[ExI] Bodies

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Wed Mar 10 00:39:43 UTC 2010


On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 4:32 PM,  From: Kevin Freels
<reasonerkevin at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/9/2010 1:09 PM, Keith Henson wrote:
>
>> I suspect that virtually all humans will abandon physical reality entirely.
>>
>> You can see this starting with Second Life and WoW.
>
>
> I don't think that "virtually all humans" will do this. Instead, I expect that this kind of branching of human evolution will be done by a relatively small segment of the population.

I don't think you are aware of how many people are involved *now.*
Over a year ago there were 11.5 million people subscribed to WoW.
This is amazing considering the really crude interface to the virtual
world.

> In time, that segment will grow, but a suspect that a large majority of the population will simply see this as another religion, or just another unique way of life much as nudists are viewed.  With the "God gene" existing in such a large portion of the population and the huge number of people who would believe that such a thing as giving up your meat-body would be the work of the devil, I am certain that there would be lots of violence along the way. The only way that I see "virtually all humans" abandoning physical reality is if those battle result in the death of the rest of the people who don't.

I don't think you understand the "boiling a frog" aspect.  (The thesis
is that you can boil a frog without it jumping out of the pot if you
start with cold water and slowly heat it.)

As an outgrowth of nanotech based medicine, people will be able to
upload into virtual worlds and reverse the process at will.  It will
only take a few hundred watts to keep your body in cold storage and
your memory updated.  For a time, years even, people will only spend
part time in the virtual state.

The problem is, virtual spaces can be and will be made *nicer* than
the real world, not to mention less expensive.  As people start
spending more and more time there, the physical world will be
increasingly abandoned.  People are *social.*  We live at certain
densities and stores (for example) will be abandoned when there are
too few people for them to make sense.  (Automated stores may persist
a long time even with very few customers.)  Near the end the only
things moving on the streets will be police robots.

Stored bodies with updated memories may be widespread for hundreds of
years, with all the infrastructure in place and being maintained by
machines with limited AI capacity.  It's going to make a strange
world.

If you see any way to avoid this fate, let us know.

Keith




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