Yeah, thats what happend to Australia too.|)
lol maybe it's just because goverments hoped for Y2K to be real...but since it wasn't now they gonna see if they can do it in a more artificial way.:p

And now in English?

Well in Australia it is always summer in december of cause.

And unrelated: the y2k "millenium bug" thing was kinda about time and fear stuff would go very wrong at midnight. Maybe this extra second doesn't sync up and everywhere things go poof. :p Or if things go poof at least they can blame this extra second not syncing up. :hmpf:

Anyway, if you don't have a girlfriend it's always fun to have a nice conspiracy in the back of your mind at new years eve. Makes counting down more fun. :zombie:

I once saw a tv show that had a conspiracy that the Japanese(that supply the worlds chips for digital watchs), were stealing seconds and had been for decades.
This explained global warming because all the months are in the wrong place now :P

http://vuzix.com/iwear/_images/image_wrap920av.jpg
http://vuzix.com/iwear/products_wrap920av.html
me want.

me want very very much.

http://vuzix.com/iwear/_images/wrap9...sories_tab.gif



Denno Coil here we come :D

Coming Soon!! yeay, too bad there's no pre order.

Probably be about $500 mind you.

Still, thats leagues ahead of what I thought we would have at this time, thought it would be a good few years before proper AR specs hit the market.

You guys start walking around with that on you and I'll point and laugh.
Reminds me of those horrible people walking around with lotsa stuff on their belts...

Go ahead and laugh, eventually you'll just have to eat your pride and beg to join us the cool kids.

"remember kids, if you study and eat your vegetables you will be cool!" :)

I dont care who laughs either.
Functionality over Form.
Substance over Style.

The sooner humanity gives up petty wants for fashion the better.
(allthough, personaly, I dont think those specs even do look bad visualy. Allthough its function is what they should be judged on)

Eventually everyone would just go out in their underwear and use AR to implant an avatar on themselves.

Ok even I admit that sounds a little scary :p

I think Jedi-like robes will be the norm.
Guess whatever is most comfortable/practical for the weather.

I wonder if that would actually happen. Sooner or later, people won't need to go out at all anyway.

Just stay your whole life (which is, until someone kills you or an accident happens) in an incubator life supporter tube, and go out only "mentally". It didn't work out too well for the folks at Wall-E, but it definitely sounds like the future.

nah, I dissagree.
At least, for the next thousand years.

People will be spread over the world purely from a food distribution factor, if nothing else, and have to come together to bread, if nothing else.

On a shorter term level, distribution of food from source to each person individual is also pretty inefficiant, so I suspect as time goes on more people will be going out to eat, not less.
This will become particularly the trend after the oil runs out, no longer will it be economical to do regular shopping trips into town and bring back food.
Food deliverys are more efficiant then individual collection, of course, but still inferiour to everyone just walking to a location or two to eat when they want.
(not to mention energy saved by bulk storage vs individual refrigeration, as well as bulk perporation etc).

So thats as far as two of the fundimental human nessceitys go; Food and Sex.
That means we wont be glued to a matrix for awhile yet.
Its only the information/comminication/sociality aspex that can be replaced virtualy in the short term.

Untill our minds are free to wonder completely seperately from a fixed body, and that might take a few thousand years if not a lot longer (That is, a point when we all dont have livespans dictated by biologics, nor have a single point for our consciousness).

In the meantime AR gives us the best of both worlds.
Everything we want, Anywhere we want it :)

You have the scariest and evil ideas of mechanising the human race and the world.

When I think of the future of the race I think of a highly sensitive, contemplative and aesthetical society, taking joy from creative activities (the arts) and with nanotechnology (hidden from our eyes in highly aesthetical, minimalist and organic everyday-use objects) taking care of our daily needs like food and clothing. We will be even more mobile then we are today thanks to nanomaterials which will make fast and sustainable travel possible. Aesthetical value will guide the way things look - form will govern or hide the function, to make the objects we surround ourselves with humane, natural and pleasing to the eye. People, after having their basic needs met by a mere whim, will immerse themselves in seemingly primitive activities like sculpture, woodwork, pottery, painting, music, travel and sports etc. And then move to philosophy, the sciences and space and ocean exploration. As no hard work will be required I see an advent of public entertainment like theatre and various festivals that will dominate the public life. No governing will be needed, as there won't be anything to govern or divide.

