till they were almost apart. He closed his eyes and violated the geometry, licking the sweat from between her shoulder blades without moving a muscle. She responded by sticking her tongue in both of his ears simultaneously. He laughed and opened his eyes. The cloud above had darkened. Kate lowered herself onto him again, trembling slightly.
She said “Don’t you find it ironic?”
“What?”
“Transhumans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that
Peer said, “No I don’t find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that or castration.”

A Sex Chip? Targeting the Brain’s Pleasure Center with Electrodes

Scientific American | May, 2009

A fundamental goal of neuroscience has always been to deduce the brain systems that underlie such basic drives as hunger, thirst and sex. In 1956 the well-known physiologist James Olds wrote an article for Scientific American, called “Pleasure Centers in the Brain,” that described how a rat kept without food for a day was lured down a platform by a tasty meal. En route to dinner, it received a pleasurable electric shock. The rat never showed up for mealtime, instead choosing to delight in the arousal. With the optimism characteristic of that era, Olds concluded that stimulation experiments would lead to an understanding of neural functioning that would allow “one drug that will raise or lower thresholds in the hunger system, another for the sex-drive system, and so forth.”

Fifty years later the promise of Olds’s vision has yet to fully materialize. Better drugs are needed to suppress appetite and spark sexual desire. But fascination has grown in recent years with taking Olds’s more direct route of stimulating the central nervous system.

So far no one has created anything like the Orgasmatron, first seen in Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy Sleeper. Undaunted, one clinician—who has trademarked the name Orgasmatron—ran a small, FDA-reviewed pilot trial to test the possibility of applying electric current to the spine to reverse sexual dysfunction. Stuart Meloy, a North Carolina physician who specializes in implanting spinal electrodes to alleviate pain, found by chance that a slightly off-kilter placement in the lower spine caused one woman to exclaim: “You’re going to have to teach my husband to do that.”

In 2006 Meloy reported that 10 of 11 women who stopped having or never had orgasms experienced sexual arousal with the temporary implant and, of that group, four had their ability to experience orgasm restored. Meloy is seeking a medical device manufacturer to bring the costs down to $12,000 for a permanent implant, about the charge for breast enlargement.

Neural electrodes may eventually move up the spinal cord to what is often characterized as the body’s primary erogenous zone. Deep-brain stimulation, the placing of electrodes at strategic spots far underneath the skull, now treats a variety of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease and dystonia (uncontrollable twisting of a body part caused by involuntary muscle contractions). An occasional side effect is spontaneous sexual stimulation.

Tipu Aziz, a neurosurgeon at the University of Oxford, speculates that better knowledge of the brain’s pleasure centers—combined with improved surgical procedures and control of electrical pulses—may make a sex chip in the brain a reality. “Lack of sexual pleasure is a huge loss in one’s life, and if one could restore that, that would enhance someone’s quality of life enormously,” Aziz remarks.

Some neuroscientists are not so sure. Morten L. Kringelbach, a researcher at Oxford who sometimes collaborates with Aziz and wrote the book The Pleasure Center (Oxford University Press, 2008), cautions that hedonic experience may consist of an impulse corresponding to “wanting” and another that represents “liking.” To succeed as a therapy, a sex chip would have to address the challenge of switching on neural circuits that activate both impulses. In a 2008 paper in Psycho­phar­ma­col­ogy with University of Michigan at Ann Arbor psychologist Kent Berridge, Kringelbach illustrated the distinction between the two by citing an infamous case from the 1960s, in which psychiatrist Robert Heath placed “pleasure electrodes” in the brain of a gay man code-named B-19, in part, as an attempt to “cure” his homosexuality.

The patient pressed a button compulsively to turn on an electrode that induced a desire for sex, but whether he actually enjoyed the sensation was unclear. The stimulation alone did not induce orgasm, and B-19 never expressed any real contentment while hitting the button. Kringelbach warns against similar misuses of contemporary deep-brain stimulation. “It’s important that we not get carried away by this technology,” he says. “It’s important that we not end up in another era of psychosurgeries,” referring to the mid-20th century popularity of lobotomies to treat psychiatric disorders.

In the end, a sex chip may serve as a prop for moviemakers, but turning on the current may never become a truly practical means of adding the buzz back in your love life.

From Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City
(A love scene between two scanned copies of humans)

She said, ‘Don’t you find it ironic?
‘What?’
‘Transhumans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that.’
Peer said, ‘No, I don’t find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that or castration.’

Death special: The plan for eternal life

New Scientist | 13 October, 2007

I’M SITTING in a darkened hall listening to neuroscientist Anders Sandberg describe how to scan ultra-thin sections of brain. First, embed the brain in plastic, then use a camera combined with laser beam and diamond blade to capture images of the tissue as it is sliced.

