Just imagine ....

If you had a 1 million GigaHertz supercomputer, could YOU make a show that people would pay $1 apiece to see?   Surely someone could.  Why do I ask?

Phaylen Fairchild blogged 11/18 on the "Facebooking of Second Life" and the past and future of virtual reality and Linden Labs.

I added a comment,  repeated below:

There are changes in software architecture that some new company will implement that may blast Second Life away. It’s sad that Linden Labs has turned it’s back on these.
One of those would be an operating system that attached the purchased CPU power to his avatar, not to a fixed piece of virtual land.
The immediate value of this would show up anytime you wanted to have a meeting or event. Right now, trying to put 100 people in a lecture hall results in huge lag, or complete failure. Under a mobile-CPU schema, the more people who showed up for an event, the more CPU power would be available for making the event even more spectacular.
Additional avatars would change from being liabilities to being resources.
That would make group activities unbounded upwards, instead of hitting the service ceiling where they are now. There could be events with 10000 participants. If everyone brought 1 GHz CPU spare power with them, imagine what you could synthesize in real time!
We haven’t even scratched the surface of where virtual reality could go. I think Linden Labs is displaying the behavior of the US Patent Office when they were about to close, because everything important “had already been invented.”

Rewriting the underlying operating system is a powerful paradigm.   I recall meeting with a principal of BAZIS, a company that wrote software for 2,500-bed hospitals in the Netherlands. This was in 1989 in San Francisco at the SCAMC conference.  They were delivering subsecond response time to 10,000 staff members, and running on a tiny machine equivalent to a MicroVAX -- the kind a secretary might have under the desk here for doing mail-merges.

How on earth did they do that, I asked.  Well, he confessed,  they had to rewrite the operating system, because VMS had become bloated and attempted to be all things to all people to the point where it didn't do anything very well at all any more.  (Shades of Windows....)

Similarly,  no one has tackled and solved the certainly solvable problem of how to make multiple CPU's into plug-and-play networks,  as my comment above describes, so that as more and more people show up,  the "system" has more and more power to work with and knows how to manage it on some emergent basis.

You could, in a place like Second Life,  invite a million people to an event, but each person has to come with 1 GHz of spare cpu power from their laptop,   as well as a $1 admission fee.   In return, they get a show only a supercomputer could deliver!   People would buy that.

In fact,  the model would be very addictive.   As people realized the power they wielded,they would ask all their Friends to come as well, and bring their friends, so as to have an even MORE spectacular event.    Instead of 100,000,000 people watching TV,   100,000,000 people would BECOME TV.

The financial possibility here is LARGER than that of professional football or soccer.  People ENJOY forming huge crowds with a common purpose.  People pay real dollars to have a chance to do so, a LOT of real dollars to attend a sports event these days.  But seating at real events is limited by the size and cost and huge lag time and investment required to build a "sports stadium".   At the same time, we read how a virtual nightclub sold yesterday for $535,000.  

These are, in terms of cash flow, JUST AS REAL AS BRICKS AND MORTAR, venture capitalists!  Listen up! You guys are all betting on the wrong horse.   Why not aim at having 1 billion people attend your next event? 

Just change the stupid operating system paradigm, dudes. This is perhaps equivalent to building a 40 story office building.  It is not trivial. but it is not rocket science either.  Call BAZIS in the Netherlands and ask them if their programming staff is busy next month if nothing else.
 

And the woman running the show would become very very rich. It's a sort of equivalent of the fable of "stone soup" or "nail soup".   It's more like a "pot luck dinner" where the guests bring the food and the organizer doesn't even have to own an oven or do any cooking (or dishes!). 

Alternatively,  and I point this comment to the US government,  what if some other country with computer savvy programmers, such as China,  figured out how to do this trick FIRST, and could call up and deploy a dynamically-synthesized supercomputer on demand to apply to specific problems?

Actually,  China is sitting on two trillion dollars of foreign reserve capital, wondering what to do with it.  My own non-humble suggestion to them is to invest in technologies that create more and more value as more and more human beings plug into the grid.  They don't need to be "efficient".    Only China these days (maybe Indonesia and India next?) when faced with "We need a dam across this river" still tends to think of solutions like "What if we had 10 million people each carry a bucket of rocks and dump them here?"   Maybe, for software,  solutions that start out inefficient at low values of "N" (number of nodes / agents) but then ramp up rapidly for high values of N are available that no body else in the world could even attempt. It's worth looking at a few minutes and pondering...  What can you do with 1.3 billion people that nobody else could even come close to that nobody else has ever even contemplated before, aside from just "playing the bell curve" and getting a top 1% of the population that's larger than everyone else's top 30%?

The two curves on the "Houston, we have a problem" graph I made could equally well describe those two algorithms.   One, popular in the USA and in short-sighted solution cultures,  rises rapidly to get the most "bang per buck" in the short term, but then runs out of steam. This is effectively what Linden Labs has done with Second Life.  They've run out of climb-power and given up growth.    The other longer-term solution does the flip-side trade off -- it starts out slowly, or even downwards in the typical J-shaped pattern of a long-term investment,  but then starts paying off in an ever increasing way, climbing up to cross the other peaked-out curve and then climbing unbounded to the sky.

I'm not wishing that a short-sighted dictatorial government should "win" here.   What I'm wishing is that somebody can be motivated to figure out what we can do with a planet of 6 to ten billion people that treats everyone of them as a resource, at least a high-quality vision-processing unit, (which by itself is superior in capacity to what the Pentagon pays a billion dollars for in terms of pattern recognition)  instead of as a drag on profits.   What bugs me the most is that the planet as a whole is sort of an analog to Linden Labs,  or the US Patent Office in 1844,  planning to shut down and close because everything important has been invented and all we can do now is cut costs and try to ride higher in the sinking lifeboat than the next dude,  or put on our running shoes so the other guy is the one caught by the bear chasing us first. ("I don't have to outrun the bear ....").

That's because, among other things, I don't fret so much about "competition" and who "wins", because the lifeboat we're all in is taking us all down with it. There is no "high point" in the boat.  We face problems like pandemics or asteroid impacts that won't respect political boundaries or turf and don't care who is where or who they will make "look bad."

If you want to conquer social unrest,  then give everyone something of value to contribute so they can at least feel wanted and important and that their pain is worth while.  People buy that.

We're not just talking "computer power" here.  We're talking 1 supercomputer equivalent AND 1 million sets of human eyes and human vision processing as sub-components to draw upon, all focused on the same problem at the same time.

God that sounds like a trip! It always looks like a trip when 100,000 starlings all gather into a huge river and practice moving as a single swarm.  When can we start?!  Here's my $1! What does it feel like to be a bird and be part of a million bird swarm?  Let's find out!

What would people do with this?   Adults probably scratch their heads and say "I can't think of anything."   Now ask 1 million 4 year olds if they'd all like to fingerpaint together....  There are things people LOVE doing that adults in board rooms would never think of.  

The goal of Second Life, once, was to let users have unbounded creativity.   Check out the video of the flash-mob "Random Act of Culture" at Macy's in Philadelphia to see how it COULD feel!