Dr. Maged Kamel Boulos, the journal’s Associate Editor and professor at the University of Plymouth, UK, summarizes the issue:

Though Second Life has existed since 2002 and there are even other virtual worlds that predate it, most in the health sector are only recently starting to migrate to such platforms, as the technology is gradually maturating and rapidly becoming more affordable and popular. This special issue of JVWR on the theme of ‘3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare’ provides a good sampler of how healthcare organizations, groups and individuals are currently using virtual worlds…for a range of clinical and health-related purposes. Topics covered in this issue include: the use of virtual worlds in healthcare higher education, including in ‘virtual patients’ game-based learning simulations, with examples from both the UK and the US; the growth and direction of healthcare support groups in virtual worlds; the development of a virtual worlds’ coping skills game to prevent post-hospitalization smoking relapse in tobacco dependent cancer patients; and an examination of how the attitude and appearance of an individual’s avatar might result in positive changes in her/his real life in relation to obesity, which is one of the most serious public health problems of the 21st century.

Though I’m delighted to see so much work being done within academia, I am most excited to see the transition from research to real life application in a field that will surely witness exponential growth in the next several years. It cannot be long until we hear an announcement of a well-funded professional venture that tackles one or more specific healthcare issues using virtual world and other emerging technologies. At a time when our nation is facing a healthcare problem of gargantuan proportions, we need to turn to innovative technologies that can streamline medical care and shed billions of dollars in costs. However, beyond electronic medical records, there hasn’t been much discussion in the mainstream media about emerging healthcare technologies nor any serious and dedicated provisions in Obama’s proposal. The challenge of bridging the gap between cutting-edge academic findings and real-life social policies is one that spans every field, yet if we don’t figure out innovative and cost-effective solutions soon, healthcare costs will become the straw that finally breaks America’s back.

Readers interested in this topic who might have missed it previously, check out Popcha! principal and TurtleThink founder Mark Kizelshteyn’s award-winning research regarding therapeutic uses of virtual worlds for elderly, disabled, and convalescent people [link]. Needless to say we are all very excited for advancements in this field!

[JVWR Vol 2, No 2: 3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare]
image courtesy of TaranRampersad

Ben Goertzel, an AGI researcher and CEO of Novamente, organized the conference and provided a very good roundup to readers of h+. He explains that the AGI conference is smaller and more intimate than other related gatherings because it specifically focuses on the “big picture:” human-level thinking machines.

“Since its founding in the 1950s and 1960s, the AI field has achieved great successes – to name just a few: the AI linguistics underlying Google and other search engines; the AI planning and scheduling software used throughout the military and industry; the AI fraud detection software underlying modern credit card operations; and the AI gaming software underlying everything from Deep Blue to the bots in massively multiplayer online games. Yet all these wonderful achievements have a common narrowness of scope, which is why inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has characterized them as “narrow AI.” The grand goal of the original AI researchers – the creation of thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond — remains largely unaddressed. Many, both within and outside the AI field, have complained about this situation; the mission of the AGI conference series is to help do something about it.”

Reading Ben’s report makes one realize just how difficult it is to piece together highly-specialized aspects of learning, cognition, computer science, etc. to form something akin to a tapeworm – let alone a human mind. However, I’m confident that the eureka moment will come in our lifetime, even if we don’t fully understand how we got there, or how our creation will actually work…

[Ben Goertzel's Report on AGI-09: The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence]

The school is designed to bring together the brightest minds from a multiplicity of academic fields and provide an interdisciplinary framework to better understand (and bring about) the future of technology. Cost for the 9-week summer course is slated at $25,000; since it’s the first year, it’s hard to say how hard it will be to get accepted and how much they will give out in aid, though my guess is hard and little.

