zompist bboard

It's just like the internet, isn't it. I knew it.

So, which do ZBBers prefer, the Vee or the internet? I'm going to be ornery and say "the internet".

Based on what little we've been presented with about the Vee, it seems obvious that the Vee is the internet, or rather what the internet becomes over the course of the thousands of years in the future when Zomp's story is set. Being something of an optimist and trusting progress, I'm going to assume that, on the whole, those thousands of years of evolution ended up with more good changes than bad, and cast my vote for the the Vee, in much the same spirit that I would rather go to a doctor now than in 150 AD, even if modern American health insurance is fucked up and the hypothetical 150 AD doctor was Galen.

I just prefer a medium that doesn't require electrodes inplanted in your brain to access it.

Actually, that's what bugs me the most about the internet, no brain implants! My greatest disappointment with the Vee is that it shows no signs of being implemented within the next 20 years.

I figure if the electrodes are easily and simply installed, and the results are as awesome as claimed, I'd rather have the vee,

That's a big ask. And given what we know about the Malthusian nature of the internet, i.e. internet use always soon outstrips increase in bandwidth, an unlikely fulfilment!

You enter an interactive datascene on the Vee. You've been in there for five minutes when everything comes to a pause. You're either paralyzed or else you keep walking but you don't move anywhere. You picked up a virtual object ten seconds ago, now it's stuck to your hands. A giant egg timer appears in the air in front of you. When all the sand pours into the bottom half, the egg timer flips over... and again... and again.... You try clicking the (real not virtual) button that will allow your neuroimplant to disconnect you, but it doesn't respond. Meanwhile, the egg timer flips over... and again... and again...

You're failing to distinguish the interface (which lives in your neurimplant) from the scene (which could be a few feet away in a datanode, or thousands of miles away in the Vee). A network slowdown today doesn't make your fingers stick to the keyboard, or prevent you from looking away from the screen.

A technology 20 years old does not make a good predictor of the stability of a technology 2000 years old. A better example is the notion of the book: the basic idea of sheets of paper written in an alphabet and bound in books was about the same in Roman times as today. (Printing is a manufacturing technology, not a change in the UI.)

Or look at cars, a technology just a century old. Of course cars break down, but on the whole you can get in any rental car, it will run fine and you'll have very few problems getting it to work.

That's not to say that there will never be lag in the 49C. In some cases it'd be worse— e.g. you are communicating with someone in a space habitat a million miles away. On the other hand, when a huge fraction of the economy is on the Vee and it's part of every house's and city's infrastructure, there's going to be a huge value placed on robustness and, where problems occur, on graceful degradation.

Also, surely there's a limit to how much bandwidth we'll ever need, and it's not terribly far off, either. Once we can get streaming data for all five senses, what else do we need?

zompist wrote:Also, surely there's a limit to how much bandwidth we'll ever need, and it's not terribly far off, either. Once we can get streaming data for all five senses, what else do we need?

Moar processing powerrrr

I guess that doesn't count as "bandwidth," maybe, but the more nuance you try to add to a simulation, the cleverer a processor you need, yes? And if everybody is trying to run extremely detailed simulations, could processor cycles for calculating them become a limited resource? Photonics would help with this, but surely that advantage wouldn't be limitless.

zompist wrote: Also, surely there's a limit to how much bandwidth we'll ever need, and it's not terribly far off, either. Once we can get streaming data for all five senses, what else do we need?

Presumably the Vee is also used for the sorts of scientific applications that might generate far more data than would be meaningful for a human (I'm thinking of the immense data storage and bandwidth requirements of data from the Large Hadron Collider, and there's no reason to assume future science is going to be any less bandwidth-hungry), so it could well be the case that bandwidth remains a limited resource.

con quesa wrote:

zompist wrote: Also, surely there's a limit to how much bandwidth we'll ever need, and it's not terribly far off, either. Once we can get streaming data for all five senses, what else do we need?

Presumably the Vee is also used for the sorts of scientific applications that might generate far more data than would be meaningful for a human (I'm thinking of the immense data storage and bandwidth requirements of data from the Large Hadron Collider, and there's no reason to assume future science is going to be any less bandwidth-hungry), so it could well be the case that bandwidth remains a limited resource.

Sure, there will always be large blocks of data. But that doesn't necessarily translate into lag. Once you can experience the VR version of World of Warcraft— or VR porn— I think we're done— the senses are fully occupied. Plus there will be no more productivity increases, as everyone is playing games.

Trailsend has a point about processing power, but he's also right that this shouldn't be a bandwidth problem. Either do the processing remotely and transmit just the results (which are likely to be much simpler, e.g. a set of locations for each player and object in the scene); or do a lot of the processing locally.

zompist wrote:Also, surely there's a limit to how much bandwidth we'll ever need, and it's not terribly far off, either. Once we can get streaming data for all five senses, what else do we need?

