Is managed experience still real?

Would a simulated experience feel as real if one knew it was a simulated experience? Would part of someone hold back from truly experiencing the situation by knowing it was not fully "real"? Will the simulated experiences of uploaded human consciousnesses be real enough to replace those that we currently experience in the physical world?

For example, could a digital human feel the same sentiments of community, togetherness, nationalism, belongingness, etc. from a simulated digital gathering of community members that ve could in the current physical world picnic, political rally, concert, soccer game, etc.? Would large group simulations be any different than 1:1 simulations?

It might be the conventional wisdom at first, that knowing something is a simulation, one would not fully give oneself to the experience, but examples of other simulation-type experiences - which are not at all as immersive as the ones coming - indicate that in fact people do completely give themselves to the simulation, e.g.; reading a book, playing video or alternate reality games, and may even have trouble reimmersing in the real world, e.g.; the Stanford prison experiment.

In fact, simulated experiences will probably feel even more real and have the possibility of being managed with settings just like other current digital experiences; one could dial up or down the intensity or other parameters as preferred, some people may want more charge, more light, more sound, different sound, more pleasure receptors firing, more intellectual wonder, more fascination, others might want less.

The amount of self-awareness that can come from altering and fine-tuning one's experience of experience could facilitate a new era of interaction amongst intelligences since much of current interaction and communication involves personal constraints (e.g.; ego, acknowledgement, acceptance needs etc.).

Experience management is not new, right now meat humans indirectly manage their experience using drugs, alcohol, caffeine, exercise, TV, conversation, etc. to enhance or dull pleasant or unpleasant experiences, what would it be like to move the intensity bar up or down pre-experience? Or have several self sims running with different parameter mixes to capture the event in just the right way since the most pleasant and unpleasant events are often not pre-determined.

Is managed experience still real? Shouldn't the individual have the freedom to choose?

Prosper P2P Finance Update

A year after launching, Prosper, the eBay of loans, has seen more than $27 million in fundings at its P2P finance site. The firm is celebrating with a user conference confab modeled after eBay Live - Prosper Days - next week in San Francisco. The event is sold out but interested parties can attend the pre-conference cocktail on Sunday evening.

As of February 1, 2007, $27 million was extended in 5,427 loans at an average loan size of $5,000. The average loan size has declined from $6,000 as of November 1, 2006 when $20 million had been extended in 3,372 loans. The mix of loans across credit tiers is generally the same, with C, D, E, HR (high risk) and NC (no credit) categories garnering more listings and fundings than AA, A and B tiers but all tiers are growing.

Continuing to answer the question "Does P2P microcredit work?" the chart below shows how Prosper loans have been performing. The pink and turquoise lines represent Prosper defaults, loans 3+ months late, as of November 1, 2006 and February 1, 2007. Prosper defaults are still stabilizing into a consistent level but have remained lower than Experian defaults, strangely in all but the top credit tiers. One year into the P2P lending business is too early to conclusively determine that P2P lending is lower risk than traditional unsecured lending but the initial signs are good. Low defaults in addition to the favorable interest rates available on the site should entice more investors to lend capital on the Prosper platform.

Another important question is “Does group lending work?” that is, does the social pressure of being a group member increase the likelihood of repayment? Prosper claims that being a group member aids funding and improves repayment but has implemented their group program more like a multi-level marketing program than a true Grameen-style borrower peer group program. The chart below depicts the performance of Prosper group member loans vs. all loans and shows that in the lower credit tiers, C, D, E and HR, the main areas of Prosper borrowing, group loans perform worse than non-group loans.

BarCampUSA 2007 - Webstock – the summer of LØVE

Tickets ($50 for all 4 days) for BarCampUSA's August 23-26 Woodstock for Techies at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds near Madison, WI go on sale this Wednesday.

BarCamp only just began in 2005 in response to Tim O'Reilly's annual A-list techies only Foo Camp in Sebastopol, CA when others decided to have their own participation-friendly conference and started a revolution. The concept quickly eclipsed its beginning and exploded into a global network of unconferences to support the demand for technophiles everywhere to learn, share, collaborate, teach and participate.