Non of that "collective eating", "omg no oil we're doomed" and "let's be just floating minds"-civilisation of cyber junkies bs...

The sad part is you think thats a contradition.

When people no longer deal in physical goods, everyone can have any aesthetical values for the world they choose. (and people have different aesthetical values, I might point out).
People can shape the world however they like, earth will be the ultimate artistic playground.
Augmented Reality lets anything look like anything else. The ultimate freedom of expression. People can paint in midair, change the colour of the sky, swap themes for the moon, or redesign their own face.
True freedom.
I cant wait to be able to paint in midair, to sculpt without the limits of any medium. To have the advantages of seeing the art in 3d in front of me, and to physicaly interact with it....while also having the advantages of an undo button, or being able to copy and share it around the world instantly. Its the best of reality and virtuality combined.

Augmented Reality free's art beyond all limits.
It will free up the "primitive activities" you discribe far more then nanotech. Nanotech will help with the things that need to be physical, of course. But we should reduce that need as much as possible. (in the list, that would be science, space and ocean exploration... the rest can be done by people just running/walking about an a physicaly empty space, frankly. With less money spent on making pointlessly physical goods, the resources free to do science,space and ocean exploration will be much greater too.).


The arrogance of humanity is thinking we can continue to value the false god of Style and Image while physicaly making stuff however.....with a world of finite resources thats impossible.

Its disgusting how much we waste physicaly for "Aesthetical value", people are staving, living in terrible conditions all over the world.
The ecological footprint of the west per-person is dozens of times bigger then other cultures. And yet we go after designer clothing. We buy cars for the brand name, we chuck clothes away for not being fashionable. This is the crime we commit for valuing image over substance.
Its not just vistual either mind. We import bottle water accross the world for frelling sake.
I dont see taste being replaced virtualy any time soon, but hopefully killing of brand names with reduce this studity a bit.

Style,Fashion and Asthetics is part of the plague that makes us such a mind-blowingly wastefull soceity.

Augmented our reality is a way to keep the good (art, creativity,individuality) while reducing its physical impact to zero. Its a win-win situation.

In an augmented reality world, brand-names become worthless.
People can buy stuff that is the most efficiant, then simply skin it to look like whatever they want. People will probably share mesh's with eachother.
(Maybe have almost deviant-art style websites for these "skins" to place over objects.).
The powers of the individual will certainly be massive anyway.

Why is it so terrible for people to have to eat collectively?
Imho, thats a utterly fantastic thing, and far better then a soceity of ready-meal eating junkys we are becoming at the moment.
Cheap, collective foods dont have to be bad. In fact, they can be localy sourced and much higher quality.
Already in lots of citys around the world people eat out most of the time...theres nothing bad about this. Its efficiant for soceity, and nice socialy.

And no, lack of oil dosnt doom us, but it DOES mean we have to distribute our essentials for living in different ways.

And no, nanotech will not save us.
It has many use's but mass-transport and food distribution isnt one of them.

What makes you think your not a floating mind right now?
If all your sense's where replicated what difference would it make?
Why value is the physical if a virtual forma can replicate it perfectly to our sense's ability to detect? Why do you fear the mix of the virtual and physical?

We have evolved wonderfull bodys over millions of years, but they arnt perfect by any means. Whats so horrifying about hopeing that humanity can one day leave them behind? To take physical forms when and where we want, but to exist free of restraints except those that when we want.
Sounds like heaven to me.

To think virtual things don't have a physical dimension or "footprint" is a lie. I hear the internets alone is using something like 8%(?) of all the electricity used in the world. And there is like 14 times the weight needed in raw material to build one computer. Some of those materials rare enough to keep wars/unrest alive. And of cause the water needed in the process and de enormous waste when we dispose of them again. I could go on...

