As I said, reality is interesting because there is only one, and you can find out the patterns of things going on. Even if buildings, streets, cars and lights are impressive they are only small extensions of the huts people were living in, the paths they were walking, the horses they were riding and the candles they were burning. Even TV is here instead of the storytellers.

In virtual reality you or somebody else can change literally anything without the constraints and efforts the real world has. You are right it's like a party. But at this stage of life I don't like partying that much. Trying to get a solid understanding of things has priority. With virtual reality I probably would feel I'm wasting my time. Until it becomes that mainstream I'd better try to get my position in that world.

Really?
a) that's an assumption without foundation and
b)is that really a reason for something to be interesting?

You could have a world identical to this one, as far as your senses are concerned.

I think you're not appreciating the learning and experiential possibilities in immersive virtual reality. You can do anything. Want to take a trip to Italy with your friends? You can do that. With your actual friends. It will feel exactly the same. Want to learn Italian culture or the language? You can have full immersion daily at your choice. Want to understand the life of someone living in dangerous Somalia? You can do that too. A suit/VR dome can provide pain and the inability to leave until a fixed time. A brain implant can possibly provide shocking pain, and the experience of wounds and death, and possibly make you forget that you are in VR.

Want to understand the life of a strict Muslim woman? Of a prince? Of an 18th century nobleman? You can do that. You can live it rather than read it in a book. Want to learn math and improve your three dimensional awareness? You can do that far more effectively inside a tailored VR experience. Want to get better at driving, or emergency handling? Ditto. Fighting? Yep. Tailored exercise routine? You bet. Want to discuss philosophy in a class with Socrates, personally tailored to you? You can do that too.
You can gain a far more solid understanding of pretty much anything through VR, and it's not close. It is this utility which will drive mainstream adoption and eventual immersion of nearly everyone (although I think there will always be Amish).

So kind of like the smart pills (currently available and on the market) that you aren't allowed to take?

I'm quite serious that people are very strange in this regard. Fixing a broken person is ok. Augmenting one that is working ok is not.

(I don't agree with the take, just note that is the general truth about people)

We won't ever bridge that gap. "You're all different!" "I'm not!"

I wasn't speaking about VR (except as bantering with Chezlaw about how well we'd do if we woke up from being dead far in the future). VR is cool.

It will continue to improve. It will never be better than the imagination of someone or someone someone else invented.

Since we can now, to some extent, tailor the evolution of the species the inherent clash between "fixing" and "working Ok" is a difficult one. Always was, but now and going forward can become even more muddled. And then there is the age old question of what is broken and what is not. Some would think Chezlaw broken and go on about his plight (I despise that word by the way) and ranting about his need to be fixed. As we both know, that would not be wise, but it would be extremely amusing and make a great subject for discussion.


What's the standard of "working ok'. Most people are idiots and don't work very well at all. Seems an insurmountable task. See DS's wonderful thread about that killer asteroid for more information.

The benefits are dubious compared to the risk. Think more about breasts.

but they get over it or get ignored.


There is no real gap, its an illusion, its just a contingent matter of where our connectivity ends or diminishes dramatically. Some people here will live to see you proved wrong, even you and I might make it.

obviously this is just scratching the surface but have you seen this on rats and humans http://www.popsci.com/technology/art...-across-campus

In February, a Duke University team managed to link the brains of two rats, one in North Carolina and one in Brazil, to solve basic puzzles together. Then, earlier this summer, Harvard University researchers demonstrated a brain-to-brain interface between a human and a rat, allowing a man to control the rat's tail with his mind.

even human to human

Rao imagined moving his right hand (without actually moving it) to click the "fire" button that would shoot a cannon in a video game. Across campus, Stucco, who wasn't looking at the computer screen in his lab where the video game was unfolding, involuntarily moved his right hand and pushed the space bar on his keyboard to fire the cannon, as if experiencing a nervous tic.

Without foundation? Name one other reality! Parallel universes don't count, because we can't live in them and btw do not know if they exist.
Yes, because there's only one reality we are living in it's worth the interest. Helps survival and prospering.
Why then have all those other worlds? Maybe fun to visit, for a short time, not to stay. I will trust the real deal more, as long as possible. Then you don't have to trust some idiot programmer.
Maybe you have a point here. But I'm not especially interested, think my everyday life is more interesting. For me. After all, you are talking about fiction. Why bother? Think I already told in another thread I'm kind of lazy.
You may fool yourself you understand more. You may miss depth that comes from trying to solve problems in reality.
As I said, I will jump on that train when we are only 20-30% left preferring the real world. Then the concentration of the real Amish will start to be too high, will not like it anymore. What's more, I will be dead by then, almost forgot about that small detail.

