Second Life creator, Philip Rosedale, and Ray Kurzweil discuss current day and future status of virtual reality and its implications in the singularity. While we are not living in the virtual world yet, workplace applications are on the rise.
Ray Kurzweil: If you go into 2045, we’ll be spending most of our time in virtual reality. Right now people spend some of their time in virtual reality environments, virtual worlds like Second Life. Today it doesn’t look as real as real reality. You know, if you look at video games and look at how we’ve gone from Pong up to fairly realistic renditions today. Same thing will happen in these virtual reality environments.
Creator of Second Life, Philip Rosedale: These sort of exponential trends that Ray talks about are nowhere more visible than in a place like secondlife where exponential growth has dominated without variation. It’s interesting to see this sort of exponential growth phenomena applied to a world like second life and realize. Of course, that the virtual world is the one growing exponentially, whereas the real world, of course, is not.
Ray Kurzweil: Ultimately this virtual reality will go inside the brain and then we really will be full-emergent with all the senses. Virtual reality ultimately will have all the features of real reality plus a lot more that you can choose from millions of virtual environments. You can be someone else, you don’t have to pick the same boring body every time. You can be different people and different situations and overtime our biological bodies will become obsolete. We’ll have many bodies and we’ll look back to the idea of having one body and being dependent on this one biological body and having no backup for out mind-file as a very primitive time.
TRANSCENDENT MAN. The Singularity Documentary.
The singularity documentary that chronicles the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist. Ray known for his bold vision of the Singularity, a point in the near future when technology will be changing so rapidly, that we will have to enhance ourselves with artificial intelligence to keep up. Ray predicts this will be the dawning of a new civilization in which we will no longer be dependent on our physical bodies. We will be billions of times more intelligent and there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality.
Human aging and illness will be reversed; world hunger and poverty will be solved and we will ultimately cure death. Critics accuse Ray of being too optimistic and argue that the dangers of the Singularity far outweigh the benefits. It pointing out the apocalyptic implications that once machines achieve consciousness, we may not be able to control them. Whether Ray’s controversial ideas incite excitement or fear, dogma or disbelief this ambitious documentary will forever change the way you look at life, death, and your own future.