Robots and AIs replacing humans?

http://www.secondlifeupdate.com/
Robot Avatars from http://www.secondlifeupdate.com/

Once in a while, I like to pop over to the Singularity freaks at Singularity HUB; they are the sort of crazy that I often enjoy — trying to figure out where we’re going, based on the trends of current technology advancement. They will get most things wrong, of course, but it’s also great to see so much optimism packed in a single site 🙂

Recently they have been discussing the end of millions of jobs thanks to advances in robotization and artificial intelligence, showing how things might not be as bad as they seem; a topic, btw, that Extropia DaSilva is being addressing since past May on her own blog, on a huge eight-part essay.

I’m personally a skeptic and think that there will be a trade-off at some point. Jobs will be lost by the dozens of millions until there simply will not be enough consumers to consume dozens of millions of products at ultra-cheap prices manufactured by robots. So at some point, something has to be done. On my comment on Peter Diamandis’ article on the costs of products and services plummeting eventually to zero, therefore creating a society where work is (barely) unnecessary, I unfortunately (as always) reached the internal size limits when commenting, so I reproduce it here:

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What Future for Virtual Reality?

 

Shocked with Oculus Rift

Rumours of my permanent disappearance, as always, have been exaggerated 🙂

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The battle for the future virtual world environment is on!

The teacher_001

I’ve tried to write a comment on the latest article on High Fidelity posted on Technology Review. But I’m long-winded and their system didn’t accept my comment. So here it is:

Rosedale’s latest attempt at designing a virtual world from scratch shows that he has learned a lot of lessons in the past 15 years. The article neglects to explain Rosedale’s background in physics; Linden Lab actually started by being a VR gear company, doing the hardware first, and designing a virtual world in order to test their gear, simply known as ‘The Rig‘, and which is allegedly still stored somewhere at Linden Lab’s premises. It was never commercially sold. Read More

Registering users on a website

Dawsey Chatterbox, posting a comment on the page for my SL User Create WordPress plugin, asked for a simpler version of the code which would merely register an avatar name to a MySQL database. He has been patient, having been waiting for almost a year 🙂 Here goes the code for the three components: the in-world script (to be placed inside an item that you can touch), a very simple schema for a MySQL table, and a PHP script to be placed at the backend of your server. I’m assuming PHP 5.X with the PDO libraries active (you should have them on by default, since it’s what PHP is now supposed to be supporting in exclusivity).

This merely registers an avatar name and its key to an external database. To illustrate a point, the location of the object is also extracted from the headers sent by the SL object. And to see that it is really updating the database if you touch on the same object repeatedly, a timestamp gets updated each time by the MySQL engine. There is no functionality to actually view the database; you can use phpMyAdmin for that.

I hope this might be useful for some.

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Revisiting the Beginners’ Guide to Second Life®

Beginners' Guide to Second Life coverA decade ago, information about Second Life® was scarce. Newbies would drop into a Brave New World and get completely confused. There were in-world volunteers — and the Linden Liaisons — to help you out, but often it was hard to assemble a lot of information to get you going. There were already the LL forums, of course, but newcomers might not know where to find them.

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Revisiting the Colourising Script

In late 2004, I’ve joined a few groups that did a lot of discussion events. Often people could not attend them, so transcripts were kept and posted on the Linden Lab forums.

Reading a transcript ‘after-the-fact’ is not the same thing as participating in a discussion in real time. For me, the major difficulty is keeping track on who said what. After a while it’s hard to remember who is actually speaking. Read More

NeXT Life

Time Warp

Unless you have been hiding in a warp hole somewhere (like I am!) you might have missed the latest announcement from Linden Lab: Second Life: The Next Generation, or SL2, or — as I prefer to call it — NeXT Life, is currently being developed, and the first beta will probably appear sometime in late 2015/early 2016 or thereabouts.

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Yes, yes, it was a prank!

