he stages of technology development leading up to the simulation point. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Reality, as we see it is pretty pliable. If we can create a virtual reality simulation, indistinguishable from reality, can we even guess what reality is, in the first place?
"Reality," Albert Einstein reminds us, "is an illusion, albeit a persistent one."
Rizwan Virk, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in common with other scientists has a slightly different take on reality. It's not our "perception," he says. "Reality, is information," data-collected, and rendered into pixels-the most basic units of the pictures, we see. Millions of pixels give us a kind of replication or reality on our televisions and computer screens.
Take a digital photograph and zoom in as close as you can. Those tiny dots you can see are pixels. Those will be invisible with the next big step in virtual reality, the evolution of "8K Ultra High Definition" imagery.
We have to think about the people who will populate the virtual world-the computer generated characters. Did you know today's screen stars are an endangered species? Maybe, they'll be part of the Sixth Great Extinction. Technology is creating "virtual actors" to replace them.
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"You've heard about the virtual news readers developed by China's official news agency. There is a male and a female. They are virtual characters but they can read the news and they have facial expression."
Facial expression is a big deal as technology works to develop virtual humans. Before people say what they are thinking-their feelings are telegraphed by their body language.
There's a debate about whether technology is capable of creating, self-aware, self-motivating, virtual humans. Professor Tomas Laurenzo of the Chinese University of Hong Kong doesn't believe it's possible to create self-actualizing replicas of humanity, when we take into account the cultural and experiential qualities of human beings.
Virk argues that technology can build virtual characters able to pass the Turing Test. To pass the Turing Test, a computer or generated character would be able to answer questions so the querent wouldn't know if he was talking to a computer or a real person.
These character simulations have been around in computer games for decades and we see their evolution in voice assistants like Google's Siri or Amazon's Alexa.
Virk outlined for China Daily where he believes technology must go, before we create a simulation, indistinguishable from reality.
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Stage 5: The Present: low resolution virtual reality, using 3D glass.
Stage 6: "Photorealistic" augmented and mixed reality. The ability to see without glasses, rendered objects (that aren't actually there), generated by holographic rendering and 3D printing.
Virk: "Once you have a 3D model, you can print out pixels, for the object, (3D printing) so you'll have a three-dimensional object."
Virk: (interface) able to broadcast, directly to the mind with the ability to read brain reactions.
Stage 8: Implanted Memory through a physical Computer/Mind interface. (Think of the film, Total Recall).
Stage 9: Artificial Intelligence in computer generated characters, capable of passing the Turing Test.
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Stage 10 Downloadable Consciousness, from the augmented human brain to a computer, (digital immortality). The Matrix!
"This topic scenario of all these redundant people being entertained, which is basically a matrix right? being pacified and entertained as well living lives in a closed environment."
The Matrix, the iconic 1999 sci-fi film, depicted a world in which humanity is unknowingly trapped in a matrix of illusion a system controlled by outside entities-maybe even aliens.
You may be incredulous when you learn that this has become a topic for serious discussion among scientists. The theme was picked up by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who wrote in a 2003 paper, "we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation." It's not so much that scientists are buying in to the "extraterrestrial" thing. Tomas Laurenzo believes we live in a matrix, so does Elon Musk and Rizwan Virk thinks we all may be part of a massive computer game.
