Unless you have nothing left to lose of course

One athena wrote a very charming criticism of the current state of transhumanism, here, and I did feel the immediate and urgent need to respond to that.

So here it is -

“..Those who know my outermost layer would consider me a science geek. I’m a proponent of genetic engineering, an advocate of space exploration, a reader and writer of science fiction. However, I found myself unable to warm to either transhumanism or its literary sidekick, cyberpunk. I ascribed this to the decrease of flexibility that comes with middle age and resumed reading Le Guin’s latest story cycle.

But the back of my mind gnawed over the discrepancy. After all, neither transhumanism nor cyberpunk are monolithic, they come in various shades of… and then it hit me… gray. Their worlds contain little color or sound, few scents, hardly any plants or animals. Food and sex come as pills, electric stimuli or IV drips; almost all arts and any sciences not related to individual enhancement have atrophied, along with most human activities that don’t involve VR….”  

Anetha dear, your perception puzzled me. I reread these sentences above and my mind gnawed over the discrepancy – after all, what is transhumanism other than typical science fiction with all conclusions taken to extreme. And then it dawned on me – you are … prejudiced.  

Let’s clarfy that a little.  If I were to travel back to the late 1970s and talk with someone typical about the future, that person would probably ask me all kinds of stuff,  such as “do people live in the moon in 2009, did we cure wars, did humanity solve pollution and nuclear weapons..” and all those classics. In most cases, I’d have to say – no, all that didn’t pan out, but we did get something almost as good – internet. Now visualise if you will the arduous process of trying to explain not just the basic idea of internet, but the complexities of internet over the years – things such as spam, 3D virtual realities, internet memes, browser wars, vista and all that. Many people from the 70s (or even the early 90s) would be able to perceive the sense in all that. Most 70s people I’d engage in discussion about the internet would blank out, regard it as “drab” and “unhealthy” and “unimaginative”.  Grey if you will. I suppose a thorough explanation of world of warcraft might actually decide internet is not something “we should want to have”.

Sometimes, when things are really revolutionary, the proof of the pudding is in eating it. 

I have found, through repeated observation, there is a category of things, “talking epistemologically here” that is intransparant unless you are deep inside them. That sounds like a religious argument, or a cult argument, but I assure you it isn’t. Some things cannot be perceived from the outside, as people tend to lock up when trying to appreciate the intracies of what transpires inside the phenomenon. Thats common with certain types of art or sport. I certainly didn’t have a clue what was so special about fitness untill after years of torture I did 4 legpress reps and wham, I was high as a kite. Trying to explain that to my (at the time slightly overweight) slacker friends could count me on degrees of abuse.

I am not accusing you of lack of imagination love – I am warning you of lack of imagination. ..  Prejudice by any other name. 

And I finally realized why I balk at cyberpunk and transhumanism like an unruly horse. Both are deeply anhedonic, hostile to physicality and the pleasures of the body, from enjoying wine to playing in an orchestra. I wondered why it had taken me so long to figure this out. After all, many transhumanists use the repulsive (and misleading) term “meat cage” to describe the human body, which they deem a stumbling block, an obstacle in the way of the mind.

I did actually hear a few people use the phrase “meat cage” and I am sure I have used it a few times, especially when I have migraines (or clusters).  But where in heck to you get the idea that “transhumanism” is hostile to physicality?   This is just not true.  In fact the idea is so deeply odd to me it confuses me where you might have gotten such an idea.

This is hoary dualism disguised as futuristic thinking, augmented by healthy doses of queasiness and power fantasies. Ascetics of other eras tried to diminish the body by fasting, flagellating, abstaining from all physical gratification from washing to sex. Techno-monks want to discard it altogether. The goal is a disembodied mind playing World of Warcraft in a VR datastream. If a body is tolerated at all, the ideal is a mixture of metal and ceramic, hairless and poreless, though it still retains the hyper-gendered configurations possible only in cartoons.

There is a duality at play here, but it is not in transhumanism – it is a duality between what you perceive as transhumanism, and what is really transhumanism.  Well, let’s me frank – I mentioned my migraines just now…. one of the reasons I am openly sympathetic to the (all)  core goals of transhumanism (and singularitarianism) is because I acutely feel the inadequacies of phyical existence.  Cluster Headaches are just one argument, and there are many. 

… But that is not me saying I loathe physical existence. Likewise if I curse the idea of traffic jams I do not automatically say I abhor cars and traffic.  If I curse spanish society for being barbaric, it doesn’t mean my favorite food is not paella.   I speak only for myself here and say that I experience the relative and undesirable qualities of the mortal coil I do not seek death or ascetic abstinence. Far from it – by all people I know I am universally regarded as the most shameless epicurian pervert.

I wallow in life. In fact, most of life hits me so hard I may assert that if my neurology were to be scrutinized at some time in the future neuroscientists might conclude I have been living my life connstantly and unknowingly under the effect of an unbalance of some natural psychedelic or narcotic brain chemical.  My mountains and valleys of existance are deep and high, extremes of exaltation and ecstacy, deep dark despair and intense terror.  

Does that precipitate me to mortalize or scourge the flesh from my bones in an urge to exorcize all passion from my world? 

Not by a long shot.

Is abandonment of the body such a bad thing? As anyone who lost a limb or went through a major illness can attest, it’s a marvelous instrument whose astonishing abilities become obvious only when it malfunctions. On the other hand, it’s undeniably fragile and humans have lost patience with its shortcomings as technology has overtaken nature. Transhumanists extol such prospects as anti-aging medicine; advanced prosthetics; radical cosmetic surgery, including sex changes; nootropic drugs; and carbon-silicon interfaces, from cyborgs to immersive VR.

I don’t know a single woman who, given the choice, would opt to retain menstruation, pregnancy or menopause (though few would admit it openly). And very few people, no matter how stoic, can face the depradations of chronic disease or age with equanimity. The neo-Rupturists who prophesy the coming of the Singularity can hardly wait to exchange their bodies with versions that will never experience memory lapses or fail to achieve erections at will.

The nice thing about perspective is that it gives you a choice. That aforementioned person in the 1970s who could choose whether or not a world with internet was the future he or she wanted (irregardless of the question whether or not he or she would have a choice in the matter – maybe internet would be an unavoidablefuture development  in 1980, other than nuclear armageddon). Likewise would this beautiful woman be able to say no to these options if she were offered them?  Would it be immoral to choose for such a world, or would it be moral to not have such a world?  Do you judge future paths because you saw this, or because you failed to see this?