The method is being developed (in mice, so far) to better understand the architecture of the brain. But Sandberg, who is based at the University of Oxford, has a rather more ambitious aim in mind. For him, this work is merely the first step towards uploading the contents of human brains – memories, emotions and all – onto a computer.

This is the opening session of the ninth annual meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in Chicago. Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough – a few decades perhaps – the technology will surely catch up.

To many, these ideas sound seriously scary, and transhumanists have been attacked for jeopardising the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo? In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world’s “most dangerous idea”.

Now this small-scale movement aims to go mainstream. WTA membership has risen from 2000 to almost 5000 in the past seven years, and transhumanist student groups have sprung up at university campuses from California to Nairobi. It has attracted a series of wealthy backers, including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who recently donated $4 million to the cause, and music producer Charlie Kam, who paid for the Chicago conference. For the first time the organisation has recruited celebrity speakers, such as actor-environmentalist Ed Begley Jr and Star Trek veteran William Shatner.

Other well-known speakers are also on the roster, including AI developer Ben Goertzel, longevity biologist Aubrey de Grey and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the group’s unofficial prophet. Kurzweil has recently caused a stir with his best-selling book The Singularity is Near, which explores what happens when our technologies become smarter than us. With transhumanists looking to woo the masses to their cause, I’ve come to Chicago to find out whether they deserve their dangerous reputation.

Saving humanity

They don’t look very threatening, though perhaps not very diverse either. Most WTA members are white, middle-aged men, but WTA secretary and former Buddhist monk James Hughes (see “Essay: The end of death?”) hopes to attract a wider range of people by highlighting the organisation’s democratic aims. The WTA insists that any new technology is used in a fair and ethical way, he says, with global treaties set up to regulate progress. Some transhumanists campaign for equal access to healthcare and for safeguards on new technology.

AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky also believes the movement is driven by an ethical imperative. He sees creating a superhuman AI as humanity’s best chance of solving its problems: “Saying AI will save the world or cure cancer sounds better than saying ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen’.” Yudkowsky thinks it is crucial to create a “friendly” super-intelligence before someone creates a malevolent one, purposefully or otherwise. “Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies,” he says. “If a self-improving AI is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, we could be in for big trouble.”

The theme of saving humanity continues with presentations on cyborgs, cryonics and raising baby AIs in the virtual world of Second Life, as well as surveillance tactics for weeding out techno-terrorists and a suggested solution for the population explosion: uploading 10 million people onto a 50-cent computer chip. More immediate issues facing humanity, such as poverty, pollution and the devastation of war, tend to get ignored.

I discover the less egalitarian side to the transhumanist community when I meet Marvin Minsky, the 80-year-old originator of artificial neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Ordinary citizens wouldn’t know what to do with eternal life,” says Minsky. “The masses don’t have any clear-cut goals or purpose.” Only scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve appreciate the need for extended lifespans, he argues.

He is also staunchly against regulating the development of new technologies. “Scientists shouldn’t have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want,” he says. “You shouldn’t ask them to have the same values as other people.”

The transhumanist movement has been struggling in recent years with bitter arguments between democrats like Hughes and libertarians like Minsky. Can Kurzweil’s keynote speech unite the opposing factions? On the final day of the meeting, the diminutive 59-year-old takes the podium, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, utilitarian blue suit and Mickey Mouse watch. Kurzweil offers a few possible solutions to today’s global dilemmas, such as nano-engineered solar panels to free the world from its addiction to fossil fuels. But he is opposed to taxpayer-funded programmes such as universal healthcare as well as any regulation of new technology, and believes that even outright bans will be powerless to control or delay the end of humanity as we know it.

“People sometimes say, ‘Are we going to allow transhumanism and artificial intelligence to occur?’” he tells the audience. “Well, I don’t recall when we voted that there would be an internet.”

By Danielle Egan

AP | 3rd December, 2008

By KARL RITTER

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) – Shaking hands with yourself is an amusing out-of-body experience. The illusion of having your stomach slashed with a kitchen knife, not so much. Both sensations, however, felt real to most participants in a Swedish science project exploring how people can be tricked into the false perception of owning another body.

In a study presented Tuesday, neuroscientists at Stockholm’s renowned Karolinska Institute show how they got volunteers wearing virtual reality goggles to experience the illusion of swapping bodies with a mannequin and a real person.

“We were interested in a classical question that philosophers and psychologists have discussed for centuries: why we feel that the self is in our bodies,” project leader Henrik Ehrsson said. “To study this scientifically we’ve used tricks, perceptual illusions.”