Though still in the early stages, BarCampUSA 2007 organizers are planning for 5,000 attendees. The event has the potential to be a real Webstock for the national psyche by more fully capturing the hearts and minds of a generation and the general public into a movement, especially if policy sessions around Net Neutrality and other issues get organized. This generation of catalyzers is technophiles who have already begun to redefine the world as it is currently known.

Geekdom has become cool, because of the instant success and celebrity of numerous wonderpreneurs but more deeply due to the philosophic resonance of innovation, improvement and life enablement. Being a geek is being capable, tech savvy with the multitude of technologies, gadgets, and websites that permeate contemporary culture. Everyone wants to be innovating, commenting, creating, helping and just being part of it.

Regarding BarCamp2007, it might be good to wait and see what kind of connectivity and power is going to be provided. It would not be a bad idea to turn up a MAE-WISC Internet Exchange Point to accommodate the massive flood of text, photo and video traffic bits, and oh, can I eBay my Foo Camp ticket?

Technology ... the reality of the future

Immobile Mobile Platform

Class I Innovation
The common theme of recently Tier-A venture-backed mobile companies Flurry, SoonR and Dash, and social networking platform ccube is that they are not really mobile. The main work occurs at the stationary platform which is oh, by the way downloaded to a mobile device and in some cases best used with a [power-consuming] preferably always-on tether to the stationary platform.

Certainly there is use for these services for email and news via text/SMS plans for mainstream non-smart phones without Internet plans, desktop synchronization and next-gen GPS with web-based local search functionality but worrying about creating cool ajaxy websites for the stationary platform does not truly extend the mobile platform.

Class II Innovation
Class II innovations involve a different mindset - thinking of the mobile device as an asset not a liability and thinking of the mobile device and devices as a true platform. The idea is to accentuate and extend the mobile platform and innovate new applications and services for use on the go.

Some of these could include more sensor-based services regarding the local setting, permissioned messaging from local merchants via text, Internet or voice (push a hotkey to have a service call you with the name and details of nearby wifi cafes, 3-star restaurants with immediate availability). That the phone is a phone is often forgotten for efficient asynchronous information delivery. Distribute platform services could include accessing anonymized data from other nearby phones which have made similar requests via push or pull, or using other crowd-search smarts for similar information.

Mobile is inherently multidisciplinary and innovations in hardware, integration and other software areas such as speech recognition as they arrive will likely continually redefine the mobile platform and trigger new waves of services development. Presumably in the not too distant future, mobile and stationary should be somewhat meaningless distinctions (like digital and biological intelligence) when considering the ubiquitous wide-band continually communicating computing grid.

Bots challenge Second Life's 3 million residents

Second Life est arrivée. The big news is not about the immersive world's meteoric growth, now topping 3 million residents after having only 100,000 residents a year ago. Neither is Second Life's USD $1 million a day economy making a lot of news.

Interestingly, what is making news is the in-world tension between avatars and bots. With their quicker reflexes, land buying bots have been beating avatars to the punch in purchasing scarce real estate as it becomes available. The land bots are alt instances, additional avatars controlled by the same person in order to be able to access the First Land privilege extended to newbies. Philip Linden recently stated that people have on average 1.25 avatars, suggesting that there are about 500,000 in-world alts.

The real challenge is that the groundswell of new residents has overwhelmed Linden Lab's ability to provide new land resources, thereby triggering a huge digital scarcity. The bots appear to be an example of human ingenuity in attempting to obtain a scarce resource. The bots are not illegal however disgruntled residents have been lobbying Linden Lab to oppose bots and Linden Lab has agreed to look into the possibility of including anti-spam captcha technology in the land-buying process.

The Second Life land buying bot friction is a microcosm of how humans are likely to respond to AGI, particularly if resource scarcity is at all an issue. The strong need of the human to speak out on emotion-driven issues such as fairness, ethics, sentimentality and perceived mistreatment should not be underestimated.

Off to build my bots...

Stocks 2.0: metrics, blogs and reviews

The Web 2.0 movement should be providing a whole new level of accessible validated aggregated information regarding publicly traded companies.