Studying urban planning has many advantages, and one of it is that we talk a lot about mobility. And mobility is not only the transportational one; there's a lot of discussion and research done on mobility of data. And this is a comment that is surprisingly well understood in urban planning : there is no limit. Give people means to exchange data, and they will. Interaction and information are normal goods : the more you can have them, the more you will take them.

Think about all the minute details that are constantly being added to video games : they keep on adding more and more data. Technically, one could include a whole Universe of details in a game, and it would be appreciated for the newer level of details added. There is not limit, I believe, to the amount of detail that can be added. Wikipedia will never stop to grow, as there is no limit to knowledge except the Universe itself, and that's nothing compared to all the data flow in our young Internet.

Basically, the only limit there will be will be technology. As long as you can add more data and have it brought more quickly, people will try to access it. Congestion (or lag, computer-wise) is inherent when you have unlimited access to a form of mobility.

Yiuel Denjidzirc wrote:Think about all the minute details that are constantly being added to video games : they keep on adding more and more data. Technically, one could include a whole Universe of details in a game, and it would be appreciated for the newer level of details added.

As I said, there's always a need for more data; but not a need for more bandwidth. As a fancy monkey, you can't process more than your senses allow.

So for instance, running SimGalaxy could take enormous processing power. But rendering it does not, because you are not seeing everything in the sim. Either you're seeing a tiny bit of detail, or you're getting an abstracted high-level view.

Games use a lot of tricks to reduce bandwidth. For instance, multi-player games can delegate particle effects to the local processor, and often these are 2-D rather than 3-D. A lot of effort is put into not rendering what the player can't see, re-using textures, etc.

(For that matter, a neural interface would allow a savings present-day monitors can't use: only the area seen by the fovea needs to be rendered in detail.)

I can certainly envision structural scenarios in which people would need to be receiving vastly more data than they're processing in order to be able to process it - say, a structure in which the entire V-universe has to be broadcast to you continuously so you can navigate wherever you want in it - and I want to say that surely we wouldn't be stupid enough to let that situation arise.

But then I remember that we should also be smarter than to raise all of our water supply to drinking-quality standards before going on to use most of it for industrial purposes and toilet flushing.

zompist wrote:You're failing to distinguish the interface (which lives in your neurimplant) from the scene (which could be a few feet away in a datanode, or thousands of miles away in the Vee). A network slowdown today doesn't make your fingers stick to the keyboard, or prevent you from looking away from the screen.

But your fingers aren't plugged into the keyboard. I have had problems where trying to download from a particular site has made my computer slow up and when I tried removing a USB stick by clicking on the little green arrow it didn't respond. For "USB stick" read "neuroimplant", for "computer" read "datanode" and for "website" read "datascene in the Vee" and you have the scene I described yesterday, in which the datanode slows up and can't process either the information downloaded from the Vee or your request to disconnect.

Mornche Geddick wrote:

zompist wrote:You're failing to distinguish the interface (which lives in your neurimplant) from the scene (which could be a few feet away in a datanode, or thousands of miles away in the Vee). A network slowdown today doesn't make your fingers stick to the keyboard, or prevent you from looking away from the screen.

But your fingers aren't plugged into the keyboard. I have had problems where trying to download from a particular site has made my computer slow up and when I tried removing a USB stick by clicking on the little green arrow it didn't respond. For "USB stick" read "neuroimplant", for "computer" read "datanode" and for "website" read "datascene in the Vee" and you have the scene I described yesterday, in which the datanode slows up and can't process either the information downloaded from the Vee or your request to disconnect.

Presumably the datanode doesn't have to let you disconnect. Zompist's point is that the neurimplant interface is more like setting your fingers to a keyboard because it is not dependent on or bound to the datanode's processor--if the datanode slows, you just look away. The analogy to a USB drive assumes a lot about the architecture of the system that is not necessarily the case.

Right, the neurimplant is not under the datanode's control, but yours.

Think of it this way: today's devices have keyboards, keypads, joysticks, and mice because we don't have digital fingers... we can't just reach in and give the device our input. The neurimplant is your digital fingers. You can't get them stuck in the machine.

zompist wrote:So for instance, running SimGalaxy could take enormous processing power. But rendering it does not, because you are not seeing everything in the sim. Either you're seeing a tiny bit of detail, or you're getting an abstracted high-level view.

Games use a lot of tricks to reduce bandwidth. For instance, multi-player games can delegate particle effects to the local processor, and often these are 2-D rather than 3-D. A lot of effort is put into not rendering what the player can't see, re-using textures, etc.

(For that matter, a neural interface would allow a savings present-day monitors can't use: only the area seen by the fovea needs to be rendered in detail.)

I remember a story involving a game set in a similar virtual reality that worked by letting the human's brains fill in a lot of the detail, and the players would amuse themselves sometimes by thinking a lot about cows being purple, or something, and then deliberately taking a long intense look at the nearby herd of cattle.

Radius Solis wrote:a structure in which the entire V-universe has to be broadcast to you continuously so you can navigate wherever you want in it

You mean like if someone tried to mirror the Internet so they can navigate better? Whatever. No matter what we set our minds on, there are always a bajillion ways to fuck things up.