(do have a look at the rest)

Well there is the mention of Rapturism, and I do agree, the vision usually overheard in transhumanist circles (as opposed to “proclaimed by transhumanists” – there is a difference) is rather grande and pretentious, if no mythological. But it is no eschatological.  There are three ways of looking at the future in my book - 

I- ‘from the roots up design road’;  you want a solution to a problem. Say, you want to traverse distances faster. So, you build a train and lay down train tracks.  Before you know it things have changed and you end up in the future. So, in predicting that future you infer trends you see in whats happening in the railroad business and speculate. Thats what Jules Verne did. This tends to be a bit Utopian.

II – ‘the good look at the innards road’; you look at over-all trends in society, technology, recurring, patterns,  from a detached, somewhat cynical perspective.  That’s what William Gibson did when he projected forward, and his approach was markedly Dystopian. 

III – you look at the essence of things, and ask yourself, what is good, what is bad, what is really happening. That is what Ray kurzweil is doing, and his approach is neither dystopian, utopian, rapturian or eschatological. 

Say, if I had a serious desire to get rid of any cluster headaches I had been suffering for, say 5 weeks in a row, nonstop, every single day, then I might have to find me some pretty impressive solutions. I might end up with a borderline moral neurosurgeon who offered me a treatment involving implacing a brain pacemaker, a programmable device that sends an electrocurrent into key areas of the brain, allowing me to trigger release of all major brain neurotransmitters (seratonin, dopamine, noradrenalin, melatonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, vasopressin and oxytocin)  according to programmed algorithms, I’d probably end up a very happy addict.  My migraines would be gone, but so would the capacity for any meaningful action as a human being. 

…But one look in my eyes.. If you hadn’t met me before, you’d dismiss this experiment with disgust in your voice. You might not even want to meet me, with the shave head and the wires trailing into my skull.  But if you did, and after the event, you would be unable to shake the realization I were feeling something no human being ever feels?  That might haunt you, forever.  It might also threaten the assumptions of many people – the realization that all structure of underlying human meaning and value is in the end something that can be synthesized, engineered, edited – and improved.

… that they didn’t in fact lead good and optimal lives.  That someone with better information could do it far better. 

There is something annoyingly conceited with most people when they enter their thirties and fourties and are starting to face the idea that they are going to die pretty soon.  I have heard this being romanticized and glamorized in poetic terms as  ”I am finally settling into harmony” and all that.  But what if it isn’t? What if the acceptance of this world and all its inherent flaws is nothing but a neurological feedback mechanism where key brain neutotransmitters create a false opiate sensation of spirituality, acceptance, grace and surrender?

I’m no Luddite, bio or otherwise. I am glad that technology has enabled us to lead lives that are comfortable, leisured and long enough that we can explore the upper echelons of the hierarchy of needs. However, we demean the body at our peril. It’s not the passive container of our mind; it is its major shaper and inseparable partner. If we discard our bodies we run the danger of losing context to our lasting detriment – as we have already done by successive compartmentalizations and sunderings.

Athena my dear, here is where we see your prejudice. I might even label it superstition.   I’d say “(S)he who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.”  

Darling, change is certain and there are sure arguments change (if not progress) is speeding up.  And there is certainly room for improvement.  Myself, I will not find it all meaningful without massive, sweeping improvement. When you introduce some new type of technology, anyone under 15 will play with it, and find new uses for it, whereas some people over 50 will find arguments to go traumatized and futureshocked over it.   In what you say, are you accusing progress, technology (despite of the obligatory “I am openminded” disclaimer when you say you are not a luddite)  causing societal ills

- or do you fail to lay the blame where the blame really lies?

What if (and I am speculating here) the blame does NOT lie with implementation of technology – but with a generation of aging people that are terrified of losing their grip of the world, their grip on existance and exert whatever force and contrivance they can to own things, make other people as they will and ‘make thing more stable’ … what if  when you say the body ‘is not a passive container’ you are doing something you don’t see yourself – projecting a lingering subconscious resentment against the prospect of becoming a biological dead ender? Marilyn Manson said it best “One hates what one fears“.   

Humans are inherently social animals that developed in response to feedback loops between the environment and their own evolving form. Like all lifeforms, we’re jury-rigged. Furthermore, humans are mediocre across the entire spectrum of physical prowess, from range of vision to maximum running speed. Yet this mediocrity probably enabled us to occupy many environmental niches successfully before technology allowed us to impose our wishes on our environment. Optimizing in any direction may push us into dead-end corners, something that has happened to many species we engineered extensively.

And I vehemently agree!  

But who is saying evolution is done, and we’re finished and we can rest and sit on our laurels?  Is this middle class existance where historical accident earned you a reprieve from having to dodge the plague, enemy tribes, poverte, famine and large predators suddenly the culmination of the road of existence?  That’s so nice about Science Fiction, isn’t it? It’s so deliciously remote…   a sequence of genocides or exploding stars or an evil ming the merciless which  don’t disturb placid suburban life, drinking squeezed orange juice, reading the morning newspaper on a lazy sunday morning, while the sprinkler waters the lawn…    However that whole perception completely disregards the fact that many humans still aren’t in any place they’d label as acceptable.  You may think it is as acceptable and “pretty much jolly good’ , as you consider the odd occasional glass of wine and concept as the epithome of existence.  

I assert you simply confuse it to good and sound, because you mistakenly think you got the best hand on the table. 

Humans become satisfied and lazy when they think they made it, and pretty aggressive to anything that might disturb their complacency and status quo.  If someone rears up its head as a dealbreaker, those scorned and ousted from the ivory towers rage in indignation.  They’ll even go to war to get what they mistakenly think is theirs.  

Change of a fundamental character is threatening, because it disrupts entitlement fantasies.  Some person tweaking their eyeballs and inserting cybernetic eyes isn’t just …”unnatural” or “dead-end” or “radical” or… “grey” . Something one certainly wouldn’t want to happen. Or, as Fukuyama said – “the most dangerous ideology in the world”.  

This also holds true for our brains. It’s a transhumanist article of faith that intelligence can and must be augmented – but there are many kinds of intelligence. A lot of learning is mediated through the body, from using a screwdriver properly to gauging complex social interactions. Short-circuiting this type of learning results in shallow knowledge that may not become integrated into long-term memory. There is a real reason for apprenticeships, despite their feudal overtones: people who use Photoshop, CAD and laboratory kits without prior “traditional” training frequently make significant errors and often cannot critically evaluate their results. Furthermore, without corrective “pingbacks” from the environment that are filtered by the body, the brain can easily misjudge to the point of hallucination or madness, as seen in phenomena like phantom limb pain.

