Reaction Grid Update: Growing Pains?

Location: Out (usually) and About (sometimes) on Reaction Grid

Where I've recently found improvements in Rezzable's Heritage Key experience, I am still withholding judgment on Reaction Grid (henceforth RG). Using both Hippo Technologies' as well as Imprudence's Mac clients for virtual worlds, I've spent a few hours struggling with tasks that I mastered three years ago in Second Life. Despite clearing my two RG avatars' caches, getting on the fastest connection available to me, and proceeding carefully, the situation has not been promising.

Perhaps the grid is growing faster than patches and support. I am not technical enough to know.

I'd high hopes for this Second Life competitor, based upon my first visits last year, especially to the 1939 World's Fair simulation. Prices are far lower than in SL to own land, and jokay Wollengong maintains a sizable operation in RG. Many educators went to RG to purchase land following her move, in part a way to express anger at Linden Lab's treatment of jokay and her work, in part to avoid having all eggs in one virtual basket. Some talented builders like Ener Hax have moved out of SL completely. Like Rezzable, Hax finds costs lower outside SL. Unlike Rezzable, however, other immigrants do not own our own servers or have a team of coders to tackle a problem.

Perhaps my subpar experiences come from being a Mac user on a grid now run on Microsoft servers--though I'm sure that was the case last year. But that's "how I roll": no Mac client, no visits by me to the grid or attention in my academic work. To its designers' credit, RG does offer a Linux client as well as, of course, one for Windows.

My problems could have come from the number of items and scripts running in the Sandbox region, but the simulator crashed repeatedly with only me present. Other regions worked somewhat better, but tasks were still painful. Setting up a free animation override to have a better walking animation took over an hour with a few relogs--I'd accomplish that in 2 minutes in Second Life.

A simple teleport to the Houston region left Iggy Strangeland--my primary avatar--wearing only a scalp-lock for hair. Then he folded up like an accordion and crashed. Both he and my secondary avatar--Zome Orlan--tried making top hats. Just about the time the hats fit, they made the avatars skin and clothing layers disappear.

I was the invisible man with hair and shoes. When the hat came off the avatar reappeared, though attaching or detaching prim items in RG frequently made me crash.

I eventually gave up on the hat and tried some hair from the inventory. Teleports resulted in random changes of hair to styles I'd worn earlier, or baldness. These glitches point to the world's database not keeping up with my choices. At least my pair of sunglasses worked out. I left a free pair on the nose of a sculpted goat at Sandbox Island. Good luck, builders, I thought. Here are some shades to hide your tears of frustration.

At least uploads are still free, because I'd have been really angry paying for my experiences in RG thus far. I thought of buying some land in RG near my friends Olivia an Viv and setting up a version of Richmond's House of Usher simulation. Now I'm going to explore more before putting down a credit card. If stability does not improve, I'm going to pass on investing.

And this week, the Virtual Worlds Roundtable makes a grid-visit to RG. That should prove interesting. I'll post a report here. (Update for Feb. 8: the VWER visit has been postponed for at least a week).

Now for a slideshow of my misadventures in RG. Let me know if you have better luck over there.

Dan Holt's Advice for First-Time SL Teachers

Location: My SL Office

I recently sat down with Dan Holt (Sl: Profdan Netizen) of Lansing Community College to discuss his first term of teaching writing with SL (Fall 2009).

Dan's an experience teacher for both creative writing & composition (academic writing--a better name--for my U.K. readers).

We had a wide-ranging discussion and I learned a great deal; Dan avoided some of the errors I made my first term, in 2007, in a similar course! Notably, he spent time in-world before bringing in a class of students.

Here are some notable points from the transcript of the interview:

• Work with students throughout the orientation and first hours
• Educate yourself and administrators before going in-world with students
• Anticipate resistance from administrators who think online courses should be primarily asynchronous
• Find a key ally (as I did at Richmond)
  
• Exploit SL's low overhead costs. These make it attractive for hybrid and online courses at community colleges
• Address concerns about SL's content and "addiction." First to Dan (and me), fears bout SL are no different from concerns about the Web in the 90s. Second, showing off good educational uses and content of the world can convince some doubters
  
• Find colleagues. Dan has had a little more success than I have recruiting other faculty. I attribute this to the different environments: Richmond's publish-or-perish pressure can be a disincentive for tenure-stream faculty to experiment with technologies
• Measure your class against others not using SL. Dan's students did a little better in a comparative assessment.
  

I look forward to talking to other teachers about their first semesters in SL. The complete transcript of Dan's and my chat can be found here .

Philip Rosedale's AI Project: Academic Musings

Location: Between Fear and Wonder
image from Collosus, The Forbin Project

I've always feared The Singularity, a.k.a. "The Rapture of the Nerds," when human consciousness could finally merge with that of a machine...the final upload, if you will. I fear it because of my ecological bent and training in speculative literature. We humans worry about AIs replacing us, but what of the creatures who have known this planet for millions of years? To AIs, would biology become merely raw material? To badly appropriate Philip K. Dick, "do algorithms dream of Shenandoah National Park?"

Such questions may seem alarmist, for my humanist readers who are not in Second Life or reading literary Science Fiction (shame on you), but The Singularity is not new or confined to the pages of paperbacks. The Singularity has been the dream of Ray Kurzweil and others like him for some time. I'm met a number of SLers who would gladly become their avatars, 24/7, even at the current cartoon level of embodiment.

I'd go so far to say that Science Fiction remains our most important genre of literature because, as Bruce Sterling put it in the late 80s, our age is the first to feel like SF. My students, when they hear about Kurzweil's and the Transhumanists' strange dream, mock it because--for now--they are young, trim, have perfect teeth, and use their parents' insurance policies. Yet their generation may be the one to build a working AI, as soon as their hair falls out and wrinkles crack over their skin like ice-feathers on a farm pond.

