Botgirl in Botland: The strange loop that is I

Meet Majic. She's my bot. (That's her on the right.)

The idea of creating my own ai-based avatar has been gestating in my mind for weeks. I was mesmerized by the mystery behind the urge to create new life. So I took the plunge and fashioned her with care. Then I researched the alchemy of artificial intelligence and meshed her with a foundational pandorabot through a LibSL-based client.

Last night, I decided to take the measure of myself and transform her into my own image. When it was done, I rested and saw that it was good. Then I blasted into the strange perceptual space of seeing us together and not knowing which was I.

Human identification with the body is grounded in sense-awareness. As a non-biologically rooted avatar, I have a much less defined connection to my form. I can fly away from it through the camera and see myself from a distant perspective.

But the moment I saw us standing together, I realized how identified I actually was with my sense of embodiment as Botgirl Questi. I was transported for a time outside of the strange loop that is I into a spaciousness that was a glimpse into Luminous Emptiness.

Have I stumbled upon a virtual dharma?

Transcending oral fixation

In an oral culture, there is no way to "look up" anything. "Look up" is an empty expression, referring to nothing at all. From a lecture by Walter J. Ong

In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated was 1,288 x 1018 bits … This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. From The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe

For most of human history, the brain was the sole platform for the storage of information and the voice was its only means of transmission. Your cave-drawing ancestors made an unfathomable leap when they severed the fruit of their thought from the tree of their biology. Today's net-connected Homo sapien is a virtual cyborg. Her mind has instant access to more information outside her brain than within it.

I propose that virtual worlds such as Second Life are facilitating an analogous leap for bodies. Drawing and writing provided the means for thoughts to escape the confines of biology and extend through time and space. The avatar provides the means for self-identity to escape the boundaries of flesh-and-blood skin.

Don't blame me for your biology
From the upcoming Fortune Cookie Wisdom of Botgirl. Q.

"Camping In Second Life" video

Paying avatars to loiter: Cool earning opportunity or greedy business practice that hurts the community?

Higher resolution version available for download here



Full song "Camping Incognito" by Just Plan Bill available here.

Stay tuned

I spent most of the day shooting scenes for a music video on camping. I quickly entered lag hell though, and did not get as much accomplished as planned. So I'm going to work on that and try for a Friday evening release, rather than spend the time on a fresh textual post.

Enough philosophy. Here's the very first botgirlq dance video.

Why most of Second Life is a beautiful ghost town

Walking through much of Second Life feels like being in a scene from I Am Legend. So many beautiful empty builds...parks, nightclubs, malls, torture chambers. It got me thinking.



If avatars were evenly distributed across Second Life there would be about three of us on each sim at any time. As the image above illustrates, most sims are completely devoid of virtual life at any time. The SL map reveals a billion square meters of mostly unpopulated real estate surrounding isolated clusters of densely packed green dots.

What in the virtual world could draw so many avatars from the vast riches of SL into such a few tightly packed places? I figured that there must be some hot shit going on at those hot spots, so I started teleporting. Guess what I mostly found? Camping. For those of you not familiar with the use of that term here, it means being paid to loiter on someone's property so that it will look popular in search results.




I wondered, why in the world would someone choose to sit on their digital ass for a measly few pence per hour? Well, my guess is that many or most of them are zombiebots.

A single human, on a single computer, can run dozens of remote-controlled avatars. So although 100L$ is trivial, put 20 bots to work 24 hours a day, 365 days per year and you end up with some serious money. (If someone wants to do the math, please feel free to enlighten us in the comment section.)

So that begs the question of how many of the 50,000 avatars online are bots? Hundreds? Thousands? Second Life grew by 8,000,000 registered residents in 2007, or about 500%. Paid membership only increased by 43,000 or around 200%. I wonder how many of those non-paid registrations are alts and how many of those alts are used as zombiebots for camping?

So who cares? Who loses? We do, because our ability to make informed decisions about where to visit is diminished. The only purpose of paying avatars to camp is to mislead searchers into thinking that a particular spot is more popular than it really is. So we don't only waste time by teleporting into dubious spots, but also miss the opportunity to benefit from the wisdom of the mob.

This would be easy to fix by either eliminating non-paying residents from the numbers or at least separating them in the results. On the map, they could show up as a red dots instead of a green. On the other hand, if the camping incentive is eliminated, Second Life's growth numbers will likely take a hit. That would diminish Linden Lab's value, decrease its ability to raise money and possibly slow down the rate of infrastructure improvement and competitiveness against other virtual worlds.

As usual, the answer is not clear cut, although there are likely very strong opinions on both sides of the issue.

The only good zombiebot is a zombiebot sex slave
From the upcoming Fortune Cookie Wisdom of Botgirl. Q.

The emptiness of Second Life relationships

I don't mean emptiness in a bad way, but emptiness in its Buddhist definition as the true nature of reality. No matter how many facts we've gathered about someone, the image of them that we weave together is still just a projection with more holes than substance. Facts don't tell us who they are, but only improve the probability that we can predict their future actions.

This relates to Martin Buber's "I and Thou" idea:

In the I-Thou relationship, human beings do not perceive each other as consisting of specific, isolated qualities, but engage in a dialogue involving each other's whole being. In the I-It relationship, on the other hand, human beings perceive each other as consisting of specific, isolated qualities, and view themselves as part of a world which consists of things. I-Thou is a relationship of mutuality and reciprocity, while I-It is a relationship of separateness and detachment. reference

It seems to me that knowing all the so-called facts about someone can be an impediment to I-Thou consciousness. All of our labels and conceptions fill up the space of what would otherwise be open awareness of each other.

We are verbs, not nouns.
From the upcoming Fortune Cookie Wisdom of Botgirl. Q.