Intelligence to me is a valued asset, but as a concept it is woefully outdated.  To me augmenting intelligence is akin to a discussion about augmenting the phlogiston.  I’d say, let people decide for themselves whatever it is they want to augment and see what happens.  I don’t mind seeing a whole generation of “slightly panicked pre-transhumanists’ waddle down viagras for whatever perceived incapacity.  I personally use my mobile phone rarely, but I love seeing the millions around me implement the damn things with a speed and infectiveness that would have been called epidemic a few decades ago. Try predicting the adoption rates, level of complexity and derivative behaviors of mobile phones to aforementioned petson from the 1970s,  and you’d get blank stares in reurn.

Or the archetupical ” I wouldn’t want ti live in such a world“.  But many do anyways, despite off, irregardless, and in ten years we’ll all be laughing at the idea that in the past people didnt have access to headset GPS-linked augmented reality, and your (grand?)children will say things “I don’t understand how you lived without them?” 

Or unless you demand that proper use of augmented reality requires a slow, disciplines process of  training, conditioning and mentorship?  I bet you know a guy who would be willing to teach, if shown proper respect and a cheque? 

I’d regard such statements as pretty outdated in the post-YouTube era. “Short-circuiting this type of learning results in shallow knowledge that may not become integrated into long-term memory” – in ten years most human beings (or the ones that matter) will have magically aquired the capacity to aquire and retainpractical and functional  knowledge from 30 minutes watching  it being done on some poser animation.  Maybe not to the exacting standards of shaolin masters, but “good enough” or “JIT”.  I suppose that kind of knowledge isn’t the real thing, would contribute to the collapse of civilization and the degeneracy of morals?  

What next? Who know people will one day be “reading books without uttering a sound“. 

Another feedback loop is provided by the cortical emotions, which enable us to make decisions. Two prominent side effects of many nootropic drugs are flattening of the emotions and suppression of creativity. Far from fine-tuning perception, the drugs act as blunting hammers. Finally, if we evade our bodies by uploading into a silicon frame (biologically impossible, but let’s grant it as a hypothesis), we may lose the capacity for empathy, as shown in Bacigalupi’s disturbing story People of Sand and Slag. Empathy is as instrumental to high-order intelligence as it is to survival: without it, we are at best idiot savants, at worst psychotic killers.

Ah, the old metaphor – all those moral weaklings who turn to that new religion of christianity will certainly come under the disfavor of the Gods and be turned into baby eating murderers.   The final resort of those who reject the emergence of a new culture,  a new virulence of memes, a new survival strategy – the end and merciful dispatching of the old tribal order, and the old tribal leaders muttering angrily the young are “possessed by evil spirits”.  Nothing good can come of that railroad business, it’s an ungodly contraption, it moves so fast the soul can not possibly keep up,  And the same goes for that damn radio, suffrage, television, rock n roll, flying through the air, psychotherapy, inoculation, women working, free sex, reefer madness, computers and all that.  

It’s all prejudice, it’s all people who don’t want their world changed.

(updated)

Ditto for “leaving biology behind”. We may be able to create other minds, very different from ours (silicon, animal uplift, what have you). But our own minds go where our brains go. Mind uploading is an article of faith for believers. As a biologist, all I can tell you is that it cannot be done.

And I can say with equal insistence it can be done. I am not saying it can be done without loss. I don’t assert that an “capture” or “scan” of a functional mind in another substrate will be able to survive transition in any way functionally or sane.  I am not even claiming a xox will be anything like the original – the best metaphor I have may be that a character rolled up in 3.5 translates with difficulty to 4rd edition.  Simulations of a human mind may be constructs that are so contrived they wouldn’t count as “people” in a court of law. Heck, I’d even assert that the first decades some sort of translation of brain data into computational data isn’t even appealing to potential clients.

If you didn’t catch it, that era has started – we can capture visual data from a mammalian cortex and translate it into visual data. When I saw that, I seriously considered that “ahead of schedule” and far more implausible than I would have anticipated.

But insofar I am a transhumanist (some doubt that) I am not much interest in this type of treatment anyway. To me “uploadism’ isn’t part of my core belief structure or ideology. 

What I would want is a number of discrete recording devices that would allow me to control an AI  secretary or agent with finely grained precision. If I’d be able to do that anyone who knows me would know I wouldnt make these tools (familiars?) anything like me. I’d give them my values, or “my values v2.o”. These wouldn’t even be consistent with one another – the simulate I’d call my secretary would have different values, presentation style and appearance than the one I’d have as my bodyguard or personal assistant or lust slave. Nevertheless I’d all have them function based on data that is intimately derived from the workings of my brain.

The whole uploading concept is a silly fantasy construct. That much is exceptionally clear.  It’s like a clerical spell, “create golem’ and a simplification. Likewise, the spell “fly” didn’t involve broomsticks in reality either – but when it did emerge in the real word it involved a number of costly, complex, contextual tools. It wasn’t much like the old mythological reference of magical flight, but maybe it was better. I mean – what’s more glamorous; flying in a lear jet or dangling midair in chilly halloween weather on a wooden stick?  Give me flight attendants with bubbles anytime.

That brings me on the belief that technology does in fact follow fantasies and projections. So much of our technology derives from visions, which in turn derive from faerie tales, which in turn quite often derive from religious parables.  These are all things or entities we’d like doing or being.   The monumental figure of Odin begat the more tame stories of a father christmas barelling over houses on a sledge pulled by reindeers.  Nick was in turn infected by Coca Cola commercials and recast in billboard red as a multicontinentally charismatic nanofac on fast forward.  It;s no surprise that nanoreplication are labelled “christmas machines’.

My curiosity makes me ask if any aliens, if there are any out there, would have markedly different belief systems (if any!), markedly different mythologies, and if so, would they aim for different avenues of technological progress? Would intelligent squids  in time generate complex mythologies we wouldn’t understand, or fail to see the point, which would instill in them the capacity and desire to make technology we would find “bizarre” and “incomprehensible” and “oddly magical” ?