Firestorm ruling the world

You should have looked at the date first before complaining that the links didn’t work! 🙂

Obviously it was another of my (in)famous April Fool’s pranks, which I try to do (almost) every year. Some years are better than others, because the best pranks are those that are 90% based on reality — which has clearly been the case.

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Facebook ‘likes’ Second Life, High Fidelity and buys both

Of course this was a prank; happy April Fool’s Day, and my apologies to everybody! 🙂 — Gwyn

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Understanding Second Life’s Culture

Wintertime in Colonia Nova

I’m currently under a lot of pressure to do my work, and every time I post anything on my blog, I get a lot of complaints that I should be working instead of blogging 🙂 The complainers are right, of course… but every once in a while, I also need to rest my mind, and do that by focusing on completely different and unrelated issues. Just to prove that I’m alive and well, and will resume my analysis of Second Life and virtual worlds in general, as soon as my current work is completed (alas, it should take another year…), here are a few thoughts about a recent discussion that captured my attention on the SL Universe forums. My comments make more sense if you take your time reading that discussion first. I tried to post an answer there, but unfortunately I’m too long-winded for common forums; I had to resort to a blog post to overcome the character limitations 🙂

Thanks to the very intelligent community that regularly discusses at SL Universe. You guys are truly an inspiration for me!

The more time passes, the more I tend to believe a few basic assumptions about SL, some of which, as you will see, are contradictory:

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Revolutionary breakthrough: animating your avatar with Kinect!

online-gym-small

I’m breaking my long period of silence (I should be working instead of blogging!) just to share with you some exciting news.

Since Linden Lab introduced user-generated, custom animations in June 2004, people have been craving for a more ‘natural’ way of animating their avatars, without resource to pre-loaded animations. Avatar ‘expression HUDs’ and the increasingly more complex Animation Overriders have gone a long way to give us more and more animations and gestures.

But it’s not enough. We want more. We want to be able that our avatar expresses exactly what we’re doing behind the screen. We want to be able to dynamically control our virtual persona.

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Prim-to-Mesh done just right

The year was, oh, perhaps 2009 or so. In the middle of all the excitement about virtual worlds in general and Second Life® in particular, professional 3D designers were raising eyebrows at a new opportunity to sell their content.

A virtual world with a million regular users who were engaged in consuming digital content, specifically, 3D models? And doing so regularly? Half a billion US$ of yearly transactions? Strong DRM in place (what we residents call “the permission system”)? All that just to prettify avatars and put them on poses on top of some virtual furniture? Well, it seemed too good to be true. And there was, indeed, a catch: you had to use Linden Lab’s own application to create content — which was designed having amateur content creators in mind, not professionals.

Professionals, well, used meshes — and had done so for over a decade. They populate marketplace sites like Renderosity, DAZ3D, BlendSwap, and who knows what else; doing business selling COLLADA files (or at least Wavefront OBJs… or Blender files… or whatever was popular at the time as a file format). They used Maya, 3DS Max, Blender — professional content creation tools. They had graphic pipelines fine-tuned for their own work — design once, deploy everywhere. Well, everywhere except Second Life, because SL had no way to use their creations: you had to do everything from scratch.

A few naturally went that way, and prospered. But the rest of the professional 3D content creation world stayed away. And, ironically, as the media started to lose interest in SL, Linden Lab spread rumours that mesh import would be available as an option in the near future.

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Rezday!

Gwyneth-Llewelyn-from-2004-and-2013Nine years ago, I was completely clueless about what I was signing up with.

I think I’ve told my tale a billion times, but, for my rezday, I’ll tell it once again. My roomie and I were far away from home on exile. We had been tracked via the Internet by some rough guys who applied extortion to us; we had to leave and let the police take care of them (yes, they have completely vanished and eluded the justice after we filed our complaint). I shut down most of my Internet presences by then, just leaving the company email active, as well as my 17-year-old personal email. I stopped participating on forums, on ICQ, MSN, and whatever sites I had been registered with; Facebook didn’t exist yet, but there were others.

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