A certain technology company has a vision for the future of people hanging out together in cyberspace as embodied avatars. A lot of smart people are working on it, and a very large amount of money has been committed.<\/p>\n
Yet in all of the descriptions that I have seen, the idea is to represent everybody only from the waist up. The reason, I believe, is that the technology is readily available to track peoples’ heads and hands, but not so much to track their feet.<\/p>\n
I wonder whether this is going to be just a temporary glitch, or whether it will become enshrined as a standard. Perhaps from now on, this is how people will look in their on-line lives — they will not exist from the waist down.<\/p>\n
If so, I am not sure that I am ok with this. For millions of years evolution has seen to it that we have a particular arrangement of brain and body. The human brain has evolved to be highly attuned to that human body.<\/p>\n
Maybe we shouldn’t just throw out half of the human body because of a temporary technical inconvenience. We don’t want our future reality to be an impoverished Waist Land.<\/p>\n
Sigh. November is the cruelest month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A certain technology company has a vision for the future of people hanging out together in cyberspace as embodied avatars. A lot of smart people are working on it, and a very large amount of money has been committed. Yet in all of the descriptions that I have seen, the idea is to represent everybody … Continue reading “The Waist Land”<\/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\/23797"}],"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=23797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23798,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23797\/revisions\/23798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}