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Book Review: Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution

surfdaddy April 29, 2011 3728 Views 2 Comments

Ray Kurzweil has commented that we'll be spending quite a bit of our time in virtual reality environments in the coming decades. They'll be full immersion, and, as in Second Life, you can be someone else if you choose. Or several someones. “Re-creating Yourself” is but one of the chapters in the new book, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolutio...

Collective AI: A Conversation with MIT’s Jeff Orkin

surfdaddy April 5, 2011 7343 Views No Comments

You’re the director in an ultra-low-budget movie set around an alien encounter. You select scenes, summon special effects, and play the supporting cast members: G-Man, Scientist, Alien, and Little Girl. Your lead actor Ted is a struggling reporter who wakes up tied-up on an alien spaceship. What do you do? You improvise.

Tom Boellstorff on Being Virtual

surfdaddy February 21, 2011 8312 Views 10 Comments

What does it mean to be virtual? Pioneering anthropologist Tom Boellstorff's recent appearance on the the weekly Metanomics event series suggests that our digital and “real” lives — our avatar selves and our physical ones — inform each other in highly complex ways that are not yet fully understood. I interview Tom to find out more about the patterns that make us both real and virtual.