Not really. We let people be miners.

That is, in general, good advice, but I doubt I could think about them more.

Adoption rates are less than 1% of such a fine product as breast augmentation.

Possibly. It is going to strongly depend on adoption rates.

I imagine that some people find it strange that we can increase electrical potential using electricity. That they were able to do this is (should be) no more surprising than if they made someone kick by hitting them sharply just below the patella. I'd be impressed if they he had involuntarily typed out "Three monkeys are now eating banana splits" or even just one specific letter. Transmitting one bit of information more than the gigabytes of information contained in the experimental procedure isn't an impressive achievement.

The practical limitation on brain-to-brain communication is that we are only coded the same on a very granular level. There is no "letter r" or "Jennifer Aniston's left breast" or "Vivaldi's 4 Seasons" neuron or neuronal connection commonality. 86 billion neurons (each with 1000s of chemical switches) and somewhere between 10 and 1000 trillion neuronal connections haphazardly put together and constantly being rearranged.

This is impressive,



but it is an entirely different problem and it only took her 13 weeks of training. The only problem is that the arm has to be specifically programmed to do each complex task.

I find this to be



more impressive as it allows for complex behavior without being highly specific, but it took the woman 5 years of training before she got a sip.

*It is an impressive demonstration, just not an impressive achievement.

Jeez Brian, have you learned nothing of technological evolution growing up these past ~30 years? In a year the learning curve will be cut in half. Ten years it will be commonplace technology. Twenty years those same women will be dancing.

The technology is perfectly fine. The problem is that we have to train all the various brains to work with the technology, which is unwieldy and a horrifically slow process.

We could just scoop out the brain and replace it with something more reliable and with tighter tolerances, but people probably aren't going to go for that.

I'm seeing a permanent problem if we have to open the skulls and put in foreign objects. There are surgical and infectional risks, and the cost of skilled labor doing the procedure. Putting sensors on the skin of the skull must be the way to go in the long run. Don't know if it will be specific enough, will it be possible to pick out certain patterns from the EEG? Spotting just a few neurons from the outside of the skull will prove very difficult because of the unspecific noise.

Maybe there could be a wig, where the layer in contact with the skin has billions of sensors that can triangulate the whole brain. I'm afraid some law of physics will prevent us from ever picking up things entirely correctly from the brain, that the biological processes can't be totally monitored by non-biological devices, especially from the outside.

Partly because of that I think AI will be the way to go, might prove much easier to develop, paradoxally. With AI you can design everything at will, while in human-enhancing technology you will have to work with stuff nature developed, not planned for interface with electronic devices. Naturally we will develop as good devices as possible for the disabled, but I think the AI development will just outrun the cyborgian development.

You really don't think we'll figure it out, eh?

That isn't a big problem. The limiting factor isn't going to be the physical technology of putting extra stuff in the skull.

Doing it from the inside isn't particularly helpful. The brain isn't just the outermost part of the brain. You also have to monitor the white matter deep inside the brain which is where a lot of the work gets done.

I generally think that we use technology to solve problems and that adoption of the technological solution depends on it actually being a real problem and the solution has to be better than what we already have



I don't think we bother. We improve the input and output a bit (lasik, telescoping eyes maybe since binoculars and microscopes are SO inconvenient, maybe a nice built-in HUD), but talking or moving our fingers a bit to control the world isn't inconvenient. Also, talking and fingers can be easily standardized as machine inputs, which is what we already do very very well.

I can buy that. There's a reason we don't have flying cars, and it isn't because the technology is insurmountable. There needs to be a demand, or at least great advertising. Still, I think we'll find plenty of use for much of what we've been discussing here. I can barely make it through the day anymore without my smartphone, and I'm sure I'll pay good future money to access the cloud with whatever new tech catches on next.

**** you. I will have my flying car. It is just running a bit behind schedule and a bit over budget.

BTM, you are correct on many issues so to see you so far out of whack with reality on the tech stuff is surprising. I mean, I'm no Kurzweilian (I think he's an idiot), but very large tech improvements and changes are coming. Including advanced machine/brain interfaces. We will be cyborgs. The love of profit (via instant superior processing power and multiplication of working speed) will drive it, if nothing else.

As for learning this stuff...how long does it take kids to write? Or adults to learn a profession?
So wrong. The technology is indeed insurmountable. Flying cars already exist, of course, but they are crap:



There's a fuel density problem, an aerodynamic problem, a transformation problem, and a size problem (related to fuel and transformation), all of which are currently insurmountable and make a car/plane vastly inferior to either a car or a plane.