1) Standardized non-financial metrics
There should be standardized reporting (as for financial statements) and a template and widget code for socially responsible investment screening data in the usual areas: Business Practices and Governance, Environment, Human Rights, Diversity, Labor, Community, Animal Testing and Tobacco, Alcohol, Weapons and Gambling.

Currently, this research is developed and implemented in proprietary ways by Citizens Funds, Calvert, the Social Venture Technology Group and others who could work in standards bodies and open source ways.

2) Ecosystem information
Corporate employee blogs should be on Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, etc. Customer, vendor and supplier reviews and D&B, Better Business Bureau and Chamber of Commerce data should be aggregated. More usable data regarding insider trades, litigation and negative PR would also be helpful. Companies can make themselves more attractive by providing this information as well as access to some permissioned-level of internal prediction markets and other innovative investment-worthy information.

3) Publicly available supervisor reviews
As the world is Yelp-ified with ubiquitous reviews, businesses can be competitive in complying with the expectation for reviews. Public CEO, executive and general management reviews may become commonplace and expected. Academic review sites have surmounted the attendant legal issues and become de rigueur in providing professor reviews with sites like RateMyProfessors and CourseReviews; why not for corporate bosses too.

4) NLP and other AI tech tools
Mutual funds and hedge funds are paying up for a new set of AI tools using NLP, natural language processing, to rapidly assess early signs of potential stock movement from rumblings in the blogosphere and news articles provided by companies such as CollectiveIntellect and Novamente. At some point all information posted to the Internet including podcasts and videos will need to be searched and aggregated. Making some versions of these bubble-up NLP-based summarization tools publicly-available could improve their value and acceptance.

Why stop at two genders?

All humans start as the same raw brain in the first few weeks in the womb and express gender characteristics (chromosomal, gonadal, endocrine, morphological, genital and brain gender identity) based on a known blueprint of hormone baths over the next weeks and years.

This suggests that other kinds of humans could possibly be created, including other genders or specializations of genders, by administering other hormones, other doses of hormones or stimulating other brain areas. As testosterone shrinks the communications center and expands the fear and aggression center in the male brain, so could some other hormone influence other areas of the brain, stimulating olfactory centers, for example, to improve the perceptual survival capacities of space colony dwellers.

Many forms of hormone management are already in use and it is likely that the area will become much more understood, manipulable, acceptable and normal including such techniques as continuous menstrual suppression in females, testosterone suppression in males and in-body auto-regulators for a variety of medical purposes. Designer hormones would follow in lockstep with designer genes.

del.icio.us for people

Why does del.icio.us for people not exist yet? This would be a means of tagging people with words; annotating their interest areas, likes and dislikes, how you know them, where you met them and probably many other aspects of meta data.

People-tagging would ideally have full portability across the Internet including social networking applications (myspace, LinkedIn, plaxo, etc.), personal IM, email and blogs and corporate/other group applications. Like regular webtags, peopletags could be self-assigned and/or discovered and shared with tiered permissioning.

Instant Affinity Tag Communication - Next Gen RSS
Imagine being able to instantly transmit news, blogposts, videos, events, etc. to a variety of affinity groups without having to remember which friends and colleagues are interested in which topics, Markets 2.0, videoblogging, sustainable energy, etc.

Even more robust would be a next generation of RSS, auto-alerting any identity with a "Singularity" tag, for example, with immediate notice of any new content tagged with Singularity posted to the Internet. Instant Affinity Tag Communication would not only provide richer data streams but also allow anonymity and reduce the requirement of personal relationships to obtain information.

Is it ethical to tag people?
Why not? A tag cloud accompanying people would be a better implementation of currently self-specified interest areas. Like many technologies, some form of people-tagging seems inevitable and mostly productive. The legal frontier would grow to address the extension of libel and slander as hate-tagging, inaccurate tagging and other problematic tagging occurred. Early people-tagging implementations could allow only self-tagging.

A people tagging system could be imbued with trust and value through tag attribute granularity such as by having a parameter for self-tagged vs. tagged by close-circle or wide-world others, disputed/ambiguous/conflicting tags and the ability to filter based on tag attributes.

Early Signals of Acceleration as 2007 Begins

Historically, technology typically solved discrete problems in open territory such as how to get database systems to talk to accounting systems or how to simulate the Earth’s climate in a computer model.