Giulio Prisco: “transhumanism is about leaving biology behind”To echo Athena’s point, you can’t escape biology-as-substrate. No matter where your consciousness is, or what physical media houses it, it will be housed on something, and that something will matter whether or not you acknowledge it. By splitting your perception of existence from your physical existence you’re just ignoring the physical, not making it disappear.

Let me state once and for all, going on the record here, that the process of creating incremental recordings of bit of meaningful information of the mammalian (or human) brain will in fact me an industry producing so much fall-out and spin-off and side effects and societal disruption that before we even get anywhere near an actually marketable (one anyone would want to pay a few million euro for) product, we will have found lots more interesting avenues that “that mere upload”.   Upoading research will have so many deeply disruptive and corrosive implications it will be one big desillionment getting there.

It would be as if Mohammed the prophet, commanding the very djinn to make all devout muslims able to fly into the Heavens and (randomly picking a spot) go there (pointing to the moon) – on which the djinn would say “fine, when you want that – will two centuries be ok?” , Mohammed, peace be on his ballsack, said “sure, but I want yo be there”, and the Djinn  would squeeze twothousand years of scientific progress, mechanization, agriculturization, imperial conquest, steam engines, petrol engines, airplanes, rockets and finally lunar landers in two centuries – incidentally thrusting all devout stone age muslims into a modernist, highly liberal lifestyle, leaving Mohammed deeply annoyed and rather disappointed.

What extra-transhumanist critics apparently appear to think is that transhumanists are a kind of  unrealistic nincanpoops who assume the transhumanist fundamentals won’t arrive without a cost, fall-out,  massive pain and sacrifice,  abuse, violence. 

The point is however – faith. Not faith in magic, or that things happen by themselves. But faith that what we currently have is horrible, and what we might have should be a lot better.  That is why I personally don’t care much for specifics such as the idefix of “mind uploading” – I just want to press the radically fast forward button, because I have a lot to gain and very little to lose. 

That incidentally, is why I urge various transhumanism critics, ‘cautious technoprogressives ‘  (luddites if you will) to maintain some caution in all this. To me the most transhuman thing I have seen  in the last few years was some stuff that resulted because of the internets. Specifically, the collapse of IP ownership. That happened largely because people could,  they didn’t have anything to gain with the current status quo, and because they could they did.  Look it it this way – most advances, especially revolutionary changes, happened because a bunch of unwashed barbarians thought they had nothing to lose. Now, even if the faerie godmother won’t come along and turn us all into furry avatar uploads in some wonderland virtual reality, there are a serious amount of  people “who have very little to lose” and who can’t stand the established status quo by now, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to get a better deal. Where rich nation transhumanists will be largely left talking about all this for at least a decade, a few billion people in the third world might in fact be living transhumanism, and very soon.  Their treshold for implementing lateral new techmologies is very low, since they have a lot less to lose, and see every day on commercial messages what they have to gain.

Denial or dismissal of revolutionary changing technologies might bite us all in the ass, far sooner than we anticipate. The third world is a pretty big petri dish and its being incubated faster and faster.

Second Life sim can only be 250×250 meters big?

 

That pretty much sucks

This is a pic of a famous sim – Svarga

 

Svarga Sim in Second life

Nice huh? Now lets put that in a bigger context:

I say Second Life needs to open up. Give us the in-between stuff and make it look GOOD. Sims should be places where avvies build and own and buy. Inbetween should be space where avvies can walk and fly and travel.  Give me some space where I can *USE* a flying airship, dammit. 

Better – give me a huge-ass continent where all the adult stuff can be *down south* and the other stuff “up north”.

Ramona!

Sister!

America has a problem there

(in reference to this article) Let me tell you all one thing, and let me emphasize it – you people in the US have one big problem.

The US has no outer borders with real people. The only outer borders you do have – mexico and canada – are countries either a state of in economic slavery, or effectively a province. The US never had to compromize in the last century, never had to understand difficult cultures, never had to look at the bigger picture.  Large parts of the US are suffering from a sense of empirial entitlement.

That coupled with an era of supra-historical abundance (most poorest persons in the US now are richer, better educated and healthier than kings in the middle ages) has precipitated a culture of unaccountability, groundless belief in some kind of manifest destiny, a petulant tendency towards hysteria, self-aggrandizement, overcompensation and bullying anyone your leaders can find a flimsy excuse of moral superiority over.

Compare the attitudes of the US with the general demeanor of an adolescent with too much money.

Now by far the most people in the US are just as sensible as anywhere else on the planet – real hardworking and sane people – but a small minority, “by virtue of flawed genetics, just too much easy affluence, an unsanitary religious culture, unbridled and unrestrained corporate optimism and a generally conceited culture” has let loose of basic sanity.

Its very tempting to throw political lables on this fringe in US politics. They had it good, by virtue of historical accidents. Blind luck. They think they managed it all themselves, that anyone could have done it, but there is something special and blessed about them, they actually went and did it. These people, at some unconscious level realize this pyramid has been constructed of quite a few miserably exploited third world countries, a steady flow of terawats of petrochemical abundance, a rather peculiar political system and the natural riches of the US.  Let’s label this “the asshole-ification of the US”

The US had a party, the party is effectively over, and now the US must recallibrate values, affluence, division of money, power and resources, and there are people who think that is unfair, socialist, unamerican, dictatorship.

That, dear people, is an adolescent entitlement tantrum.

However these people in US society, let’s arbitrarily overlap this minority with staunch bush supporters, have taken leave of all sense.  Living in a continent and nation of compromize – europe – this is as obvious as concluding that the german diet is unhealthier than the french, and that the german economy will always be more robust than the french. Why? Because it is so bloody obvious. Some things don’t need explaining, when you look at them from a certain perspective.

All this permeates US society and has slowly been heating on the stove. Now, with a US military budget of 600 billion dollar per year, with schools collapsing, infrastructures worse off, an economy imploding, more extremes in wealth and poverty than in brazil, everyone and his pet chihuahua having access to medicine, an incapacitating health care crisis, obesity and half america shambling blindly towards ADHD and diabetes, unfunded pensions, medical insurance and welfare, and worst of all – an oil consumption that is about as unsustainable a delusion as one of the larger jurrassic herbivores being under the confiction it is a kolibri.

This can’t go on. Worse, it won’t, trust me on that. It can’t last years, no less decades. And there is worse on the horizon, in terms of automatization, labor reorganization and simplification, globalization, virtualization, tele-operation, robotization, nano-replication and then some – all of which conspiring to throw a monkey wrench with dimensions more reminiscent of a dubai hotel safe in the delicate cogs of the US political, demographic, military, economic and emotional sensibilities.

