A Fundamental Truth, Even in Virtual Reality

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch - New York Times:

"It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”"

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

New York Times:

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors. There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

I'm very fatigued, spaced out, and feeling really virtual as I contemplate this.

Public Policies for Virtual Worlds

The Chronicle:

Scholars of fantasy worlds and game-industry professionals hammered out a 10-point policy platform for virtual worlds at a conference last weekend at Indiana University at Bloomington. Among the policy statements: game developers should not be liable for actions that players take inside virtual worlds, such as assaulting other avatars ...

What about the impact on job prospects for virtual lawyers? Someone needs to prosecute such assaults...