You might say nano tech will fix that, and I hope something will. But the way the "market" is being shaped was not often about general sustainability or humane ethics.

Just to have some nice AR glasses connected to your personal surveillance device does come with a footprint and a physical dimension. Even if the images they project into your head are virtual.

I had some other stuff I wanted to comment on but I forgot. :P
Maybe make a thread about trans/post-humanism later. ^_^

For me that can only and truly be accomplished by nanotechnology, if every person can create what they need there is no need for money, trading as we know it and governing. In your system there is always the person making the AR devices, on whom everyone else are dependant (unless the technology is relatively simple and open source).


That is appealing. Your personal space grows significantly.

Sooo, you sculpt?


Why?
What is the point of reducing the creation of real things, when things ranging from food and clothing to art can be made out of the junk we created during all these years? What money would you speak of in a world where everything can be made to be everything else by a whim of each person?

With nanotech the finite resources can be an infinite number of things. Matter itself would be our clay.

I absolutely agree on that, however I think you're mixing two things, modern mass culture with it's useless crap has nothing to do with real style and aesthetics.

Fashion and "style" sadly have nothing to do with pure aesthetics.

Same with sufficiently developed nanotech, instead of hiding the trash we will be able to reclaim it, or give it back to nature, or reuse it as we please.

Most likely it would be the other way around, only thing you would create would be new fields for advertising. Someone has to make the AR merchandise, imho it would only allow the rich west to hide behind it's pink spectacles shielding it more effectively from the hunger and poverty stricken third world. Nanotech fills that gap making money useless, hence there won't be any trading in the present sense and so no labels or brands other than the ones of the individual craftsman will exist.

There won't be any buying, you'll just think stuff into being by shaping whatever pile of heap you find. I guess AR could be the interface for doing so.

Aye.

Being forced to it is the horrible part. And face it, it's just like bottled water, just a new way for big companies to invade into another area that should remain private. Collectivism destroys individualism you speak so highly of.

I wonder how did you figure that out?
materials capable of converting 100% of sunlight into electricity, materials that move matter along the hull giving ships and planes great speeds and maneuverability. Cheep and sustainable transportation. Massive and easy water purification, and perhaps onsite food creating. How will that not save us? Manipulating matter to suit our needs is the holy grail.

That's Kant's bullshit. It's called common sense, there is no proof whatsoever to support a hypothesis that the whole world is "fake", and the non-existence of proof is proof of non-existence.

Why take care of a real dog when you can buy a robot? Why have a child if you can buy a doll? Why make friends if you can sit at home and imagine you have some? Real things have a value, a certain quality and give psychical comfort that no simulation, albeit marvellously "real" will not take away. If reality and real things have no value then nothing has any value whatsoever. You would create a society that does not care for anything real other then what sky they will have today. I would imagine one of those people taking off his glasses one day and realising that he missed a lifetime of random and untamed beauty the world is offering him.


Would you rather see a sunset or see the whole light spectrum? Would you rather taste wine or each individual taste that's in it? Would you rather know the future and live a dull life without choice, or live a life full of surprises?
"Perfection" in scientific terms, looses a lot to "imperfection" that the human body offers. We lead imperfect lives in imperfect bodies and that's what makes them perfect in a lot of ways.


EDIT:
Btw. to transfer a single megabyte through the internet you need to use up an equivalent of a fist-sized lump of coal, downloading a movie off the internet costs the world a really big and heavy bag of coal. There is (yet) no feasible way to secure enough energy for a virtual earth to exist on top of this one. With every person transferring terabytes of data each minute.

EDIT2:
http://greenupgrader.com/2583/on-the...en-air-travel/
List of sustainable concept airplanes.

I really like the current discussion, it's about what is your idea of Utopia and how feasible it would be to achieve. My idea is more in the direction of what Darkflame said.