The aforementioned minority of entitlement drunk gun toting, red meat eating americans (lets call them murrcans) are itching to blame. We know that freudian displacement fantasy as an urge to dish out “dolchstosslegenden” in economy sized packages. Google the term. Whatever the case, americans are having to face the reality that a small but discrete lunatic minority has become so disattached from the real wold of real issues, it has been restricting itself to a fury diet, on you know what cable channel, and is ready to kick some ass.

My estimate – the stirrings of civil war, the first people dying, the first states vying for secession, by the time obama’s first term ends. Richly spiced with racial prejudice, conspiracies, lambasting religious memeticists with the morals of tapeworms, accidents happening faster and faster.

Did I mention the environment yet? Denialism. Thats the buzzword. People stuck in a spacewarped version of the 1950s, squared with late reaganite gung ho optimism, unaccountable by virtue of stockpiles of nuclear weapons, looking for someone to blame, because it certainly isn’t them.

This conundrum is as unsolvable as a granite sink in a custard pie and by every measure of my insight in human nature and the near future, it will lead to severe societal disruption, bloodshed, anarchy, severe crime and probably something not dissimilar to the soviet collapse in 1989.

These people will become a smaller minority, but all the more radicalized and -again- in denial. And by the 2020s you will either be dealing with this is a uniquely new and unamerican manner, or the US will be a third world nation, or collection of third world nations and some begging to be admitted into the EU or league of pacitfic nations.

Deal with it. I promise if it gets really bad I’ll send powdered milk and cans of spam. And oh right, I know what side *I* will be supporting with discrete arms shipments.

OHHWW BANNED!

THAT used to happen more to me back in the old days – being at some place and WHAM someone bans you, over a misunderstanding, or a mistake, or just plain for being there. That is a very central feature of Second Life and nearly after five years of Second Life it can still hit you like a mallet. The place? One of those high-exposure porn places. The person? One Mystie Heart. The reason? I offered her (for free) some stairs, I wanted to help her!. She misinterpreted and thought I was spamming her for sales.

Those things happen.

It’s not important really, and I will probably have forgotten about it by tomorrow.  Well, maybe the day after, since I recommended the TBR to over a dozen friends, most of them people from 2005, 2006 and thereabouts, yanno, “real people”. But I find myself irate, very annoyed.

So what does that mean for virtual realities like Second Life in general? Well, a lot. The business model and entire philosophy of Second Life is based on land ownership, absolute governance and the right to ban. A land owner has complete control and can exert that on a whim. You can be in SL, build up a livelyhood, friends or intimate relationships that are in large part dependant on visiting a specific place (and develop an attachment to that place) and then the owner can revoke that right on some impulse and you will never receive any explanation.

Many beginners in Second Life have experienced this and were left dazed. It is the prime cause for drama and irritation, even fueds that last for months or years. Being in SL means having places you go to – take that away and you as a player are left locked out. For new players this can be a reason to leave SL.

Now fast forward a few decades and imagine how big these worlds could become.  Second Life right now is functionally rather small – an old avatar like mind involves over 10K  of “possession” (and I throw away a lot). I know avies with over 100K of possessions. Though most possessions are just duplicate registries for mass items, many items are unique or tweaked. Such an old avvie could involve over 100Mb of data. A sim involves between 10 and 50 Mb of data, which is about 15000 discrete objects or shapes over an area the size of a soccer field. World of warcraft is not much different, but a bit bigger in some areas and much smaller in others.

Take a high end graphics example such as Crysis, which may serve as the growth model for high-end mass-user virtual realities five years from now. This would be a reality much more detailed, more more emotionally involving and with more “story” than what SL currently entails. Imagine a full island along the philosophy of Crysis, through which you connect through a gigabit connection. That could be no more than five years away if you live in a big, affluent city.  Imagine a property owner managing such an estate, creating a complex story, interactivity, animations, socializing. You can create worlds that are pretty compelling, if not addictive.  People will be driven to really want certain things, commensurate with the talent of their land host. And the land host might wake up one day with PMS and say, sod off, I dont like the color of your hair.

The business model of Second Life is not something that is set as a standard for the future of all MMORPGs, but it is likely to be a strong hint of what’s in store. WoW does not have this model of freedom, and disallows individual expression. Eve allows a tiny bit more in some areas but a whole lot less in others – in Eve you don’t even have a proper avatar (yet). But it looks like “Blue Mars” will adopt the SL philosophy of owning land and creating a wide range of goods by end users. Again, a lot of opportunity of random wielding of power by individials, who can affect your emotional state as a user on a whim.

There is a legendary example of this mechanic, and it stems from Eve Online.

And that brings me to the nature of evil. In Eve and in the real world, much of the exlusion that goes on is a function of scarcity of goods. I would call this the Viking factor – if someone has something you want, you can use force to take it – something ranging from gold to livestock to cattle and (more recently) oil.

But in the virtual, the premium scarce good is attention. Mystie Heart runs a place that in Second Life and in doing so she is bothered endlessly, nonstop by people asking for stuff, asking for help, pestering her with questions, making advantage of her – andsoforth. Run across someone like that and you end up with indiscriminate tendencies towards dictatorship.

Last month I learned something about the potential of people to manage other people – The maximum of a network working together is about five or so people managed by a manager, and a maximum of one or two layers of depth of hands-on management. In the real world we can use contracts and laws and payment and punishment to enforce conformity. In the virtual that is very hard to sustain, and it does place a maximum on the capacity to delegate, and a very significant tax on person accessibility. Add to that you will have to run virtual busineses  through a keyboard (I am pretty sure Mystie won’t use voice) and a small window (a screen) and you have a horribly tight window to explain, use charisma, wield authority or conduct business. This leaves the effective maximum stable organization in Second Life very small, with a depth of one or two (barely any middle management likely) and an attention width of no more than five or so avies per person. An organization (or club) in second life becomes effectively more ruthless or unwieldy over 30 persons, especially if money or strong emotional interdependency is involved.

The result: Drama!

This is a very anarchic reality with very low potential to wage war, enact vengeance on the one hand, but very little ability to govern over hierarchies on the other. Sure, if you can change real world money into Lindens and use that to wield power, but for the same money you can get a whole lot more slavish devotion in the real world.