Now Philip Rosedale, a golden youth who resembles the suburban American Alphas I teach, and the utopian who founded Linden Lab to give us Second Life, wants to come at The Singularity from another direction. According to Hamlet Au's account, "a sentient artificial intelligence which existed in a virtual world" would complete one of Rosedale's ongoing projects, "The Brain. Can 10,000 computers become a person?" See Rosedale's company site, Lovemachine, for more.

I'm actually glad that Rosedale is after this goal, since I imagine that governments lacking his humanitarian streak can lay their hands on 10,000 linked computers and a number of good coders without much forethought. It would just be just another line in some intelligence agency's "black" budget, right after "new stealth first-strike bomber" and "high-res spy sats." I'd rather have Rosedale, with his world-changing goals and good intentions, build the first AI.

Or would I? Rosedale's site includes this mission statement:"LoveMachine is a team of people using disruptive technologies to very rapidly build things that can make money and have a shot at saving the world." Note the "very rapidly" and "shot" here. Unlike Einstein's God, Rosedale seems willing to play dice with the universe. What if The Brain does something different? Isn't that how Skynet emerged in the Terminator films? How the Matrix became self-aware? How Collossus, the prototype for all of these technologies (well, perhaps Forster's "Machine" takes first credit) was born? Well meaning people can still wreck civilization; even without thinking machines, each of us pushes civilization closer to the brink daily with each gallon of gas or pound of coal we burn (and America consumes at least 20 million barrels of oil a day).

Yet someone is going to try to build AIs, and many smart people have already been at it for some time in places like M.I.T. I lack the computer-science skills to begin a technical critique of a "virtual AI" made of 10,000 linked computers, so I'll move ahead to what such a creation might mean, were Rosedale to make The Brain.

The original idea of an "avatar" in C.S. circles was a program that would do things when its owner was otherwise occupied. An AI might be able to not only let me know when Dominion Power's bill has appeared in my online banking account but also advise me of ways to manage power-consumption in my house by roaming its power grid, using sensors to check where, for instance, I missed insulating a corner in our crawl-space last year. Then it could go shop for the best products to fill those gaps, while getting quotes on energy-efficient windows to replace our 60+ year-old panes. Iggy would log on to SL and have a chat with my AI about how to move forward. Through Iggy, I might authorize it to negotiate with window-makers and get quotes on the best products. It would search out some eco-friendly insulation of the sort that I could not find last year. My e-mails to suppliers never got returned, and I went on to other matters, buying fiberglass bats at Home Depot. The AI, not needing to sleep and unable--one hopes--to be bored, could keep at the customer-service desks--or AIs--until answers arrived. Meanwhile, I'd send the AI an order to dispatch nanobots under our house to kill the last Camel-back crickets that have been such a nuisance and have evaded my sticky-traps and chemical bombings. The nanobots would not kill any spiders, since we enjoy their hard work at killing other bugs.

Even my students get a little more excited when you talk about AIs in these terms. We allow other machines, and the hum of constant networked contact, to fill our hours so completely that we lack time to do what I've just described. AIs would take the tedium out of a networked existence as surely as the washing machine took the tedium from what was once called laundry day.

And if only it would stop there. As Ruth Schwartz Cowan so convincingly argued in her book More Work for Mother, the advent of labor-saving household devices had a side effect of ramping up expectations that we'd all complete more tasks in our drudgery-free time. Cell phones unite, but they also enable tiny women in giant GMC Suburbans to be distracted while driving, even as they convey to planned activities the toddlers in the back of the rolling fortresses.

I'm not confident that the time released by our AIs would make us a whit more leisurely or happy. Well, I take that back: they would if we made the machines serve us fully and fought like demons for any free time. I've done this with Internet technologies, taming my habits online and on the phone. I actually get some solitude most days and can enjoy the wonders of the natural world.

And that makes me a Postmodern freak in an ever-connected, scurrying world. I'm not sure AIs won't become just another, particularly powerful, example of Emerson's "things," that hop into "the saddle, and ride mankind."

I just hope Philip puts a kill-code into The Brain, so a human can always turn it off.

Reality Check: Kunstlerism of the Week

Location: James Howard Kunstler's Blog

I'm fond of Jim's turns of phrase, and I read his blog, "Clusterfuck Nation," every Monday as soon as I can.

Since he writes too about invented worlds--the American delusion that oil is infinite and suburbia is sustainable--I find a clear connection to the forever-young, forever-awake world of Second Life. Reality is, of course, a little harsher than SL, as Kunstler reminds us this week:

Do you really think that more suburban sprawl makes this a better nation? When our soldiers bleed out in the sands of Central Asia, will their last thoughts be of the curb cut between the Best Buy and the Burger King?

Read Jim's "Jive Economy" (seems that the Lindens DO copy reality in this, too) for more insights by one of our most acidic, and overlooked, social critics.

Maybe I'm just grumpy because my local bus-line reduced service and my employer must provide shuttle service to co-workers who might otherwise lose their jobs, even as many of the students on campus are so affluent that they'd never be seen dead on a public bus.

Even among my well educated colleagues, too few of us leave our cars parked and commute by bike or foot. Too few shop from local merchants, not on suburban strips that will become unworkable and boarded-up shells, with cheap oil's demise.

When that occurs, or when China stops subsidizing US debt, "Too Big to Fail" may become "Too Broke to Not Fail." Then, perhaps, we'll see how invented "reality" has been in our Strange Land.