The curriculum follows 10 tracks:

* future studies and forecasting
* networks and computing systems
* biotechnology and bioinformatics
* nanotechnology
* medicine, neuroscience and human enhancement
* AI, robotics, and cognitive computing
* energy and ecological systems
* space and physical sciences
* policy, law and ethics
* finance and entrepreneurship

Though this is pretty exciting stuff, and I most definitely support its existence, it seems a bit of a misnomer to call it a “University;” it appears to be more of a business trade show/conference than a school. It’s also quite likely that people who are willing to shell out 25K on a summer course possess ulterior business motives and are piggybacking on nerds to sniff out the “next big thing” while establishing the proper Valley connections. Finally, based on current info, it looks like the SU will just be teaching interested parties about various Singularity-related academic topics, and not performing ANY actual research whatsoever. And isn’t the point of the Singularity that it will pretty much happen no matter what we do… that the seeds are sown, and barring some massive catastrophe that blasts us back to the Stone Age, we are just waiting for the trigger? Personally, I’ll be following the people at the trenches, who, for example, are working and thinking extremely hard on how to actually create a seed AI, rather than the “students” attending a glorified Google networking event.

[Singularity University]
[via TechCrunch]

New Scientist did a short review documenting contemporary approaches in solving the Turing Test, a simple experimental question posed by mathematician Alan Turing in 1950: can a computer intelligence involved in casual conversation convince human judges that it too is human? For over half a century researchers have attempted to build something that can pass the test; as the New Scientist review points out, contemporary attempts have not been limited solely to conversational analysis, but in fact span many variations, including musical (a Jazz piano that can improv with a human), aesthetic (life-like androids, and also see our post on virtual actors), military (weapons deciding when to fire themselves)…

…and of course, pwning at Unreal Tournament! Realistic AI engines are a huge component in game development and greatly contribute to players’ enjoyment and engagement levels. Proving that these issues are not only limited to research labs, moneyed corporations, and theoretical musings of cognitive scientists and philosophers, Australian game developer 2K offered anyone that could design a bot that passes the ‘bot Turing Test’ $7,000 cash and an all-expense-paid trip to their studios down under. The contest was recently held at the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in Perth, Australia. Slashdot reports:

“Teams from Australia, the Czech Republic, the United States, Japan and Singapore competed in the final. Competitors created bots to play a specially modified Unreal Tournament 2004 Death Match. Expert judges then tried to tell whether they were playing a bot or a human, just from their observation of the way they played the game. Judges included AI experts, a game development executive, game developers, as well as an expert human player. The result? The winning team AMIS, from Charles University in Prague, managed to fool 2 out of the 5 expert judges, and achieved an average ‘human-ness rating’ of 2.4 out of 4. All the human players were judged more human than the bots overall, but the judges were fooled often enough to suggest that in next year’s contest, some bots may be able to pass the test by fooling 4 out of 5 judges. AMIS won $2,000 cash plus an all expenses paid trip to 2K’s Canberra studio. You can check out the full results and competition videos, and try an online video quiz that lets you judge for yourself.”

[New Scientist: Tests that show machines closing in on human abilities]
[botprize 2008], via [Slashdot]

Please feel free to get in touch with Boris (boris [at] popcha dot com) or myself (mark [at] popcha dot com) to discuss virtual health care initiatives.

Thank you again!

****************************

Greetings TurtleThink Readers!

My name is Mark Kizelshteyn (Chronos Laval) and am founder of TurtleThink.com.

I am pleased to announce the publication of my article, Therapy and The Metaverse: Second Life and The Changing Conditions of Therapy For Convalescent and Chronically Ill Users, in Washington University’s Undergraduate Research Digest. Click here for a free copy.

To mark the occasion, on January 22nd at 1 – 2 SLT (PST), I will be doing a brief talk in Second Life on some of the major themes that were illuminated during the research process. And most of all, I would like to meet those of you I don’t know, answer your questions and start a long term dialogue about the immense opportunities in the therapeutic applications of virtual worlds.

The event will be kicked off by John Lester (Pathfinder Linden), who has been working tirelessly with Linden Labs to promote the healthcare applications of Second Life. This event will be hosted by Popcha! at their headquarters. (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Popcha/180/238/32)

Please RSVP by replying to mark @ popcha dot com. Optionally, let us know who you are and what you are up to.

