<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 11:11 PM, Alan Grimes <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ALONZOTG@verizon.net" target="_blank">ALONZOTG@verizon.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"># How will VR environments be provisioned? How much work will be required of the user to create a VR? Where would the terminally incompetent get their VRs?<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>That last forms the baseline. So line as there are VRs for even the terminally incompetent, the more competent can afford to be lazy - and, well, human nature tends toward laziness here. Someone goes to the effort of making a good, or at least acceptable, standard VR interface that anyone can use, and many people use it.<br>
<br></div><div>Of course, users can put in as much work as they want. Note the amount of effort that goes into building Minecraft worlds - even those that are never seen by more than a few. (Although, fame to those who both make good product and share it widely; some small fortune to those who figure out how to turn a profit without turning away most of their audience.)<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# How large of a VR would a user be allowed to build?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>That strongly depends on who's setting the limits - and why. It may well be that there are no limits, beyond how much hardware a user can gather; that would be the case if today's laws were applied.<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# What limitations on creating sentient characters to populate the VR? (this is obviously deeply problematic on many fronts).<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Again, who's setting the limits, and what's their agenda? Again, if today's laws were applied, there would be no limits. Some may soon come into effect once this happens, depending on how the legislators come to learn of this...or it may be viewed as a modern form of slavery without the drawbacks, if the sentient characters can simply be programmed for loyalty and slave mentalities (or, more importantly, if the legislators believe this to be the case).<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# What rights/limitations would a user have in a public VR?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Depends entirely on who's paying for it, and their relationship to the user. Most likely it'd be akin to the rights/limitations people have on any public property, including a limitation against trashing the place (without special permit, which usually involves working for or with the government).<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# Would the user be guaranteed unalienable rights to exist and communicate in public VRs?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Depends on the local government, and whether they give similar rights in meatspace.<br></div><div>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# Would private VR spaces be considered a natural right?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Probably not, any more than homes are considered natural rights. They're property, and it's a good thing if most people have one, but this is distinct from a right to have one. (Though it helps that making an eyesore out of one's private VR does not impact other peoples' private VRs.)<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# What limitations would there be on how a user manafests himself in a public VR environment?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Again, depends entirely on who's paying for it, and their relationship to the user. "Public VR" can be considered to be "VR that is owned and operated by the government, which gives most people certain access rights", similar to public roads today.<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# What limitations would a user have on the type of avatar that could be attached to his emulated humanoid nervous system?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Same answer.<br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# Is there any alternative to the following mode of self modification beyond basic tuning parameters: --> You load a copy of yourself from a backup made a few moments ago, modify it, attempt to run it, if it seems to work, you then delete yourself.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes. Many alternatives:<br><br></div><div>* You modify your currently running copy on the fly, without backup, much like how self modification works today. (More dangerous? Yes. Convenient and therefore used widely anyway? Probably. Safe enough for small tweaks, so that "more dangerous" rarely applies in practice? Likely. Does away with the "there are briefly two yous" issue that some people might want to deal with? Yes. And "this is similar to how people have done it for a long time" is a compelling factor for many people. Of course, one can also copy a modification that someone else tested on someone else, thus trusting that the modification is probably safe for yourself too.)<br>
<br></div><div>* You run several such modifications at once.<br></div><div> <br></div><div>* You don't delete yourself, essentially forking for each modification.<br><br></div><div>* You run altered self in a simplified, sped up sim (sped up because of the simplifications) and thereby evaluate long-term progress quickly.<br>
<br></div><div>Are those enough?<br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
*** The current dominant theme, that of a heliocentric cloud of computronium bricks seems to imply a central authority that, at the very least, dictates communications protocols and orbital configurations.<br></blockquote>
<div><br></div><div>Unless the protocols emerge by consensus, for lack of said authority (much like how "international law" is not "what the single superpower - USA - wants", but "what enough of the major countries of the world agree on"), and orbital configurations likewise (though likely recognizing orbitals already claimed in practice).<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# What rights would the least privileged user to access base reality?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>The least privileged users might access base reality and nothing else. This is a common plot: the elites turn their attention to spaces only they are aware of, and ignore the portion of reality that is the entire reality for commoners. VR vs. base reality is one expression of this, as is a medieval tale of peasants whose only exposure to war is when knights come through, demanding food and shelter, until the lords on both sides - who had only thought to defeat one another - suddenly have their "civilized" war interrupted by a peasant revolt.<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
*** Assume that the overwhelming majority of the population was force-uploaded and re-answer the previous question.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>It changes depending on two things:<br><br></div><div>* What noble aspirations the uploaders had when doing the force-uploading and setting things up.<br>
<br></div><div>* What that grinds down to, in day-to-day practice after a sufficiently long period of time.<br><br></div><div>Generally, why do the uploaders even care to run most people? Access to base reality likely costs at least minimal resources - whose, and is this a large enough amount that anyone cares?<br>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
# Are there any problems with the following scenario: You detect a problem that will inevitably cause a cascade failure across the entire network but since you are on the ignore list of everyone connected with the central authority you can't even report your bug. The people in the central authority have been running human emulated brain patterns for subjective thousands of years and have become senile (due to the exhaustion of potential synapses between their neurons), and complacent and refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of such a problem... So basically everyone trapped in this nightmare tried to go around the simulator with a count-down clock to when everything would collapse hovering over their heads, trying to warn the few who could actually do something about it, until the clock reached zero and everything just stopped.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes. If many people are convinced of imminent demise, and the powers that be can not be convinced to help - perhaps some people would be content to give passive warnings as you describe, but someone is going to try to take more action than that.<br>
<br></div><div>Security crackers exist. Exploits and social engineering exist. If the people in the central authority are indeed senile, that makes it more likely that these things will develop, in time for those aware of the problem to attempt a fix. (Just last May, I was in a LARP about essentially this very scenario.)<br>
<br></div><div>The bigger problem is assuming that everyone will act in the same way - especially, in a way they have reason to believe will be utterly ineffective (even if it does require little effort). Over a large enough population with the same concern, a wide variety of solutions will be attempted.<br>
</div></div></div></div>