subject: Believe In Extreme Realities [print this page] Believe In Extreme Realities Believe In Extreme Realities
Those who have seen the movie 'The Matrix' have already been exposed to a quite plausible idea: that humans could live in a virtual world that they thought was real while their bodies lay encapsulated in fluid. The pretense was that artificial intelligence had become aware and were using the bodies as electric 'batteries.' That's a pretty silly notion considering that the AI organism could obtain power from almost anywhere.
But what if people themselves discovered that they could actually live and prosper in virtual worlds? It's already happening. Download 'Second Life' from the Web and create a whole new you, full of possibilities. The online game is a sort of a hybrid between a sim game and Facebook. But in this game, you are the sim. But Second Life is just the very beginning of a revolution that is going to sweep humanity and revolutionize the notion of reality. In an age where a company like Google can become a multibillion dollar sensation overnight, it is obvious that networking and computer technology are fusing so fast that they are no nearly impossible to separate.
In the future, virtual worlds will be created and I predict that commerce and even politics will flourish in these environments. Money will be made in the real sense of the word, and, strangely, we may reach a point where we start to wonder about what to do with our bodies as we spend more and more of our time in virtual worlds instead of this one. With the addition of cybertechnology, the outcome may be very bizarre indeed. We may end up in a world where millions or billions of people willingly have themselves encapsulated and maintained so that pursue their virtual lives (any number of which they may be living at the same time).
And it is not at all implausible to suggest that most new technology in the future will come from virtual spaces, not 'real' ones. The energy configurations of the mind will remain the same after all, and the material brain will be fused with silicon hardware. And we wouldn't be slaves like in 'The Matrix.' We'd be fused with AI, but we'd be the master.