The human mind is extremely flexible. Newborn babies don't have terms, they develop them later on. By terms I mean anything from "tree" and "house" to "democratic society" and "theory of relativity".

If you look 3,000 years in the future, and see that on the surface the world looks just like in The Matrix, you might think this is so depressing and horrible - what a melancholic world. But what do you know? You're just an old and bitter 3,000 year old man who lives in the past. This is actually Utopia.

Name one person ( except yourself ) who would accept to be put in a cybernetic tank and experience fake things that aren't real. And another thing, If all humans would look the same, then the depth of them would disappear since we all are uniqe, just my thought on it :) .

The point is simply how do you know whats real and whats not already?

Think of the human sense's as like a form of "bandwidth" to the brain.
Part of that bandwidth we can almost complete simulated already; Sound and Vision.
Touch, Taste, Smell and a few other lesser sense's we can not.
Not yet.

But what if we could? Then what?
What if this has already happened?

Ultimately, none of our sense's define our world or ourselfs, all that defines it is sentience...our conciousness, our sense of self.
And, most importantly, our sense of other peoples conciousness. The contact between others of our kind. Thats whats forever important here, not our current form.
The interplay of minds and the information we collect on our universe, thats all that maters. Everything, absolutely everthing else, derives from that.

Yout right no one would go for the tank option today because it is a limitation...that tank could only offer, at best, a perfect fake of the real world's potential expierences. While the collective knowledge of the world is huge, it dosnt give people a chance to explore beyond whats known already.
It could be enjoyable, but at the moment it could never offer more. Its limited by the real world data.

However, thats not what the potential is.

The potential is to expand our sense's beyond what can currently be simulated.
By freeing ourselfs from our physical bodys dosnt mean we have to close ourselfs away by any means.

Robots on Mars, or in the deep see, or billions of miles away.
We could flick our mind to any location humanitys "senses" are at that moment.

Rather then being limited to the visible spectrum of light, we can see the universe in its full glory...or, at least, to the limits of our constantly expanding technology.

Our bodys will just be the starting point, a mere biological quirk of how we evolved.
Our mind...the important bit...will flick between real and virtual freely. We will jump from artifial body to artifial body as the need and mood suits us.

These artifial bodys wont be worth more then our virtual ones though.
The virtual ones will be mostly what we use to communicate with others....its what we already do today. I know people IRL, but I know many times more online, many times more people know me by my "Darkflame" avatar. Its just as much ME as ""THOMAS WROBEL" is.

Our virtual avatar would be the conciousness's chosen depictiation of itself. In many ways a truer form.
The physical bodys we use will be limited by the enviroment of whereever we want to go at that time.

Its not nothing, its merely infinitely smaller.

Lets say you download a movie.
Compare that to making a DVD.

Downloading a movie ....per download...requires an utterly tiny amount of electricity. Infinitesimally small.

Making a movie on DVD requires;

1. source the materials for the disc. (requires shipping, mining, and refineing).
2. Create the disc (requires energy both in terms of manfuctory, and human labour)
3. Package the disc. (more materials shiped, plastics used).
4. Transport the disc to the shop (more oil used in transportation).
5. People then go to buy the disc. (using a vechile to get there).

The energy used per-disk verse per-download is like, a million times, possible a billion times more then a download. The energy for a download can also come from anywhere. Shipping and production of products has to come from physical sources. (aka, oil in the ground, forrests, etc).

Now think of every CD,DVD,Game made.
Now thing of everything that could, in principle be replaced virtualy.

Yes, PC's take energy to make.Absolutely true.
But its a 1 off cost, replacing hundreds of thousands of other products over its lifespan.

Its not perfect, simply put, vastely more efficiant then our soceity is at the moment.

I write such a huge post for you and you ignore it completely? I'm hurt. :sad:

stop making powerful components such as videocards, etc. which draw so much power if u wanna "save" the planet or something. Downloading a movie just won't do no harm as long as ur PSU won't be eatting 500+ Watts.