This says quite a lot about Elon Musk, I feel.

I'd counter his argument by saying its only been 40 years since pong, too short a time to be extrapolating too far into the future. I believe we are approaching a very real physical limit to transistor size, so I don't think its necessarily a given that in another 40 years we will have moved on the same distance. Basically for all we know this could be a momentary blip for a century or so.

but yeah, if you agree that we will continue to create increasingly sophisticated and powerful computers, and that humans continue to be for a little while, then ok, I think it is feasible that we could create a virtual world, which would make me quite terrified that our reality might suddenly BSOD.

I have watched Sword Art Online with my kids (5,7 yrs old) and after seeing the series they definitely get the idea of what a virtual world is, and would really like to experience that type of thing.

The cool thing is that by the time they are my age they probably will get to get close.

Well, I don't believe people have a soul, and miraculously, I've made it almost 36 years so far with an acceptable level of murder (i.e. none). Not that I haven't wanted to kill some people at times, but there's that whole annoying morality thing that I developed for myself.

That said, here's an interesting point. I don't have a problem gunning down hordes of beautifully rendered avatars because they have no sentience.

But what happens when that changes? At what point on the AI curve is it no longer acceptable to drop entities into a virtual world to experience fear and be slaughtered?

Iain M. Banks called it the simulation problem. Let's say you have a noble goal: you want to determine what economic methodologies will produce the best outcome for your citizens. So you develop a model of the countries economy, and in order to simulate it as accurately as possible you make each citizen an intelligent agent with needs, fears, desires, etc. You then subject them to a few million iterations with everything from fascism to communism and all stops in between. Right now? not a big deal. But in the future as computing power grows exponentially, the possibility of modelling those citizens as self ware becomes greater.

I don't mind killing a realistic avatar for fun. I wouldn't even mind if I knew that that avatar was controlled by a human doing the same. But I'd have a real problem killing an AI that could think and feel.

Next step? You wanna hide behind something? You actually crouch behind a virtual object...no more "automated hide by pressing 'X' ". You will be far more interactive. Imagine using this with Kinect, or Playstation Move....equipped with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. Imagine actually dodging attacks with body movements. It's the ultimate marriage of the physical and virtual world...

Neil should play Portal.

Personally what interests me about the future of videogames is the prospect of more advanced AI. Seems that the goal of games for a while has been life like graphics and proper physics. We're getting pretty close there, but it still leaves us with a rather empty virtual world. I'd be much more interested in creating a virtual ecosystem complete with all forms of life, both simple and complex that are all able be autonomous. The rise of parallel processing/multiple cores might make this sort of thing a reality, as well as more realistic AIs. Hell, maybe the technological singularity will emerge from game development...

Oh shit, I forgot about the cyberpuck, which sounds like a robotic Shakespeare character. <- boom goes the dynamite.
And the whole 1280 x 800 smacks of bs to me in the same way Forte's claims of 512x460 did: adding together the per-eye resolution. Granted, they seem to be upfront about the vertical resolution of 800 (which isn't great for 2012 either) but that horizontal res? Boolshit! It might be 1280 for an iguana with eyes on either side of it's head, looking at different shit per eyeball all its life. But for we humans, each eyeball pretty much looks at the same thing, not accounting for parallax of course. So I'd say the actual horizontal resolution might approach 800, depending on how much they want each eye to "share" as it were. So it's essentially a giant square.

Naysaying/partypooping aside, it still looks promising. There's nothing quite like moving your head around to observe a virtual world: it affords the kind of immersion you can't touch with a standard monitor setup, I don't care how big it is. <- that's what she never says. Boom again!

>> ^probie:

>> ^shuac:
Back in '96, I bought a Forte VFX-1 which was a VR headset with stereoscopic vision, very comfy over-the-ear headphones, and motion tracking. All for about $1000.
Each eyeball had it's own little LCD screen (263x230) and I can tell you that it looked like pure ass. Despite it's shortcomings, I played the original System Shock with it and I still have very fond memories of skulking through Citadel station with that thing strapped to my melon.
While I'm not interested in contributing to a kickstarter campaign (after all, that's why we have venture capitalists), I may be interested in a finished retail product.

Ha! I, too, bought a VFX-1 headset. (Had to buy a separate Number Nine S3 Virge card as well so the interface cable would work). I never did play SS1 on it, but I did roll through Quake 1 and all of it's mission packs, as well as used it for Looking Glass' Flight Unlimited. I never used the Cyberpuck controller, as it wasn't very intuitive to me. Once GLQuake came out (which had to run at nothing less than 512x384) that was the final nail in the coffin. But fun times while it lasted.