Now there is a deeper shift occurring which promotes change in the form of unsought improvements to the wide-ranging structure and institutions of society, to all of life. The thinking that has been creatively applying technology to problems is starting to question all aspects of how we experience life and redefine long-standing traditional social, economic and political models and problems at all levels including physicality/stuff (stuff-ness), information and concept. There is a tremendous opportunity for participation in this process. The toppling of societal models is underway in three key areas…


ECONOMICS - INDIVIDUAL AGENTS REPLACE 200 Y.O. INSTITUTIONS
The most fundamental changes to status quo are currently visible in the economics sphere.

1. Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law professor extensively studied at Harvard’s Berkman School, points out that for 150 years, information and culture has been produced at the capital-intensive industrial scale and nearly all society is currently organized around this. Now, however, there are radical changes re-jiggering the creation of information goods and culture to increasingly occur in distributed open source models of participation by individuals. The subtext is the impending demise of traditional institutional models.

2. Markets 2.0 is driving capital allocation decisions to the individual in unprecedented ways deflecting power from existing capital markets with institutionally-disintermediated P2P affinity-directed investment, philanthropic, purchasing and human productive capital.

3. We are becoming a multi-currency society with reputation and ideas supplementing, replacing and ultimately surpassing monetary currency as the medium in which value is reflected.


POLITICS – BEGGING FOR CHANGES
Politics has not changed much yet. The time is ripe for many ideas such as these two and hopefully the 2008 US Presidential elections will be the catalyst:

1. Google Earth-like zoom perspectives of aggregated searchable political information integrating 1) real-time congressional voting records, 2) parties to whom budget allocations/public contracts are awarded, 3) lobbyist/PAC activities and 4) OpenSecrets, NewsMeat, etc. campaign contributions.

2. A daily barometer on MySpace, AARP, SeniorWorld, SecondLife and other social network giant homepages or newspaper homepages measuring and broadcasting real-time political sentiment.


SOCIETY - INCREASE IN INDIVIDUAL AGENCY
Blogging, MySpace, YouTube, polyamory/multiamory attitudes, social networks and reputation building have compounded to create a more open, freedom-oriented, feedback-giving, opinion-forming sharing and discussing deliberating society. This has ultimately resulted in greater agency-taking by individuals in all areas of life, as political agents, as economic agents, as social agents and in every other area of virtual and physical reality.

Applications for human agency will continue to proliferate allowing the further empowerment, liberation and democratization of the human spirit, triggering higher degrees of actualization, happiness, contribution, participation and productivity.

Second Life exponentiates to 2 million residents

Today the virtual world Second Life welcomed its 2 millionth resident, exponentiating in growth from the 1 million resident mark on October 18, 2006 in less than two months and after barely having 100,000 residents at the beginning of 2006.

It is not Second Life’s 2 million residents, 10,000-20,000 of whom are in-world at any given time, nor its $650,000 per day economy ($237 million per year; $119 per capita, exceeding that of the Congo, Ethiopia and Burundi) that signals that the immersive world medium has arrived, but rather the existence of its opposition. The Register often highlights critical and problematic aspects of Second Life which it refers to as Sadville, for example citing "saddenfreude" and an analysis that time spend in Second Life contributes to global warming, as an avatar and a Brazilian consume roughly the same amount of electricity. (TV and media center electrical consumption was not mentioned.)

The brewing anti-SL movement has even moved in-world in hopes of better capturing SLer attention. The World Development Movement's anti-poverty campaign reminds passersby that there are still problems in what they refer to as "the Real World" such as a preventable child death every 3 seconds.

The ongoing presuppositions of the anti-SL movement are strange. They seem to think that SLers are 1) responsible for and 2) capable of contributing to world-problem solving in some unique way that TV watchers for example are not; and that 3) SLers are in fact not working on physical world problem solving in the physical world or via Second Life although there is much evidence to the contrary (such as the awareness raising Darfur sim where SLers can experience the refugee camp experience more closely).

When was the last time TV watchers or online Bix contest participants were blasphemed for watching TV or surfing the web instead of working on the world’s problems in their relaxation time?