None of those problems are insurmountable as you've shown, there are just currently no practical solutions. The demand for the product is not high enough to warrant the capital investment it would take further develop and eventually mass produce it. Perhaps someday we'll back into the technology while solving some other problems we find more pressing, like military research or space exploration.

All the mass production in the world wouldn't create a flying car that didn't suck. You could throw $60 trillion at it and you couldn't produce a viable flying car. The technology is indeed insurmountable right now and in the next ten (probably 20) years at least until we have far higher density fuels/batteries and more advanced morphing abilities (requiring new materials and microstructures which won't be invented for a decade at least even with all the investment in the world).

In other words, technological progress as a function of time is exponential (or linear), but it's at most logarithmic as a function of money. Why do think Moore's Law has been more or less followed for fifty years? Why no giant leaps? Why couldn't we produce 20% efficient solar panels in 1970? Why do batteries only improve ~8%/year regardless of research dollars?

Tech is harder than people think...it's a process of feeling out (and building, and collecting mass amounts of data/experience) in each incremental stage before moving to the next. You can't build 2x smaller lithography for smaller chips with having the previous stage in production to observe. You try to do 20x and it will take so long and you will run into so many unforeseen (and possibly unsolvable with your available data and know how) problems that it's actually faster and more reliable to go 2x each time.

What?!?

At our best we take our daily vitamins (and that is a rare feat). I have nearly nothing else to say on the matter.


2000 hours, minimum. Infinite hours if you want skill involved and you don't let me pick the kid.

It has been by giant leaps.

Excellent description of why there is a Moore's law, why not just make it a hundred times better. If it isn't in the Wikipedia it should be added, imo. I'm much wiser just because of this post.

As for the flying cars. Already 7-8 decades ago it was a natural wiew we would get flying cars in everyday use not very far forward in the future. That shows we don't get all the technology that is imagined. I have figured it's mainly an energy problem. Being on the ground, rolling, consumes very clearly less energy than flying, where you have to use energy to keep the vehicle up all the time. Combustion/jet/electric motors don't do the job.

Similarly the brain-technology interface may prove difficult to achieve. You may need that advanced technology and computional power for achieving it, that with the same grade of technology you can easily get computers smarter than all people who ever have lived combined. An employer will prefer that instead of a human who has enhanced his/her mental power by a factor of ten. There will always be bottlenecks our biology puts in front of us when developing the interfaces.

How much money do you think has been invested in flying cars?? Not very much and you showed me a picture of one. If someone dumped 60 trillion dollars into it, we'd have ourselves a pretty nice flying car. Problem is, you can't find too many people with pockets that deep who didn't get that way by making sound investments. Flying cars are simply not sound investments right now because we don't need them, ie, there's little market for them. You seriously underestimate what we can do when we put our minds to it... ever heard of the Manhattan project?

Right, we're bad at forecasting what the future will bring. That's because we're bad at knowing what our future selves will value. People in the past had no idea we'd rather spend hours chatting on the interwebs, playing video games and watching porn than playing marbles, swing dancing and going to drive-in theatres.

Anyway we can disagree on whether the tech can get there. I believe if we could take nuclear chain reactions from theory to A-Bombs in four years with $2billion ($23 billion, today's dollars) we could take a flying car from a crappy model-T to a Ferrari with ~3000 times that investment.

The real point BTM was making that I agree with is that technology is not the only factor, and often not the limiting factor. The market plays a big role. So does politics. Even if we had a Ferrari Air Cruiser tomorrow, how many of us would take the ~ 100 hours of flight training required to get a pilot's license? Who would okay all the taxes required to build the infrastructure necessary, ie, air-traffic controllers, police, etc.? All this to what benefit? So we can "drive" a few hundred feet in the air? The need is simply not currently big enough to justify the costs. These are bigger limiting factors, imo, because they make the investment a non-starter.

That's besides the point. Whether I take smart pills or not is very little to do with what people let me do. if I thought they were a good bet i'ds pop tghem like smarties.


Quite extraordinarily high. Proves the point. Add a far less limited market, a far higher advantage and multiple incremental directions and we're done

That argues for my point so I'm not sure were we are going. We join the nets and they constantly get rearranged and we cant tell what does what or who is who. except we can a fair bit so can save a lot of time. Its not like when attaching an optical device we aim at the ear.

There is nothing impressive to achieve. All we do is increasingly demonstrate the breaching of the old contingent constraints.