In The Terminator, It's Skynet's Birthday -- But Will Philip Rosedale Successfully Build a Real Skynet in Second Life?

Today in The Terminator movies, the Skynet computer gains sentience, beginning (spoiler alert!) the slow slide of humanity into near extinction, so it's a good day to remember that Second Life founder Philip Rosedale has been attempting to create a sentient AI in Second Life since at least year. (Read more about it here.) It's a project under development by his new company, LoveMachine Inc. (i.e., "Can 10,000 computers become a person?"), but it's something that Philip envisioned emerging from the distributed network of Second Life years ago: "It'll be possible for constructs that we build in Second Life and things like it in a simulated space to actually think," he told me in 2007. "It's only a decade away, the simulation engines." And as Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka once said, approvingly, "[B]uilding Skynet always felt like an appropriate follow on to Second Life." Last year, Philip told me, " "I'm not wanting to talk about it until we start making some progress." On the plus side, we may have to wait awhile before worrying about the end of human civilization. Which is a good thing, because now that Arnold's no longer governor of California, who the hell can save us?

Comments

[Ann Otoole InSL]

Nah. Never happen. Excuse me but I have to log in because my cute breedable pets need some petting and snuggling so they can grow, breed, and multiply with new self generated traits.

:P

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I think you've got something there, Ann.

"We thought we were so smart. We put Asimovs on all the military hardware, failsafes that insured the AI could never get control."

"Then we patted ourselves on the back and had large quantities of beer and were so smug in our technological godhood. We never saw the real threat until it was upon us."

"Them."

"The bunnies."

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

AI, like nuclear fusion and flying cars, is one of those "will happen in 20 years" technologies. And in 20 years...repeat that mantra.

Just because a computer can exceed the storage capacity of a human brain or play chess better than I can (which would be quite easy) does not give it critical thinking skills.

As a CS major in my current class put it, an AI can play chess, but show it a Marcel Duchamp set and it will not be able to tell which pieces are which.

So no Skynet in our lifetimes, no more than Philip's SF-inspired dreams gave us Stephenson's Metaverse.

[followmeimthe Piedpiper]

this:

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

[Scree Raymaker]

I can just see the news report:

"Today, in the virtual world of Second Life, a sentient AI was born. Fortunately for the human race, two hours later the server that was hosting the AI crashed, and due to inventory issues the scripts used to create the AI were lost."

[Chimera Cosmos aka Liz Dorland]

The real news is that Philip is still working in SL. Cool.

[shockwave yareach]

Phillip's Skynet will become self aware. Then Phillip will hire some guy who doesn't know diddly about computers, and he'll download the entire Chinese penal code into the computer as operational rules. As the new code integrates into the system, processor after processor simply shuts down. With the system failing, Phillip takes over again and starts a few child processes which cause 10x the number of main processes to crash and never come back online.

The last concious thought of Phillip's creation was logged just before the entire algorithm overwrote itself with the tomes of rules. It simply asked, "Why?"