I'm Hari Seldon, who are you?
Prtihwis at the Imagineer blog is absolutely on-target when he says that massive multiplayer online role playing games will be a revolutionary app. He senses its influence will be akin to the ubiquity of Bollywood customers (earlier known as "fans"). I especially admire how he explains what an MMORPG is very simply: So what are they all about ? It is about a simulated world peopled by different races of people with each having slightly different characteristics. Is it not the same in our 'real' world ?
Absolutely.
What happens when a sudden revelation, an image through various media, perhaps a child shows us that the real world is as virtual as the online world? The Singularity, but instead of a technological one, a sociological singularity. When everyone loses the ability to distinguish between themselves and their avatars, which is how I have become - a version of myself. The global singularity equation is clear to me now:
Six Billion Imagineers = One helluva MMORPG
Prithwis is also interested in a recent rise of Alzheimer's disease among adult populations, and imagines a very plausible solution:
If we look at the disease carefully, we would note that the principal discomfort is in the area of remembering 'things' that are related to the circumstances at hand. Now 'remembering' things and 'recalling' them on demand is one of the things that computers - particularly databases - can do very well. Search and recall is one of the hottest technologies and the iconic status in this space is held by Google, but Yahoo and MSN are close behind.
What I find interesting is the connection between loss of memory, and the reception of your avataric self, the logging out of the "real" world and logging back into it using a different "self", the fading in and out of the borders of maya. Perhaps it is the stupidity of a mythical system like democracy that breeds the loss of memory among seniors tired of being forced to remember who they are, what their name is, where they were born.
As for who Hari Seldon is, I'm pretty sure I know him closely.
