No, I’m not talking about the average player in SL, but the Artificial Intelligence created at Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Lab. Eddie is programmed to reason and to predict other people’s actions and has also passed a few reasoning tests. Eddie or really, Edd Hifeng, isn’t yet walking around in SL, but it’s possible to talk to him. When I tried to contact him in SL the other day, he wasn’t online so I couldn’t meet him “face-to-face”. Imagine meeting this new lifeform in a way, a first contact.
The researchers of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute isn’t planning to leave little Eddie in the virtual world. They are working to bring him to us in RL. But first he’ll play in SL so he can grow and learn about how to be more like us. Eddie is part of a bigger project that Renselelaer is working on. It’s a holodec project like in the scifi series StarTrek. So our “first contact” might not be in Second Life, but in a holodec and a full size Eddie or someone else. The future awaits us and it looks really promising.