Let’s fast forward to a time when technology has advanced to the point where we can share a fully immersive virtual world. We can walk around — or fly around — at will, pick up objects, have eye contact with each other, and all the while feel perfectly comfortable hanging out together in that physically plausible alternate space.<\/p>\n
Now suppose that we decide it would be fun to populate that space with virtual beings — what in computer parlance are called “non-player characters”, or NPCs. What do you suppose they will be like?<\/p>\n
In particular, will they be as photo-realistic as we can make them? Will they be indistinguishable from us humans in every way — or at least, indistinguishable from the avatars of ourselves and each other in this shared world?<\/p>\n
Or will they be deliberately stylized, marking them as a separate species, much as in earlier times we would stylize animated characters such as Bugs Bunny or Woody the Cowboy?<\/p>\n
I’m not sure it’s a question of what is possible. It might be more of a question of what we really want from these characters, and how we prefer to think of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let’s fast forward to a time when technology has advanced to the point where we can share a fully immersive virtual world. We can walk around — or fly around — at will, pick up objects, have eye contact with each other, and all the while feel perfectly comfortable hanging out together in that physically … Continue reading “NPCs on the Holodeck”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15863"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15864,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15863\/revisions\/15864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}