Second Life reaches 5 million residents

Second Life reaches 5 million residents and a $1.65 million per day economy but its growth rate has slowed from a doubling every two months in both residents and economic activity. The chart below shows the population and economic trends since January 2006.


What is so exciting about Second Life that has attracted 5 million residents? Other statistics not reflected here would probably show more interesting patterns about the medium's usage such as an increase in time spent in-world, a growth in community-specific groups and an increase in corporate presence as more entities set up virtual offices including Coldwell Banker.

Web 3.D is about Community, Community, Community.
The richness of a virtual world platform like Second Life suggests why it is so successful. The Internet was a tremendous step forward as people with shared interests were able to find each other via usenet and email lists, mainly having 1:many relationships. Web 3.D virtual worlds allow special interest interactions to be much deeper and more intimate in a robust audio-visual and 1:1 way instead of a 2D text-based 1:many way.

In addition to more intimate interaction, virtual worlds offer more agency. One example is that people can fully govern how their appearance is presented. Interestingly, so far, instead of exploring more aspects of identity and representation, the vast majority of avatars appear in a great homogeneity of youth and beauty, making explicit the strong force of perceived appearance ideals in the physical world culture and recreating this in virtual reality. Then as art imitates life imitates art, the avatorial aesthetic cycled back out of a Second Life gallery into the physical world in a “13 Most Beautiful Avatars” exhibit at New York’s Rhizome gallery.

The interesting focus for Second Life now is not how many residents are there but the large variety of inventive things that they may be doing.

Chevron supports Global Warming

Some good progress was made this week as Al Gore implored Congress to freeze greenhouse gasses at a Capitol Hill hearing and 65+ institutional investors including CalPERS signed a pact encouraging Congress to enact green legislation. The Ceres pact is a follow-up to the 225+ institutional investor launch of the Carbon Disclosure Project in January, 2007 which centralizes emissions reporting from over 1,000 corporations including General Electric, DuPont and Caterpillar at one website.

On the other hand, not in the press and not getting the message at all is Big Oil company Chevron, boldly asking investors to vote against proposal #5 on its annual proxy to "Adopt Goals and Report on Greenhouse Gas Emissions." Not surprising given the entrenchment (some have been board members since 1982 and 1989) and lack of diversity (one female, added in 2006 and two people of color) on its board.

At least many corporations are taking action and even some Big Oil companies such as BP are part of the Carbon Disclosure Project. It will be nice to finally see some improvement in stock prices from companies like GE after their successful multi-year effort to reduce emissions.

Postmodern Physics and Manifold Destiny

At present, humans remain baffled regarding the key aspects of physics that could if understood trigger a step function of manipulability of physical reality. In the Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin notes a dearth of progress in physics over the last 30 years mainly due to an undiversified groupthink myopic focus on string theory which has yet to show any results or falsifiable constructs.

The physics progress juggernaut has triggered a surprising meta level of questioning including the invariability of the speed of light, quantum mechanics, general and special relativity and what is science. Smolin calls for a Leibnizian interpretation of time/space that is a dynamical network of shifting relationships rather than an assumed fixed background upon which most of physics reasoning has been done to date. If we were not relying on gravity and the speed of light, would it be easier to understand dark matter and dark energy?

We have no idea...

• Why there are so many elementary particles with different sizes and masses

• What and how the 96% of the universe that is dark matter and dark energy is and behaves

• How to describe in words and math where large and small scales intersect like black holes and the big bang

• How quantum mechanics really works
  

• What really happens at very small scales such as the Planck length

Luckily, there are some experiments on the way, most importantly the GLAST NASA satellite due to launch in August 2007 which will probe the Planck scale; also gamma ray projects at the Auger Observatory in Argentina and at other facilities and the building of quantum computers. The big hope of the Large Hadron Collider, the detection of the Higgs boson, would help confirm some long-held theories but probably not shift thinking as much as the Planck scale research could.

What - No Singularity?
Interestingly, some scientists' models including Smolin's are suggesting that time goes backwards from the big bang and in black holes, essentially meaning that there is no Singularity. No Singularity?! Technological Singularity paradigmers might have to rethink their metaphor.

Our avatars ourselves

As companies and other organizations take to immersive worlds, it may be that new employees are assigned an avatar and virtual office space along with their security card and computer. Blogging is now part of some job descriptions and soon employees may be encouraged to spend time in-world for both corporate socialization and professional collaboration purposes within and across corporate lines.

There is a lot of energy around synthetic environments including a full track of virtual world programming at this week's SXSW Interactive in Austin TX and at the upcoming Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in NY March 28-29. Second Life is sneaking up on 5m users and a $2m/day economy and There engine Forterra has its hands full with enterprise and government clients for custom enterprise applications as well as government and medical simulation and training exercises. If you are not in-world somewhere for your company, you can work as an extra in someone else's world. Sim exercises are populated by "external role players," a new and expanding job category which simultaneously underlines the marketability and necessity of tech-savviness and another step in the Yochai Benkler shift to an economy of distributed individual participants vs. industrialized entities.

Professional avatars will likely be influenced by corporate guidelines and norms regarding appearance and behavior, analogous to the physical world; at least virtual suits are more comfortable! One result of this could be an even more diffuse exploration of virtual identity as humans have a closet full of avatars for all of their different professional and personal virtual activities. Other new job categories are probably already proliferating: avatar imaging, avatar reputation management and consolidation...

Avatar and other content portability across the different emerging public and private virtual world environments is also a non-trivial matter. IEEE avatar translation protocols and standards as well as intra-world authentication services could help facilitate avatar portability. Poor portability could mean poor rendering which could result in miscommunication, prejudice and other dynamics which can be theoretically avoided with virtual worlds. An avatar discrimination lawsuit re: virtual world employment practices would not really be a hoped for milestone.

Relevancy for digital humans

So much of the structure of current human experience will be irrelevant in an upload world. The ultimate state will be one where identity, nationalism, community, belongingness, property rights, economy and resource requirements all go away. All that will be left is creativity, entertainment, actualization and intelligence's pure focus on problem-solving.

There may be an intermediary phase where digital humans attempt to translate and create a surrogate structure of their former world:

-Property rights no longer pertain to physical objects but control over one's source code and ideas

-Competition for scarce resources becomes over computing resources to run one's digital self rather than over money, foodstuffs and energy

-Competition for status, that great biological human pastime, becomes not material and money-based but idea-based

-Survival means not against the physical conditions of heat, cold, hunger, disease, etc. but rather regarding the backup, storage and access to digital human source files

-Reproduction becomes not about the spreading of genes biologically but about the legality and compute resources required for creating, merging and modifying additional instances

-Politics becomes not about large security-driven nation-states with special interests and contract awards but looser federations concerned with rights, freedoms, preferences and voluntary participations.

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...