Paper Launch: Therapy and The Metaverse: Second Life and The Changing Conditions of Therapy For Convalescent and Chronically Ill Users.
When: Thursday, January 22, 1 – 2 P.M. SLT
Where: Popcha HQ Sim
SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Popcha/180/238/32
Link to Article: Click Here

For this we owe it to GEO600, a (the) gravitational wave detector located in Hanover, Germany. The instrument was registering inexplicable noise that baffled all the researchers for months. Finally, an explanation was offered by Craig Hogan: “GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in…If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The newspaper goes on to explain:
“The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.”

What does this mean for us? Probably nothing. What does it mean for physics? It may reconcile Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics, which would bring us one step closer to understanding the universe at its most fundamental level. Leibniz, who spent much energy rationally proving that a Divine Creator exists outside the universe, would be proud of his adopted hometown, Hanover; God is found and he is a… projectionist?

[New Scientist: Our world may be a giant hologram]
[via Sentient Developments]

“What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

Well, since they asked, I’ll chime in with my plebeian perspective: the creation of recursively self-improving AI. The actual results of such an event are totally unimaginable (beyond our current abilities) but the fact that it will “change everything” is almost certain. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, articulates my personal beliefs quite well in his answer to Edge’s big question (read after the jump).

In addition to Nick Bostrom, a few other participating individuals that I have read or followed in recent years include Aubrey de Grey and Brookyln’s own Douglas Rushkoff. There is a great overview done by Next Big Future, which points out that 30 of the 150 responses are explicitly transhumanist. However, I encourage readers to browse many of the responses; the thoughts are as widespread as they are interesting. What do YOU think?

[Edge.org Big Question 2009]
[Next Big Future: Analyzing the Edge 2009 Question and Answers]

“NICK BOSTROM
Philosopher, University of Oxford; Editor, Human Enhancement

SUPERINTELLIGENCE

Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic, and scientific advances that, for better and worse, undergird modern civilization.

All our technological inventions, philosophical ideas, and scientific theories have gone through the birth canal of the human intellect. Arguably, human brain power is the chief rate-limiting factor in the development of human civilization.

Unlike the speed of light or the mass of the electron, human brain power is not an eternally fixed constant. Brains can be enhanced. And, in principle, machines can be made to process information as efficiently as — or more efficiently than — biological nervous systems.

There are multiple paths to greater intelligence. By “intelligence” I here refer to the panoply of cognitive capacities, including not just book-smarts but also creativity, social intuition, wisdom, etc.

Let’s look first at how we might enhance our biological brains. There are of course the traditional means: education and training, and development of better methodologies and conceptual frameworks. Also, neurological development can be improved through better infant nutrition, reduced pollution, adequate sleep and exercise, and prevention of diseases that affect the brain. We can use biotech to enhance cognitive capacity, by developing pharmaceuticals that improve memory, concentration, and mental energy; or we could achieve these ends with genetic selection and genetic engineering. We can invent external aids to boost our effective intelligence — notepads, spreadsheets, visualization software.

We can also improve our collective intelligence. We can do so via norms and conventions — such as the norm against using ad hominem arguments in scientific discussions — and by improving epistemic institutions such the scientific journal, anonymous peer review, and the patent system. We can increase humanity’s joint problem-solving capacity by creating more people or by integrating a greater fraction of the world’s existing population into productive endeavours, and we can develop better tools for communication and collaboration — various internet applications being recent examples.

Each of these ways of enhancing individual and collective human intelligence holds great promise. I think they ought to be vigorously pursued. Perhaps the smartest and wisest thing the human species could do would be to work on making itself smarter and wiser.

In the longer run, however, biological human brains might cease to be the predominant nexus of Earthly intelligence.

Machines will have several advantages: most obviously, faster processing speed — an artificial neuron can operate a million times faster than its biological counterpart. Machine intelligences may also have superior computational architectures and learning algorithms. These “qualitative” advantages, while harder to predict, may be even more important than the advantages in processing power and memory capacity. Furthermore, artificial intellects can be easily copied, and each new copy can — unlike humans — start life fully-fledged and endowed with all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors. Given these considerations, it is possible that one day we may be able to create “superintelligence”: a general intelligence that vastly outperforms the best human brains in every significant cognitive domain.

