Interesting link

[vgbaron]

LINK: Examined, the Virtual Life Is Worth Living - The habit of insisting that the virtual life is somehow not part of real life has diminished with time. Few people regard, say, online magazines as fake magazines anymore. And more than one politician has been felled by a scandal involving sex that was purely digital. So even though it wasn’t physical, it must have been real. Right?...

http://alliancedigitalentertainment.com ... iled=00435

This should sound familiar to fans of MindScans. Steven L. Kent's story (that sparked the movie MindScans) was truly ahead of its time. I'm amazed. How about you?

-Vic

[Ben Chiu]

Jay Fickes, an FX tech for Alliance, sent me this link to futurist Ray Kurzweil's predictions about the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Raymond_Kurzweil

I think he may be right about most things, but I do question whether "singularity" as he terms it will ever happen. I suppose the biggest problem is coming to a common understanding of what "smarter" means. Computers can out compute/solve problems faster and remember more/store more than the human brains now. So in those terms, they're already smarter.

However, when you finally get down to it all, computers can only do what they're programmed to do (even if another computer does the programming as Kurzweil suggests), so it's a net zero sum proposition. They can only be as "smart" as the original programmer(s). But it's an interesting idea and as Jay suggests, might be fertile ground of a cool movie one day.