Re: Why the future needs everyone!

From: KPJ (kpj@sics.se)
Date: Tue Mar 21 2000 - 06:05:24 MST


It appears as if Jim Fehlinger <fehlinger@home.com> wrote:
|
|By the way -- for a transhuman angle to all this -- I consider my
|multimedia PCs and computer-based home theater to provide a crude
|form of virtual reality (at this stage, really just a digital
|replacement for earlier forms of analog media -- never mind the goggles
|and body suits).

I believe more in augmented reality (AR) than virtual reality (VR).
VR technology might well become a major entertainment player for the
``couch potato'', but then it'll just become a toy. To use the power
for something relevant, IMO AR would be the ticket. When some major corp.
starts selling cheap AR sets (wearables), then the chip really hits the fan.

+ I expect this sort of virtual reality (entertainment
|for the masses is the supercilious way of looking at it, and notice
|I didn't even mention pornography -- until now) to be:

|1) capable of sucking up the most advanced information technology
|available in the commercial sector for the foreseeable future and

Virtual characters working as fronts for one computer system or another,
like the virtual Japanese pop star and the virtual TV news anchor. And
random very-realistic games personae of games (watch out for Tekken 6).

|2) the most painless and "fun" way for artificial information
|processing technology (whether intelligent or not) to infiltrate
|and colonize human civilization (and perhaps even the human nervous
|system, as Kurzweil suggests in _The Age of Spiritual Machines_).

I feel the stench of a Sceptic Tank. VR would require one to immerse into a
virtual world, and block out the real one. Nah.. AR? Maybe. VR? No way!

|Medical applications, while more noble, are neither painless nor
|fun (doctors give most people the willies), and the sort of
|accounting applications that have been the bread-and-butter of
|information technology ever since the Babylonians started
|inscribing numbers on clay tablets are dull as dishwater
|(that's what I do for my employer).

Heh heh.. Just wait 'til govt agents look like a cyborg unit of the major
borganism of U.S.Govt. The Augmented Men of Tomorrow, soon to strike terror
in _your_ neighbourhood!

   /kpj



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