The key to unlocking this dilemma is automated systems. Imagine if Second Life had non player characters, run on Linden servers, NPCs you can give simple instruction (act as a bouncer) or more complex ones (go to location XYX, use subroutine ABC there, find object D, take it to ZYX, collect the results and return here).  The implementation of NPCs would have very hard to predict effects in Second Life but it would have *big* effects nonetheless.

What is my point? My point is that the ability of an avi to wield indiscriminate power is extremely limited. It is limited by available time, personal magnetism, money, land ownership.  If you have all those aplenty, you can lash out and cause true misery over others. Make virtual realities bigger, the capacity to intentionally cause this kind of misery might end up becoming a goal by itself. That is something that concerns me, since I had sufficient of that in the real world. It’s the reason I do not play Eve Online – Eve allows (or effectively compels) its player audience to resort to a kind of predation that has the capacity to seriously hurt.

The memes of an apocalypse

In economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.^[1] The term inflation once referred to increases in the money supply (monetary inflation); however, economic debates about the relationship between money supply and price levels have led to its primary use today in describing price inflation.^[2] Inflation can also be described as a decline in the real value of money—a loss of purchasing power in the medium of exchange which is also the monetary unit of account.^[3] When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services. A chief measure of general price-level inflation is the general inflation rate, which is the percentage change in a general price index, normally the Consumer Price Index, over time.^[4]

Stagflation is an economic situation in which inflation and economic stagnation occur simultaneously and remain unchecked for a period of time.^[1] The portmanteau stagflation is generally attributed to British politician Iain Macleod, who coined the term in a speech to Parliament in 1965.^[2][3][4] The concept is notable partly because, in postwar macroeconomic theory, inflation and recession were regarded as mutually exclusive, and also because stagflation has generally proven to be difficult and costly to eradicate once it gets started.

Biflation is the state of an economy where the processes of inflation and deflation occur simultaneously. During this period there is a rise in the purchasing prices of commodity items and a fall in the purchasing prices of non-commodity items.

And now we have Stimflation (link) !

So what kind of phenomena would you end up with? Let me take a wild guess – I see (gaze in crystal ball) Chinese smuggling crates of dollars into the US  via diplomatic mail and buying everything in sight. This already happens, but as soon as it starts to compress, I see chinese literally walking into discount stores and buying the whole store. I am not talking stuff manufactured in the US or normal Chinese – I am talking obscenely rich Chinese,  buying luxury commodities which are and stay in high demand and have practical value in China.  China cannot dump dollars effectively. But they can buy, and this will push out americans, and inflate the dollar. Food and rent and all that will become very expensive, very fast. Strangely enough most houses will still become worth less – why would a Chinese guy with too much dollar assets want to buy a suburban house? He will buy city apartments in good neighbourhoods and be in a unique bartering position (I want TEN of these apartments, whats deal can you offer me?) pushing out locals.

Unique times in the world, especially from a first world perspective. People in places like Brazil, India, Indonesia, former Eastern Bloc should know how this works, when obscenely rich westerners come and throw around their money leaving locals embittered and cynical.

What would be next? Osciflation (wild spikes up and down in the price of different product ranges) ? Exiflation (variants of inflation pushing people out of areas of economic traffic at the benefit of automated systems or foreign transactions) ?

I do not think it is unrelated, I think you will see more of this: Blood Magic Gang. LARP meeting vampire nihilism meeting cyberpunk meeting dystopia meeting completely ludicrous. Hello tomorrow!

Sample Streaming

I call this. Remember where you read it first.

(though chances are someone else is doing it already, someplace)

Pretty soon wearable speakers will be used to play short recognizable sound bites. Users of this system will use them in conversation, at tweaked sound levels, very spontaneously and fast. Say, dropping Schwarzenegger quotes in casual conversation. How would the interface work? Dont know but the market will find a way. My guess is by wearing a glove with buttons. The wearable boxes exist – the key now is a solid input device, rigging it to something that stores a fewhundred Gb of wavs,  a battery, some good software and you are set to take selfexpression (and annoyance) to a whole new level.

Wearable Speakers

Tablet

Glove Input that works

Reply to someone who believes in something

** That while there are a few thoughtful, interesting atheists, the majority are

** either rabid anti- religious zealots or people too ashamed to take

** responsibility for their actions in a supernatural sense?

…this is a tendentious, shortsighted and somewhat rude series of characterizations. Furthermore it is in part hypocrite. You underacknowledge why precisely atheists are militant; any christian or muslim would be defensive or militant in a world where active belief and veneration of Quetzalcouatl where the absolute norm. Whereas atheists are not subjected to human sacrifice, I speak loudly for my cause because …

— I deeply resent, if not actively loathe religion and the effect it had in my life. Let’s say I can be characterized and interpret my life as having been mentally abused by what I term god-ists as well as the idea of god-ism, and have suffered completely unacceptable societal implications because of the actions of followers dedicated to this idea.

I think this belief system is bad for people and bad for the world – and since I regard the idea of “the supernatural” as bunk, a constructed lie, or at best the inefficient operation of the human cognition, as a result of the miserable operation of the brain as a result of the miserable design process called evolution –  I regard claims about the supernatural in the same light.

I take limited responsibility for my actions, since I am not the author of most of my actions, and they occur separate from my will or consciousness. What’s more, I have a far different idea of free will as most likely you (and assorted other god-ists) do. I do not regard “the supernatural” as something that actually “is”, is to be considered in my cognitive evaluations, and if something like a supernatural does exist, it is described so wildly inconsistent that any scrutinous scientific assessment of the supernatural come up with no meaningful implication. I do acknowledge “the unknown” as real – but it is completely NON congruent with “the supernatural”.

If you actually read the book “the golden bough” you might conclude the same. Unfortunately you will conclude such for a few thousand OTHER religions than your own, and you will do so with unswerving prejudice.

** A) Theorizing on the motivations of peoples you don’t understand is, at best, pointless and at worst offensively stereotypical, and

Is there anything in the earlier post that would conclude you I have absolutely no sense of human nature, religious or not?

There you go again, as human beings have been known to do time and time again – once a human is not part of your tribe, it is to be excluded. Now I would regard that tendency as the most mischievous human quality ever. I completely loathe that behavior and you have just exhibited it. No my dear QM, I claim to understand these people all to well – however what I conclude from my understanding happens to be eminently unpalatable to your sentiments, for my inability to feel an inch of respect for the beliefs of ‘the religious’, or ‘the idea of a deity’ (and feel compelled to loathe both in equal measure) does not mean “outsider ignorance”.

