From: Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Sun Dec 08 1996 - 11:50:18 MST
Ambitious, imaginative and interesting proposal - I'd love to see
it implemented. Maybe, we can split it into Zones of thought: if
you can't pass the arithmetic entrance test, you can admire the
wonders of the Institute of Complexity from a distance, but can't
touch them, or talk to their developers.
The only downside that I see to this is that such creation would
require effort to the tune of tens of millions of dollars (and then
a lot more still). This could be done incrementally and after some
point the project may become self-supporting financially. Still, for
the time being directing extropian effort into the more substantive
development and propagation of ideas probably makes more sense.
Ironically, the first large-scale VRML worlds that we may see,
will most likely host various simulations of flesh, group sports,
and "uploads" of natural objects/scenes. Thais is quite typical for
many breakthrough situations, when the opportunities provided by
the advanced fringe are exploited by the old but still powerful
Establishment. (My other examples here would include human
intelligence that is still a servant to people's primary animal
urges, and results of the democratic revolution in Russia that
came through passionate struggle of its best people but were
mostly used to enrich the powerful Communist scums).
I wonder if this scheme of events is going to work all the way
through the rest of the social upload process (so far the liberation
of different social functional mechanisms from the old physical
carriers has been changing the tools, but not the nature, of the
society). Imagine the first uploaded people as Col. Quaddafi,
Ross Perot, Pope, Michael Jordan, Pamela Anderson, Jean-Claud
VanDamme - with lots of goodies in their worlds and millions of
eager-to-follow fans.
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Alexander Chislenko <sasha1@netcom.com> www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html
Firefly Network, Inc.: <alexc@firefly.net> www.ffly.com
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