Volume 2, Issue 1 
1st Quarter, 2007


How Uploading Works

Marshall Brain

Page 2 of 3

We can actually look at market forces that will drive us out of our bodies and understand that is a way of understanding a little bit about uploading and what will drive that.

What will drive us out of our bodies?  I can tell you one thing is travel. Travel can be inconvenient: flight connections, security probes, and all the things involved with traveling. The experience of travel is one thing that will drive us out of their bodies but for a lot of people another thing that will drive us out of our bodies is video games, the desire to experience video games much more intimately that we do today.

Here is an image of video game technology in 1982 versus video game technology in 2005.  In 25 years we went from Pac-Man, which is four colors on a black screen, to an immersive 3-D environment.


Image 4: Video Games

What would this screen look like in 2030?  If we went that far in 25 years, what will a video game look like in 25 more years?  And that’s mind boggling.  What will I look like?

If we stay inside our bodies, it will not look that much different.  It can get a little higher resolution but you can get much better than HALF Life II in terms of resolution. 

They offer us all these different experiences that we would all like to have, but look at some of these experiences, you can play football, you can kill people in realistic battle situations and you can go back to ancient Rome.


Image 5: Immersive Video Games

There are lots of cool things you can do but the problem is you have to do it with two thumbs and most of us don’t want to experience football and Ancient Rome with two thumbs.  We want to experience them with our full complement of physical senses and muscles.  We want to actually participate in these events.

This is a rapidly evolving technology.  I believe it is either on the cusp of or already has overtaken the movie industry.  It has nowhere to go but forward except for this problem: the notion that you are going to control and experience with your thumbs is nuts.  That is one thing that will drive us out of our bodies.  And it will drive us out of our bodies in one of two ways.  Either we will install hardware that will let us emulate or connect into these virtual environments and control and feel them or we’ll realize we don’t need our bodies anymore. One way or the other will get us out. 

The second reason is porn.  We all see the effects of porn in our society and I can offer you an interesting and sometimes shocking piece of data to show how popular porn is.  I would say we all use Google.  Google represents 2.7 percent of all Web traffic, followed by Yahoo! and MSN.  Search is about five percent of network Internet traffic and we all use that.

Porn is over three times more Internet traffic than all of search.  It’s insane how popular porn is and we don’t realize it, maybe because it’s not something people talk about.  But that statistic cannot be denied. That is an astounding statistic. 

The way people experience porn right now is through still images or grainy videos and that stinks.  It’s just not how people want to experience porn.  It is a very, very poor stimulation of what people want out of porn. That’s the second thing that will drive us out of our bodies. 

The third thing is this horrible problem our bodies create with longevity.  I was on this flight, wishing I wasn’t inside my body, and I’m sitting in my seat, which is the aisle seat.  There is a quite large woman sitting next to me who got there before me and just put up the arm rest. We’re squeezed in a two pack on the airplane.  She’s about 80 years old and she used to work at IBM. I got to know her very well on this flight. She lives near Orlando, but is flying up to visit her niece who lives in Burlington, VT.  She said to me at the end of the flight, “I really appreciate you being here today.”  And I said, “Why is that?”  And she replied, “Well, my husband of 53 years passed away and this is the first trip I’ve ever taken without him.”

What do you say to that?  She talked through the whole flight and I talked with her and we had a very nice time, but I didn’t realize I was taking the place of her now deceased husband, That’s just shocking to think that I was in that role, for one thing.  And for another thing, think how horrible that is, a person she’s been with for 53 years just vanished out from underneath her for no reason.  Death is an insult; it’s just ridiculous.

There are all these different ways for us to die.  We could go to the bathroom and fall down the steps or we could get into an accident as we’re driving back to a hotel or the hotel could burn down while we’re sleeping; there are so many ways for us to die. 

When we die we don’t have a backup system or anything like that. Getting out of our bodies is one way to improve longevity.

All of these forces, plus having to use the restroom and all of these other things, are going to drive us out of our bodies as soon as we have the opportunity to leave them.  Lots of people would leap at the chance to get out of their bodies if they could go plug into a virtual world.

 

 

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