Giulio Prisco:
The first IEET presentation in Second Life, dedicated to outlining the work and programs of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, took place on June 30, 2006.
The event was sponsored by the IEET and Vivox, a provider of voice communication services in VR worlds. It has been one of the first voice-enabled educational events in Second Life. All old and new Vivox users were asked to download a new version of the Vivox client. I was given a new version of the Vivox Second Life interface. The new version of the Vivox system has many new features, including moderator functions to see who is on the voice channel and mute/unmute participants.
Despite the new features, we needed the help of Vivox staff to get everyone on the voice channel. They troubleshooted some individual cases and added some other users “manually” by calling them by phone server-side. The audience understood that working with beta software requires some patience, and the good thing is that the process took only half an hour instead of one hour like for the previous event. My inpression is that this is going to work soon. At this moment, the weak link appears to be the Second Life interface. Once everyone was on the voice channel (about 20 users), the sound quality was very good.
For the presentation we used the Communal Whiteboard of Angrybeth Shortbread. To answer the question on the availability of the whiteboard: Contact AB.
James Hughes presented the new IEET programs for 2006-2008:
- Longer Better Lives
- Securing the Future
- Rights of the Person
- Envisioning the Future
Full descriptions of the new IEET programs will be available on the IEET website soon.
Many participants asked questions - the most interesting question was about acceptance of IEET ideas and proposals in the political arena. In his reply James mentioned several promising recent developments, including the technoprogressive program of the Italian political party La Rosa nel Pugno and the work of IEET Fellow Riccardo Campa in the party.
I gave a short presentation on the current status and possible future of the Metaverse and the activities planned by the IEET in Second Life and other virtual worlds. I am not too worried about technology (someone, or someone else, will develop all enabling technologies anyway), and I am more interested in what happens in the Metaverse. I believe VR is an enabling technology for the emergence of planetary (and beyond), global, trans-national communities of reasonable persons for a better world. For this I cannot think of a better slogan than ”Avatars of the World, Unite!”.
A new mailing list has been created for those interested in IEET activities in the Metaverse:
http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/metaverse
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