The spectrum of approaches to creating artificial (general) intelligence ranges from completely unnatural techniques, such as those used in good old-fashioned AI, to architectures modelled more closely on the human brain. The extreme of biological imitation is whole brain emulation, or “uploading”. This approach would involve creating a very detailed 3d map of an actual brain — showing neurons, synaptic interconnections, and other relevant detail — by scanning slices of it and generating an image using computer software. Using computational models of how the basic elements operate, the whole brain could then be emulated on a sufficiently capacious computer.

The ultimate success of biology-inspired approaches seems more certain, since they can progress by piecemeal reverse-engineering of the one physical system already known to be capable of general intelligence, the brain. However, some unnatural or hybrid approach might well get there sooner.

It is difficult to predict how long it will take to develop human-level artificial general intelligence. The prospect does not seem imminent. But whether it will take a couple of decades, many decades, or centuries, is probably not something that we are currently in a position to know. We should acknowledge this uncertainty by assigning some non-trivial degree of credence to each of these possibilities.

However long it takes to get from here to roughly human-level machine intelligence, the step from there to superintelligence is likely to be much quicker. In one type of scenario, “the singularity hypothesis”, some sufficiently advanced and easily modifiable machine intelligence (a “seed AI”) applies its wits to create a smarter version of itself. This smarter version uses its greater intelligence to improve itself even further. The process is iterative, and each cycle is faster than its predecessor. The result is an intelligence explosion. Within some very short period of time — weeks, hours — radical superintelligence is attained.

Whether abrupt and singular, or more gradual and multi-polar, the transition from human-level to superintelligence would of pivotal significance. Superintelligence would be the last invention biological man would ever need to make, since, by definition, it would be much better at inventing than we are. All sorts of theoretically possible technologies could be developed quickly by superintelligence — advanced molecular manufacturing, medical nanotechnology, human enhancement technologies, uploading, weapons of all kinds, lifelike virtual realities, self-replicating space-colonizing robotic probes, and more. It would also be super-effective at creating plans and strategies, working out philosophical problems, persuading and manipulating, and much else beside.

It is an open question whether the consequences would be for the better or the worse. The potential upside is clearly enormous; but the downside includes existential risk. Humanity’s future might one day depend on the initial conditions we create, in particular on whether we successfully design the system (e.g., the seed AI’s goal architecture) in such a way as to make it “human-friendly” — in the best possible interpretation of that term.”

Download the white paper here.

The research is informative and brings up a few integral concerns — mainly why invest in something (virtual worlds) with no proven track record? As Caleb points out, the demands for ROI proof are higher than usual in this sector because people still have a hard time divorcing the video game/fantasy aura from the business application. Although understandable, this will quickly die down.

We are still in an experimentation phase with virtual worlds and it is fine to question the enterprise plasticity for virtual environments, but companies need to take small steps and see if it is a right fit. The important thing to remember is this is a new industry and there will be potholes along the way. Enterprise users need to remain patient and not constrain the creative approach of virtual world solutions with outdated and non-transferable frameworks. Keeping an open mind through the process will prove to be fruitful — business is changing and the ways to keep your employees and clients respectively productive and engaged are evolving.

The paper also has an insightful discussion section looking at the relationship between the incubation of virtual worlds and how it parallels that of the web in the 1990s.

Read the paper here.

I would also like to draw your attention to a quote in the research regarding the versatile nature of collaboration in Virtual Worlds. This quote brings up the term “emotional bandwidth,” which I believe to be one of the mantras of the future of virtual worlds technology and health care.

“Because the full-colour, multifaceted nature of the experience offers so much more “emotional bandwidth” than traditional Web sites, e-mail lists and discussion groups, users say the experience can feel astonishingly real. Participants develop close relationships and share intimate details even while, paradoxically, remaining anonymous. Some say they open up in ways they never would in face-to-face encounters in real support groups, therapy sessions, or even with family and close friends in their true lives.”

When you're smiling...the whole world smiles with you

Working off this study they also explored 1700 college students and their connections on Facebook. In addition to verifying that happy people tend to have more friends, more interestingly they found that happiness is contagious; when visualized you can actually see clusters of “happy nodes.” They conclude that emotions are a deeply collective phenomena.

Edge: Social Networks and Happiness