Second Life Founder Working on Sentient, Dreaming AI

Since founding Second Life, Philip Rosedale has moved on: he currently runs LoveMachine, a company that describes itself as “a team of people using disruptive technologies to very rapidly build things that can make money and have a shot at saving the world.”

Case in point: they’re currently working on a project to simulate a functional, virtual brain that manifests itself as a sentient artificial intelligence in the world of Second Life, and even dreams. 

Wagner James Au, who writes one of the top Second Life blogs and formerly served as the game’s official embedded journalist, reports:

A somewhat more ambitious goal, [a Second Life veteran] told me, was, well, creating a sentient artificial intelligence which existed in a virtual world.

“He wants it to live inside Second Life,” as she put it to me. “It will think and dream and everything.” Indeed, the company’s website now lists as one of its three projects, “The Brain. Can 10,000 computers become a person?”

This seemed somewhat unbelievable (but only just), so I checked with Philip himself.

“Yeah,” Philip Rosedale told me, “that’s the general direction we’re going… but I’m not wanting to talk about it until we start making some progress.”

Au also dredges up a quote from the company’s former CTO to the effect that “building Skynet always felt like an appropriate follow on to Second Life.” The Singularity is coming?

(New World News via Boing Boing)