Yesterday, Thursday March 19 at 12 Noon, The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education held it's Keynote. The man giving it was someone familiar to every longtime Second Life resident: Philip Linden, aka Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab, the company behind this virtual world.
Today, we have the distinct honor of hearing from a man who actually made gatherings like this one possible. Our keynote speaker is a physicist turned coder turned visionary, someone who looked at the early internet and saw not just a network, but a world waiting to be built.
He founded Linden Lab and created Second Life, the virtual world that has been home to educators, artists, researchers, and dreamers for over two decades. He has since explored spatial audio, open-source VR platforms, digital currency, and even the frontiers of machine consciousness. And in October 2024, he returned to Second Life as CTO, bringing fresh energy and new ideas to a platform many of us call home.
Someone was saying close to a hundred people were in the area the event took place, an intersection of four sims, Philip on a small cliff overlooking the crowd, "I feel like a king standing on a high rooftop *laughs* I see people I recognize, it's the magical things about Second Life." He thanked the educators for their work in this virtual world. He would talk about AI and how it was impacting society, saying at one point a comparison could be made to the Industrial area when machines did the work of the muscle power of many men, "Now we have gone much father with replicating how our mind works. ... the progress was very quick lately ... we are living in strange times- there are tremendous risks, there are more bad than good impacts at the moment."
After the keynote, Philip took questions, and there was talk about not just AI, but other topics such as Second Life, "It's interesting to reflect on the fact that SL hasn't grown as rapidly as we thought or liked." One subject was about how people often rely on facial expressions, hand movements, and other cues in real life but that was absent in Second Life and other virtual worlds. It was also brought up that being hired to correct an AI could be a roundabout way to do the job of a programmer for a fraction of the cost. Someone also joked it AI had an alignment, it would be "Chaotic Neutral." It was also brought up that there hasn't been a real-life Second Life Community Convention since 2011. Philip Linden did wonder if the possibility of doing another deserved some thinking about.
The conference was broadcast live, and may be available to see later on the VWBPE Youtube channel later.
Bixyl Shuftan
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