It sounded intriguing enough for me to try it, though entering the laboratory on Monday, I was having second thoughts.

The first props I saw were two kitchen knives, three naked dummies and a prosthetic hand sticking out from behind a curtain.

“You have the right to say stop at anytime if you feel uncomfortable,” said Ehrsson’s colleague, Valeria Petkova, as she rubbed my left hand with electrolytic gel and attached electrodes to the middle and index fingers.

She assured me I was not in any danger. Still, a nervous tingle rushed through my body as she placed the headset over my eyes.

In the first experiment, the goggles were hooked up to CCTV cameras fitted to the head of a male mannequin, staring down at its feet. Through the headset I saw a grainy image of the dummy’s plastic torso. I tilted my head down to create the sensation I was looking down at my own body.

At that point, it didn’t feel very real. But when Petkova simultaneously brushed markers against my belly and that of the mannequin, the effect started setting in. As my brain processed the visual and tactile signals, I had a growing impression that the mannequin’s body was my own.

That was good fun, until the gleaming blade of a bread knife entered my field of vision. Petkova slid it across the dummy’s stomach, sending shivers down my spine and a pulse of anxiety through the electrodes. My heightened stress level was illustrated by a spike in a computer diagram shown to me after the experiment.

“Approximately 70-80 percent of the people experience the illusion very strongly,” Petkova said.

Apparently, I was one of them.

The second experiment was more benign. This time my headset was connected to cameras mounted on a round hat that Petkova was wearing. We faced each other, extended our right arms and shook hands.

Now that was weird: I was supposed to have the sensation of shaking hands with myself. The illusion wasn’t perfect as I couldn’t quite recognize Petkova’s grip as my own, even though that’s what the goggles meant to make me believe.

Perhaps the session was too short. The actual study, in which 87 volunteers participated, consisted of repeated sessions that gradually provided more accurate data. The results were published in PLoS One, the online journal of the Public Library of Science.

The principle finding was that under certain conditions a person can perceive another body as his or her own, even if it is of an opposite gender or an artificial body.

“These findings are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that make us feel that we own our entire body,” the study said.

Ehrsson said the study built on a previous experiment known as the “rubber hand illusion” in which participants were manipulated to experience a rubber hand as their own.

Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, said the Karolinska study was a “step up” from other research on the subject.

“This goes beyond other recent studies, where you’ve taken ownership of rubber hands and rubber legs,” said Spence, who was not involved with the study.

His only concern was whether there might be any lasting effect on participants.

“The questions is what happens if you did it much longer? If you were in there for days and weeks. Would it be like something out of Total Recall?” Spence said, referring to the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger science fiction movie about a virtual vacation that turns into a nightmare.

Ehrsson suggested the findings could be applied in research on body image disorders by exploring how people become satisfied or dissatisfied with their bodies. Another possible application could be developing more advanced versions of computer games such as Second Life, he said.

“It could lead to the next generation of virtual reality applications in games, where people have the full-blown experience of being the avatar,” Ehrsson said.

In series two of Grant Naylor’s Red Dwarf (aka BEST SHOW EVER), shipmates Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten are absorbed into the VR total immersion video game Better Than Life.

Better Than Life taps into the subconscious and allows users to live out their dreams and desires within a virtual setting. From the Red Dwarf Radio Show pt4:

“Better than life was intended to be the zenith of computer game technology. A metal band was placed across the forehead, and underneath it needle thin electrodes punctured the skull and burrowed into the frontal lobes. Tiny computer chips in the electrodes transmitted signals directly to the brain. No screens. No joysticks. You were really there. Wherever you wanted to be. It was only a month after its released that people realised it was addictive…It was the ultimate hallucinogen with only one real major drawback, it killed you. Once you entered Better Than Life, once you put on the headband and the needles wormed into your mind, it was almost impossible to get out. This was partly because you weren’t even aware that you were in Better Than Life in the first place. The game protected itself. Hid itself from your memory. Your conscious mind was totally subverted while your body withered and died…the only way out of the game was to want to leave it. But no one ever wanted to leave.”

User’s imaginations develop semi-plausible explanations to justify certain events. For example, instead of making a large, expensive car appear out of thin, the user’s imagination would create a scenario where they won the lottery, or created a successful business, so they could buy the car. While it is possible for friends to forcibly remove the headset that contains the game, the result is instant death from shock.

In an episode of Batman Of The Future, a similar VR game is played underground and becomes a new drug for dejected teenagers. Highly addictive and highly expensive, the game leaves user’s feeling inadequate about their “real” lives. Desperate gamers lie, cheat, and steal to support their habits and are exploited by the evil villain ‘Spellbound’.

Plausible?