Remember I had to sit through the fevered rantings of self-appointed charlatans and lunatics who imprinted the abusive and dehumanizing idea of hell – that quaint little private Auschwitz that this magnified santa keeps around to deal with his detractors – and trust me when I say I understand this circus of imbeciles all too well.

I don’t need to be French to understand French cuisine.

I don’t need to be Italian to understand Italian politics.

I dont need to be an imbecile to understand stupidity.

** B) The existence of any sort of divine or supernatural being cannot be based, at all, on

** the existence or behaviors of their adherents.

If thats the case, I urge you to to very cautious.

I am going to reveal something to you now.

Let me warn you about the potential existence of a very dark and macabre deity, that goes by the name of Nyarlathotep. He is a dark deity indeed, and he is the emissary of an unspeakably powerful super-Deity, called Azathoth. And Nyarlthotep is very much real, alive, in this world, in the here and now. 

As you may or may not know, Azathoth is the Titanic Consciousness (if one can speak of such a thing) in the center of our Galaxy. We know precisely where He resides – I can show you pictures of the stellar field in great detail : Sagittarius A*, look it up. Azathoth is the power and will and intent behind a series of natural phenomenon we scarce can comprehend. This force is completely disinterested in us, and merely waking up a brief period would almost certain destroy life on earth down to the microbial level. Even though by our standards Azathoth is insane, being composed of a nightmarish vortex of material phenomenon we barely have words for (what do terms such as “double photon rim” or “event horizon” or “accretion disk” mean to us mortals?) but He has a will, goals and His will if exerted would spell a doom worse than any Hell the christian desert chieftain deity could ever put forth.

Worse of all, Nyarlathotep, being his avatar and emissary, and representative of the daemonic court of Azathoth, appears in human form (as well as thousands of forms he has ruthlessly assimilated) and is with a casual sense of distracted entertainment, active and working on earth.

Nyarlathotep will eventually cause the destruction of our civilization, the death of most humans and the permanent insanity and physical contortion into twisted blasphemous shapes of those who survive.

As for afterlife – there is only afterlife as a lingering memory in the nightmarish brain of Azathoth, or lesser Daemons like Azathoth, such as Tsathoggua, Cthulhu, Shub Niggurath, or Hastur – a fate worse than death. We’d call that ” a mind upload” and of a kind you would not like. 

So what did I just do?

I described you a physical reality, a metaphysical or supernatural context, a destiny, a greater universal reality. Its easy for you to google all this, and then decide that H.P.Lovecraft is in fact not a feebleminded writer of horror stories, but is in fact The Prophet, foretold by the most horrible of books – the Necronomicon. But you won’t, because you don’t believe in superstitious nonsense. The thing is, you will discount my brief explanation, or interpret it as totally different from my claims. You will be easily led to conclude its just a fantasy, and a rather annoying and pointless fantasy. You can not conclude from what I said so far I have anything near the authority or insights to make the claim of Azathoth (god) and Nyarlathotep (his son) in any way relevant to your life. In fact, you will take great efforts to forget this parable.

I wonder why?

My guess is probably because this tale has absolutely no place, meaning, added value in your existence. It sounds horrid, and you reject it out of hand, and you do so rationalizing that its just some lines put on the internet by someone of no importance.

But remember…….. Nyarlathotep knows this too. He has also read these lines, and your post, and now He knows your name for He is able to see you, and see every day of your life from birth to death. Nyarlathotep is alive and well, in this very day, in this very world, and he works in mysterious and unspeakably foul ways… In fact, Nyarlathotep might be compelled to remember you…. which would be more ghastly a fate than I may wish upon you. For you would be inside him, in an eternal nightmare, from which there is no escape, escape to slowly turn into something as horrid as Nyarlathotep himself. Now do you believe in Nyarlathotep?

** Fascists tend to be horrible people. It does not follow that fascism does not exist.

People with psychotic episodes can do and say horrible things. They may even become horrible people. It does not follow that their psychotic episodes have any basis in reality, apart from being imperfections in their neurology. Their psychotic delusions do not exist in the real world.

Hell, I could even say the same thing about Fascism. Likewise, people under influence of LSD or Peyote see the most amazing things. Yet these people see them with the full knowledge they see caleidoscopic reflections of their own subconscious mind and the patterns generated by a tattered, disorderly human brain. 

ari…?

Did we discuss this kind of stuff in the boat?

Second Life, “A.I.”, bots and droids.

I happen to live in the world Second Life, as some readers may know and apart from some minor ventures into other places (IMVU, There) I tend to spend most time there and I consider myself somewhat of an authority by now. Well not really, I can build fairly well, but I overuse Prims. I make stuff but I dont make much real cash.

And I barely know LSL.

The funny thing is – the A.I. team responsible for running me in SL (yes it’s a team effort now) received some training in the dreadful actionscript language. That is an object oriented language that is similar to LSL and even though I suck at it, my hands are itching to start working using LSL in more depth in the next years. However, when I introduced into new ideas my mind wanders and immediately starts looking for the far extremes of what is possible in that medium. That gave me the following idea. This idea may not be original. Insiders, people who actually know more about LSL than silly old me (who barely read two pages of code) would probably consider this rather silly.

Linden Labs needs additional revenues. They need to sway users to spend more Lindens benefiting Linden Labs. I think I have an idea to syphon a greater percentage of Linden$ towards the LL coffers.

1

Enrich prims with a wholly new ability – to have prims contain L$. This may be a new window in the prim options window, since it should be linkable to all sorts of (possibly new) LSL methods. This could take the shape of a credit card, or a “quest award” that is given out by a shop owner. Giving out L$ content in these prims might be linked to group membership, location, having performed a series of set tasks or anything else that can be unambiguously falsified by LSL code checks. The automation of money containment in prims will allow shop or land owners  to automate hiring of new players for tasks. A prim that contains money should at the very list show what amount is contained in it, or (default) show the amount contained in it when anyone rightclicks the object. This idea is very important for the *next* idea.

2

Allow land owners a new option in their land management menu – this should allow for creation of objects on their land (default – this option should be OFF) that can move into their land, be rezzed there or are stationary there, and pay to exist. This setting should be accessible to all who want to know. Say a person designates a spot for selling an article on his or her land – and anyone who positions objects there has those objects *taxed* automatically as the above new game addition – a prim contains money and the PRIM loses its internal cash reserve. I think this will simply installing advertising/sales boxes. Land owners can decide to enact payments from hosted prims per day, minute or second.  They can enact a payment per prim the object signified – a 10 prim object residing on someone’s land may be charged more than a one prim object.