>> ^deathcow:

I believe these minecraft computers will evolve until they are more powerful than the cpu they are running on. I have just read that they are porting the Apache web server to minecraft currently using cube expressions. It is finally a perfectly object oriented development environment, the first to pass the Jefferson Test of true object orientation - where the objects can be physically picked up and carried around. This is a first. It is pioneering work and eventually your bionic kidneys will probably be running an embedded minecraft operating system.

How is it possible to run a virtual CPU faster than the one its running on? Surely the "real" cpu still has to do all the leg work, the whole thing has to be stored in "real" memory etc. Don't get me wrong, its still amazing to build something like that in a virtual world, but its still really just a simulation.

Unless your saying that one day you could build a minecraft computer that is faster than todays ones...then yah I could see that being possible.

@jonny also sifted this.
>> ^L0cky:

Upvoted, but to be honest they could have been making all that up for all I know.
Also I'm surprised by the amount of steps and chemical reactions considering the response time between thinking and doing. Did anyone share my naive imagining of magical electricity shooting from my brain and contracting my muscles?
What I'd find interesting is learning how nerve impulses (also known as action potentials!) form, or begin. How they get from or are cued from this seemingly virtual world of my thoughts into actual things that do stuff to my body.

>> ^L0cky:

Upvoted, but to be honest they could have been making all that up for all I know.
Also I'm surprised by the amount of steps and chemical reactions considering the response time between thinking and doing. Did anyone share my naive imagining of magical electricity shooting from my brain and contracting my muscles?
What I'd find interesting is learning how nerve impulses (also known as action potentials!) form, or begin. How they get from or are cued from this seemingly virtual world of my thoughts into actual things that do stuff to my body.


Essentially you have a branching network of fibers (dendrites) that join together at the neuron (brain cell) body. If enough of these dendrites stimulate the neuron body then the neuron sends the action potential, if there is not enough stimulation, then no action potential is sent. So while a neuron can be activated in a variety of ways (e.g dendrites coming from various areas of the brain) there is only one outcome - either the action potential is sent or it isn't.

Movement is a lot more interesting than just thought - action potential - movement, however. This is because parts of our brain can store movement patterns, so many of our learned movements (e.g. dancing) just need a trigger and then some movement pattern is initiated at a sub-conscious level - the cerebellum is a part of the brain that helps with this.

>> ^L0cky:
Upvoted, but to be honest they could have been making all that up for all I know.
Also I'm surprised by the amount of steps and chemical reactions considering the response time between thinking and doing. Did anyone share my naive imagining of magical electricity shooting from my brain and contracting my muscles?
What I'd find interesting is learning how nerve impulses (also known as action potentials!) form, or begin. How they get from or are cued from this seemingly virtual world of my thoughts into actual things that do stuff to my body.


@L0cky - I was worried the jargon would be a bit too much. The video definitely assumes knowledge of certain physiology concepts. I'd be happy to explain as much of that as you like. But I'm not sure if you're asking about the basic biology, or something more metaphysical in the sense of how conscious thought is transformed into patterns of neural activation.

As for the speed of the process, keep in mind that this is at a molecular scale. This is all happening at the speed of very tightly coordinated chemical reactions.

Upvoted, but to be honest they could have been making all that up for all I know.

Also I'm surprised by the amount of steps and chemical reactions considering the response time between thinking and doing. Did anyone share my naive imagining of magical electricity shooting from my brain and contracting my muscles?

What I'd find interesting is learning how nerve impulses (also known as action potentials!) form, or begin. How they get from or are cued from this seemingly virtual world of my thoughts into actual things that do stuff to my body.

Fixing someones computer by defragging the hard drive? Retarded.
He also installs some virtual world game on NOT HIS computer. You're fired.
No actual computer knowledge was used or harmed in the making of this program.

>> ^jimnms:

Reminds me of this flash game.


Dang, I got busted halfway. I suck in both real and virtual worlds.

>> ^Deano:

>> ^deathcow:
> So what's the point of doing this?
the same as using videosift

I doubt that.
I'm just wondering what the next step is after creating such a vast and obviously complex virtual world. Is there a game to be played after that point that utilises those assets?


It's Legos.

>> ^Deano:

>> ^deathcow:
> So what's the point of doing this?
the same as using videosift

I doubt that.
I'm just wondering what the next step is after creating such a vast and obviously complex virtual world. Is there a game to be played after that point that utilises those assets?


The game is that you define the game, so in a sense you are right. On videosift we 'play' within certain rules (as in Minecraft) - the difference is that Minecrafts rules seem to only really be limited by imagination and time.