There are already rehabilitation centers and support groups for addicted gamers as well. Yahoo has two clubs devoted to EverQuest or EverCrack as some call it: Spouses Against EverQuest and EverQuest Widows.The latter, which boasts over 1,000 members, has all the markings of a virtual Al-Anon meeting.

Earlier this year, a 19year old Thai man stabbed a taxi driver to death in an attempt to steal his cab and money to support his habit for ‘Grand Theft Auto’. When questioned he told police “I needed money to play the game every day. My parents give me only 100 baht a day, which is not enough”, he is also quoted as saying “killing seemed easy in the game”. (See here)

The lure of gaming has been predicted to result in a mass exodus from ‘reality’ into ‘virtual reality’. Edward Castronova, Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University author of ‘Exodus To The Virtual World’ suggests that “some people will be colonists – “the virtual frontier opens up and off they go and disappear” – others will just use virtual worlds to get together with distant family and friends. But there will be a group of people that spends all their lives there, and that the big question is the size of this group.”(see here)

Behavioural experts are treating virtual worlds as models for real world study. In 2005, a plague called ‘Corrupted Blood’ was introduced to the World of Warcraft game as a challenge for higher-level players. The virulent and contagious disease was accidentally carried out of its virtual containment area causing mass genocide in the densely populated capitals. Researchers from Princeton University used this as a model to study pandemic and were able to pinpoint factors for spreading including the ‘stupid factor’ where “Someone thinks, ‘I’ll just get close and get a quick look and it won’t affect me,’” Nina Fefferman from the Princeton University.

On technology
So there is potentiality and human desire for virtual living, but is the technology there? Funny you ask! Drexel University students have developed a mind control interface to play video games with.

The device (which looks eerily like the controller in better than life) is a headband equipped with sensors that measure brain activity. By shining near-infrared light into the skull and measuring the intensity of light reflected back, oxygen levels corresponding to brain activity can be recorded. The device, originally developed by Drexel’s biomedical engineers to monitor the brain of patients under anesthesia, serves as a controller for the Drexel-developed video game Lazybrains. Not quite ‘better than life’ this technology is intended for medical applications, especially teaching kids with ADHD tactics for concentration. Sony has already patented the technology to send sensory data directly into the human brain, so movies or games could be equipped with smell, taste, and even touch capacities. Microsoft has also patented the use of the brain as a computer, a brain-computer interface system.

So the prospect of virtual living seems all the more possible. But if we can live online where we can look how we want, get what we want, and feel how we want, why in the heck would we waste our time with the real world?

In Greg Egan’s book Permutation City, people are downloaded or copied into computers at the point of death as a kind of electronic afterlife. Their bodies are abandoned and copies can interact with humans in the corporeal world at real time. Or perhaps we abandon the real world and live exclusively online, we manufacture and commit to a new ‘reality’.

“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain…The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

Maybe the Matrix is an ideal solution for escaping a deteriorating world. We can program our Matrix to omit famine, disease, pain. We don’t have to worry about resource scarcity, global warming, or natural disasters. We can live artificially. If human experience is the totality human perceptions, then we eliminate objective reality. Matter is obsolete. We live contently in Plato’s cave.

…

Just some concluding comments on disembodiment from Eugene Thacker. Katherine Hayles also writes extensively on this topic (re: ‘How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics’). Can human consciousness be translated into an informational pattern, able to flow freely between organic and electric substrates?

One salient feature of such transformations includes the concept of “uploading,” in which the parallels between neural pattern activity in the human mind and the capacity of advanced neural networking computing will enable humans to transfer their minds into more durable (read: immortal) hardware systems (Moravec 1988, 109-10). All of this is made possible via a view of the body that places special emphasis on informational pattern. Once the brain can be analyzed as a set of informational channels, then it follows that that pattern can be replicated in hardware and software systems. As Ray Kurzweil states:

“Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our hardware. When the hardware crashed, that was it. For many of our forebears, the hardware gradually deteriorated before it disintegrated…. As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file. We will be soft- ware, not hardware…. the essence of our identity will switch to the permanence of our software. (Kurzweil 1999, 128-29)”

Hayles shows that the posthuman is founded on a strategic definition of “information.” This modern notion of information-most notably in the extropian concept of uploading-does not exclude the body or the biological/material domain from mind or consciousness, but rather takes the material world as information. This powerful ideology not only informs research in cognitive science but in the life sciences as well. Hayles’s critical point is that informatics is a selective process, and those things that are filtered or transformed in that process-such as a notion of the phenomenological, experiential body, or “embodiment”-simply become by-products of an informatic economy.

From Eugene Thacker ‘Data Made Flesh’

TP