LL does not charge for *stationary objects* – But….

3

here is where it gets tricky – next LL implements a set of new codes (or an object option window) that allow for objects/prims to be animated according to a simple AI variable script. This may allow the creator to set movement speed, some sort of random movement template, linkage to scripting methods, maybe some sort of aggro-engine, making the prim aggro other (animated?) prims or characters. Then the script can set the object to have some sort of ‘hitpoints’, or have the object suffer damage directly channelled to the L$ quanta inside – in other words, a creator can set the hitpoints of an animated (mobile) prim to its value in Linden$.

But that isn’t everything. Next allow these prims to ambulate/hover/move/roll. The default movement would be some sort of slow hovering motion. The default paradigm of these animated prims would be a “droid’, compelling creators to actually shape them in the shape of robotic entities, or monsters.  Now I can even imagine a one-off fee to allow a prim to use the settings of an avatar model shape – i.e. this way anyone receives the option to create bots that have avatar shapes. Such objects should be marked as DROID unambiguously. If a creator uses these options, he pays for them – these droids/bots use the codes for animation, the object needs an inside reserve of Linden$. Next Linden Lab withdraws L$ from this primcontained reserve and empties it gradually. If the reserves hit zero, the bot/droid derezzes and evaporates (or get returned to a folder in the characters inventory labelled “bot cache”.   Depending on what LL calculates would be an appropriate server load, creating a droid should cost somewhere between 50 and 500 Linden$, and sustaining a bot (with bot options activated) costs several 1L$ (per prim?) per day. So a small R2D2 should cost about 100L$ per day to let wander, and so something the creator deems useful. Best of all a bot (or droid) has the ability to *receive* money from people.  Now the trick is to balance annoyance factor versus utility. A bot can be set to harass people about scientology, or it can be set to offer a special service. Good botting could be amazing on a welcome island, and they might create the most stunning wargame sims.

Again, existing land owners who get a heart attack thinking about this, would simply decide to not change the default settings – bots and droids not allowed on their land. But similarly hosting wandering bots might prove a new trickle of revenues for land owners. A good bot creator would then program his bots to agro negatively (fleeee!) if the droid or bot wanders into a land area that charges 1000L$ every minute to any wandering bots.

The ideal situation would be a small but noticeable number of bots on the mainland and (if purposefully to allow entry through gates or bothubs) island sims. Visitor bots would be on specific errands, most of should be not too annoying or ‘grievous’ .  The trick is to introduce LSL methods that allow for engineering these bots to a fine degree. I am sure existing scripting methods allows creation of these bots, and maybe it’s even possible to contrive of bots containing LS already, but a purpseful new Method(); would allow creators to work on wholly new sim content and (very interesting to me!) the formation of increasingly ingenuous AI structures.

This might be a very very useful development, since personally I am pretty sure that in the next years the real world will see a robot revolution, with toolbox hobbyist robot builders and clickandrun selfformatting components being sold to and implemented by hobbyists. SL might take an advance on the way such a robotics revolution might unfold.

4

It shouldnt be too hard to formulate a set of programming tools that allow users to create bots (primmed) or droids (avatarshapedriven, one of ten simple default droid skin) and instill them with several simple behavioral constraints. Players should be allowed an object to *zap a bot* as to give any ’spambot’ a serious negative agro, but not on all sims.

It would get really sexy if LL implemented new LSL methods that simulate specific limb qualities, such as “arm” (grabbing physical prims?) a mouth (causing damage, eating any stray prims that  contain accessible L$?) and legs (ambulation).  A leg should be a distinct entity that acts in a predefined way, according to a number of variables. Attaching a leg to a bot gives it a distinctive mode of walking – you see that exhibited in Spore. The same should be possible, albeit simpler, in SL.  “eyes” or “ears” should allow bots and droids to interact with avatars, talk to them (hopefully not annoyingly) and engage in activities that are beneficial to users of SL. Ideally bots should evolve quickly, become useful to their creators AND to people in other sims. The ideal bot would literally respond like an AI, and when queried should provide answers. Say, I see a mallbot and ask where I can find this or that article. The mallbot then takes me there or hands me a landmark or  – offers me to sell me a folder with landmarks for 1L$.

These bot based microtransactions could literally create a new cottage industry of content in SL, namely botbuilders. Some bots might last for days or weeks, as long as they were created bloody useful. Ideally bots should be allowed (or capable) to wander the mainland grids and move from sim to sim, as long as they are welcome. Many sims would be extremely suspicious of wandering bots, but some sim owners would create additional revenues hosting bots in this manner. Other sims would host elaborate wargames using automated creatures as monster encounters. And the mere existence of droids or bots that use these methods creates a certain load on Linden serves which in turn creates a strong impetus for LL to extract a fee for the mere existence of these things.

Has nobody thought of stuff like this before? Please let me know! I mean you can replicate entire ecologies of creatures that will allow adventuring. Plus – you can bet that people can come up with ideas nobody thought of before. This will generate options in Second Life that will be far more quickly evolving than any MMO in existence.

5

Finally, in the more remote future, LL might try and create a method called MUTATE. Allow these entities to slightly alter set variables in a prim. Likewise the purposeful creation of a method called Procreate(); would allow bots to spread wider according to succes rate. This would give rise to evolution. Imagine a series of complex wargames over sims, owners creating bots that are created to do things, attack each other, extract whatever L$ is in other bots as sustenance.  Discrete mutation rates would allow the creation of bots with slowly changing features, but more elaborate features might translate into a higher L$ tariff for the bot to exist.

I think this will vastly increase LL revenues, and will make SL a lot more engaging to new players.

Addendum 1

The discussion on this article already started. A friend suggested this might create a new market for LL – simulations. Imagine a shop owner wanting to model traffic in a Real World location. He can then hire specialists to model a complex and expensive simulation, OR he can build the simulation in SL, for probably onetenth the price. These programming tools might be convenient for people modelling traffic, panic in  a burning building, hollyday shoppers, people moving in and out of a large building, etc. Current LSL allows those programming constructs (and I have some nice daleks to show you how that currently works) but it takes quite a bit of contrivances and bughunting to make it work well.

An AI options window might prove be a feature in SL that may enrich the game in remarkable new ways.