Parallelnormal is yours to copy (with attribution), under a 
Sociologists want your brain in cyberspace
Call them transhumanists, or extropians, or convergenists. Call their mission GNR, or NBIC, or “RL meets SL.” A new generation of social scientists, with religious zeal, are changing reality as we know it.
(A meeting of the minds, at “Convergence of the Real and the Virtual: The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft.” Image: from the Convergentsystems wiki)
by Mark Baard
Virtual worlders, led by a so-called “convergenist” from the National Science Foundation, met this week to discuss one of their plans for humankind: capturing individual personalities onto computers, and transmitting them into other worlds.
Rather than meeting in the real world, attendees at the Convergence of the Real and the Virtual conference brought their swords and leopards, and their idealized bodies (big muscles, big boobs) to a space in World of Warcraft, an online massively multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG.
The NSF sociologist who organized the WoW scientific meeting, William Sims Bainbridge [sic], has taken the form of a “level 65 (out of 70) blood elf priest” in the game, which claims more than nine million players.
Part of Bainbridge’s job, as director of the NSF’s Human-Centered Computing Cluster, is to direct young researchers into areas of “future research,” including “immersive and multi-sensory technologies, and direct brain-computer interfaces.”
For the WoW meeting, Bainbridge described how human consciousnesses might be uploaded to virtual worlds (at least in Battlestar Galactica, they call it “downloading”).
He also described how virtual humans might be made governable:
(Virtual world) participants are much less likely to be guided by religious belief, and more likely to prefer the suspension of disbelief associated with science fiction and fantasy. So, we can expect that virtual worlds will prototype many social innovations that might then diffuse to offline governance, while often preaching sedition.
Bainbridge spent some of his younger days in a Scientology splinter group, and is considered by some academics to be a religious expert.
But Bainbridge is also a religious hero, to the transhumanists, who hope to accelerate the convergence of real and virtual reality, as well as genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (Ray Kurzweil’s GNR).
In addition to recruiting its partnerships with the NSF, NASA and other governmental agencies, the extropians court Hollywood stars such as William Shatner, and academics at Yale and Oxford.
Some transhumanists call themselves extropians, others, convergenists. Some also use a different convergence acronym, NBIC, which represents nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science.
Like Scientologists, transhumanists appear to brook little dissent, and seem eager to silence their critics. When Bainbridge meets with Second Lifers in a few weeks, for example, he will be hosted by a group of transhumanists “too busy building the future we want to spare time on unconstructive criticism.“
That unconstructive criticism, say the transhumanists, is any that comes from those who do not “share our goals and values.”
Filed under: Big Brother, MMORPG, Privacy, Psyops, Second Life, The Singularity, Transhumanism, Ubiquitous computing, Virtual reality, virtual worlds | Tagged: BCI, Genetics, hci, MMORPG, Nanotechnology, Robotics, Second Life, sociology, Virtual reality, world of warcraft, wow
[...] Sociologists want your brain in cyberspace [...]
I’d encourage you to read your sources a little more carefully; someone reading just this would get a completely inaccurate picture of both the convention that happened in WoW, and the Extropia sims in Second Life. Neither of them are in fact about transhumanism!
The conference was primarily about living in virtual worlds not via “brain uploading”, but via sitting behind your computer keyboard and typing! That is, the thing that millions of people do today, not some SF future involving electrodes and brain-mapping nanobots.
The Extropia sims, as mentioned prominently on the page that you liked to but apparently didn’t read very carefully, are lot a transhumanist enclave at all. I’m an Extropia resident, and a member of what I believe is the *majority* of residents who aren’t transhumanists in any particular sense (I mean, I like reading some transhumanist SF, but I’m not out there evangelizing for the inevitability of brain-uploads in real life). Extropia is about positive futures of whatever kind. Only someone who checks under the bed every night for lurking brain-uploaders would jump to the conclusion that it must therefore be transhumanist…
(Embarassing typos in my comment above include “liked to” for “linked to”, and “lot a transhumanist enclave” for “NOT a transhumanist enclave”. Sheesh!
)
… and on rereading I apologize for the last comment; I doubt you actually check under the bed every night for lurking brain-uploaders.
But the point stands that (as its web pages say) Extropia isn’t about any particular Transhumanist future; it’s about positive futures in general; referring to Extropians as Transhumanists is an error.
Mark:
Here’s the actual description of the conference:
“To begin with, people who have published about WoW will briefly describe their completed work, and the abstracts and links will be available on the wiki. Others, who are currently engaged in research, will explain what they are doing at somewhat greater length, including any preview of results, in response to questions. The concluding part of the session will be a debate about future in-WoW projects that would be valuable to do, especially those that students might use as term papers and dissertations.”
Sorry, no Scientologist brain-uploading dissent-suppressing crazies, just a bunch of professors, grad students and people interested in the social science of virtual worlds.
Same thing with Extropia, alas: we’re a community with a sci-fi architectural theme, which hosts a lot of events, from the SL-Transhumanist group meetings to fundraisers for African charities to fishing tournaments.
Sorry to disappoint! Whether it’s virtual reality or physical reality, it still can’t seem to match up to the products of pure imagination!
“That unconstructive criticism, say the transhumanists, is any that comes from those who do not “share our goals and values.”
It should be noted that the quoted text, which Mark attributes to “the transhumansts”, was written by people who aren’t transhumanists. The unconstructive criticism is comments along the lines of “You suck” (he’s quoting the FAQ answer in response to the question “I think you suck”). And the “goals and values” being refered to our the desire to build a sci-fi sim that isn’t a post-apocalypse wasteland or grim dystopia. I’m happy to freely admit that in the process of building a beautiful sim, I’m ignoring criticism along the lines of “you such” or even “I think you should make the sim more like the Wastelands”.
all transhumanists, extropians, or convergenists are invited to the parties I do to inworld.. (would be such quiet events without them)
Oh.. and uploading human consciousnesses.. has nuthin on downloading hot tunes!