Jim BlascovichCritiques

I had no idea second life was ever this popular. Maybe just in social psychology circles.

Like a primer about virtual reality for people who've had their head in a virtual bucket for the last twenty five years. ( But some useful info toward the end )

How do people interact in virtual reality? Pretty much as they would in actual reality. There's an underlying assumption in this book that virtual reality sophisticated enough to allow people to walk around inside a virtual world, or out in the real world using some kind of avatar, with all of their senses in tact, is inevitable. This seems an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish, to me. A lot of major breakthroughs in biology, artificial intelligence, and robotics would be needed. Those breakthroughs certainly aren't inevitable, and unless someone has a sudden insight that is the metaphorical equivalent of a Darwinian Finch hitting a Newtonian apple and splashing into an Archimedean bathtub, it won't happen soon. If these advances do happen, well, it would be kind of cool, although I am concerned that individual immortality in virtual worlds could lead to our species extinction in the physical world.

Like a primer about virtual reality for people who've had their head in a virtual bucket for the last twenty five years. ( But some useful info toward the end )

Mostly on the present and foreseeable-future state of virtual-reality technology and psychology. Though they do not project a path to true mind uploading (with consciousness preservation), the authors do imagine mortal people being indefinitely "outlived" by their highly realistic avatar simulations.