Video games could kill you

There are a million and a half reasons why I don't like Second Life or any video game for that matter. They contribute to inactivity. They waste people's time. I could go on and on but the main reason is it just plain creeps me out.

It's not the random people who come up behind you and grope your avatar. It's not the half human half animal characters. But it is the fact that they could kill me.

When I told a friend about our assignment to experiment with Second Life he sent me a link that really got me thinking. A recent New York Times article addresses the possibility that our lives could be a simulation or virtual reality like Second Life and that these programs could become self aware. Basically your life could be someone else's Second Life.

I might have just brushed this article off but within in one hour of creating a character in Second Life his own appearance changed without me prompting it.

You have inevitably seen a movie that deals with this genre "science fiction". But according to some computer experts a computer capable of "creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems" will be available in the next 100 years. Looking at technological advances in the last ten years makes me think that estimate might not be too far off.

There's a 20 percent chance the picture on the right is actually the real you

It's unsettling to think that nothing is real and that I have no control over my own life.
Nick Bostrum, a professor at Oxford University says that there's at least a 20 percent chance that our world is not real but rather that we are virtual puppets.

It gets worse too. What happens when a "character" becomes aware that it is a simulation? According to Bostrum's logic the simulated world would seize to exist. Why? Bostrum follows the chain of thought that if our world is simulated and we continue to make other simulated worlds such as Second Life eventually there would be a lack of processing power to fuel our virtual reality.

It may be a wacky theory but I'd rather not test it. This is why I'll never turn on Second Life again.