These are just a few emerging, mainstream technologies that have incredible implications, IMHO.MMORPG farmers offer to play the million+ user online role-playing game World of Warcraft on your behalf for a fixed hourly rate. And they're actually getting people to sign up. The value of 'leveling up' in a virtual game is high to people who don't mind paying a little money to play the game as a super God.
Club Neverdie... An online-only exclusive club where you can rent an apartment. The owner paid $100,000 for a space station within the virtual world. "Make Real Cash!"
The fact that all we need is a graphic upgrade and display-goggles for virtual reality will creep up on people. Live invincibly, limitlessly with the helmet or 'logoff' to your regular, miracle-free life.
Small devices like the Microsoft Table blending the line between virtual and real. I put my real camera on the table, and virtual photos appear on the table, but I can manipulate them with my hands as if they were real objects. A child would probably guess the photos are 'within' the table.
The theory that we are progressing towards a singularity.
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Image courtesy of Wings of a Messiah
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If the line is becoming blurred now, it is only going to get fuzzier. We may see this as the pinnacle of human existence - to create life that is smarter, better than we are. It will solve our problems, or at least allow us to escape them. It will easily see how to reverse global warming. It will cure cancer. It will give us an alternate universe where we can feel just as fulfilled as in this one, only without the petty annoyances of gravity or mortality.
And yet...
This makes one question what life really is. What it means to be alive, and to be a human being. If we do reach the singularity, that moment when we have truly created technology that surpasses human intelligence, there will be no turning back. If it is "better" than we are, have we created life? Something to serve our ends? Will this technological being, in its subjectively infinite wisdom, deem the human race to be a plague on the earth and recommend that we be eradicated? Will it figure out that to cure cancer, all we need to do is rid ourselves of these limited and mortal pieces of flesh we call bodies? Will it have morals, or will it see these as "in the way" of progress? Will its goal be progress or something that we have no conception of?
None of these questions can have an answer, because if we ever do reach that point, it will be beyond the limits of our current imagination. So push yourself and imagine, think of your own questions, if only because it is these questions that need answering before we can begin to answer the ones we don't know.
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