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Photo-realistic and near photorealistic 3D virtual environments are coming in 2013.

Learn more about the state of the art CAVE 2 virtual reality environment.

Rapper Tupac Shakur, who died at age 25 in a 1996 shooting, recently made headlines when he appeared on stage with Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre at the Coachella 2012 festival. The Tupac “hologram” performed Hail Mary and 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted with Snoop Dogg before dissipating into thin air, leaving the audience in awe, and somewhat unsettled, by the technology used to make the rapper reappear and perform.

The human psyche is highly fragile in the times of stress, and it’s only appropriate to assume that the simulated voices will follow us more and more, just like the GPS in your car telling you to turn around the corner. We must apply tight user experience guidelines to some of these simulations.

Simulated reality without consent is basically slavery, it’s an atrocity, which no intelligent being could condone.

Computers are supposed to help us each to do more than what we could do before. I’m working on that. Someone once asked me when I thought it would be possible for a single author to create an epic like “Doctor Zhivago” — the movie, not just the book. My response was that it’s now or never! If we want to pursue this type of deep authorship, it’s up to us to pursue the tools to give us that power. On the other hand, if we want to continue the large studio approach… well, our work is done.

1. Chemical brain preservation is a technology that may soon be validated to inexpensively preserve the key features of our memories and identity at our biological death.
2. If either chemical or cryogenic brain preservation can be validated to reliably store retrievable and useful individual mental information, these medical procedures should be made available in all societies as an option at biological death.
3. If computational neuroscience, microscopy, scanning, and robotics technologies continue to improve at their historical rates, preserved memories and identity may be affordably reanimated by being “uploaded” into computer simulations, beginning well before the end of this century.
4. In all societies where a significant minority (let’s say 100,000 people) have done brain preservation at biological death, significant positive social change will result in those societies today, regardless of how much information is eventually recovered from preserved brains.

It will not take long until most people will be connected most of the time to a set of devices that can read their thought processes and emotions and record what they do and say to whom at the same time.

Today’s guest post continues our theme on the Future of Work in a somewhat different direction: the performing arts and music.

The rise of digital music and music sharing has challenged the existing economics of the music business. And at the same time these very technologies offer artists new ways to connect with fans, customers, and other artists. A shared virtual reality environment presents an entirely new creative means for performing music and sharing music and other art as well as potentially providing a platform for selling or exchanging it.

Linda Rogers has been organizing musical performance in Second Life for half a decade. Linda shares some of the history, issues, and challenges she encountered along the way to five years of virtual reality performances in which she quite arguably and somewhat accidentally invents an entirely new art form — the shared virtual reality musical performance.

As the Singularity approaches, the very nature of work and many of the tools we use on a daily basis will change radically. Chances are that most of you reading this article are sitting at something called a desk right now. But what are desks and why do we have them? What is the future of the desk? What about mobile and augmented reality technologies? Can’t they make the very idea of a desk obsolete?

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.