Now, the truth is finally revealed: indeed, as we have been saying all along, we can create our own AI ‘digital clones’, training them as our own selves, and having them roam the grid, flawlessly pretending to be us.

The technology is known as “Second You” and the following YouTube video shows how it works in practice:

It’s possible that, back in 2010, this was still an emergent technology, but, today, it’s been developed to perfection.

As the ‘Lab pursues its mysterious and opaque agenda of entangling us deeper and further into this collective hallucination, it seems that others, fighting for keeping the dominance in the Viewer Wars, have taken an unprecedented misstep: they will shut down voice communications.

Granted, this only applies to users of the old viewer. Which, by sheer coincidence (or not!), is the one most people use to log in to Second Life.

Under the new management, all their content will be sold to third parties, such as in the deal with Google which will allow them to use Reddit’s content for training AIs. This comes as no surprise, since it’s highly likely that they were already doing that, but paying nothing to Reddit.

Reddit’s content is valuable because it shows how real humans interact in question asking and answering. It’s not only the type of the questions that is important for AI training; rather, it’s the style used by humans informally explain things to others, and how a conversation can naturally flow from this interaction. Reddit has several prime examples on how this is done which are an almost perfect fit for the kind of ‘naturality’ that Google expects to capture and train their AIs with.

But there are other sources for this kind of human-to-human communication. Such as Second Life.

By the end of 2023, Linden Lab announced that 2024 would see the “coming of AI” to Second Life, without going in many details. These were soon revealed: in order to reduce the churn rate of brand new users, Linden Lab partnered with Convai to deploy help bots on the Welcome Areas, with mixed results — but LL always explained that this was still very ‘experimental’.

But note that these bots are not only ‘helpful’ in the sense that they can answer sophisticated questions posed by newbies and walk them through the required steps. They also work in the other connection — capturing precious conversational data, which the Convai experts can then further process and refine to have their bots be even more ‘fluent’.

Again, this doesn’t stop here.

It is a well-established fact that Second Life is perhaps one of the last platforms that lacks encryption in chat communications, especially in direct IMs and group chat. It’s almost trivial to connect a bot, join a popular group, and start recording all transcripts, for the purpose of doing more training — but at the cost of intruding in the resident’s privacy. You’d be hard-pressed to figure out if a bot were listening in to your conversation or not.

The nice, plain, simple chatbot greeting you on your favourite shop, and which is always eager to send you landmarks to the latest and greatest items on sale could also be recording everything you say in public chat, adding it to the vast database that AI makers require to train their models.

Of course, to be honest, it’s far easier to embed a chat repeater on your favourite pair of shoes… or inside your Bento mesh. Hmm. Anyway…

Ok, so, text chat is easy to grab. But what about voice chat?

Enter the new development being done by Linden Lab: voice-over-IP (VoIP) chat using WebRTC. This is announced as a way for Linden Lab to drop their support for Vivox (the current VoIP provider for Second Life and many OpenSimulator Grids), and, instead, move voice chat to standard Web protocols, which, allegedly, should allow Linden Lab to integrate more functionality and improve quality overall.

That’s all true and correct, but the attentive observer might have noticed that this allows Linden Lab to effectively receive and locally process all voice communications, which, according to their specifications, do not appear to be heavily encrypted, if at all.

Thus, Linden Lab, besides supplying AI developers with Terabytes of text chat, may soon complement that data with the much more interesting voice data. And why is it so interesting? Because humans do not speak in the same way they write, especially, of course, in informal and casual conversations.

Most VoIP providers, however, guarantee their customers that their voice calls will be encrypted end-to-end. Therefore, these are useless for being intercepted for extracting AI training data.

Linden Lab, however, might not encrypt such data, and, as a consequence, it will be able to feed them all directly to Convai or any other AI provider requiring lots of good-quality voice communications for training purposes. An added bonus, on public chat, is that positioning information (location and direction the speaker is turned to) is also captured and stored, since this is used to produce spatial audio with extreme accuracy. But even direct calls and group calls may be captured and processed by AIs, reflecting the difference between being on an intimate call (one-to-one), a closed group conference, and, well, talking in public.

Evidently, Linden Lab will not relay any personal information to third parties. Voice streams will be totally anonymous, without even referencing the avatar it comes from, and stripped from any IP addresses — all requirements to abide by US and EU law. For training purposes, such data is nevertheless incredibly valuable, meaning that Linden Lab might be able to get a good price for it. Perhaps not as much as Reddit gets from text — the audience is considerably more limited — but nevertheless a nice income supplement to cover the costs of developing a whole new voice system from scratch.

The consequences?

Don’t be surprised if the next time you interact with a conversational ‘bot in Second Life, it will answer in your own voice. ?

The date was January 2008.

The place was the virtual world of Second Life.

The event was banning unlicensed banking and related financial operations.

At that time, speculators were having fun trading on the many exchanges that offered ‘Linden Dollars’ (game tokens used in the virtual world to acquire products and services) for fiat currency, and vice-versa. We would see charts and graphs that looked pretty much how crypto looks today — the difference was the order of magnitude: transactions with Linden Dollars are measured in millions of US$, crypto trades in billions and beyond.

We saw the same scams, the same fraudulent schemes, the same greedy opportunists who would defend the most outrageous ‘companies’ (most of which weren’t even legally registered anywhere…), only to have everything crash. This tiny bubble lasted in Second Life for perhaps three years or so.

Satoshi Nakamoto put up his Bitcoin.org site in August 2008.

Coincidence?…

Disclaimer: This author had previously posted a similar text as a comment on Medium.

Recently, the mainstream media have been increasing the pace of news articles related to UFOs (or, how the U.S. military forces call them now: UAPs — unidentified aerial phenomena), and in a recent interview to former President Barack Obama to The Late Late Show (as reported by CNN), it seems clear that Obama was aware of the existence of such flying objects (and of the legitimacy of those videos), although he was rather vague and humourous when asked for details.

There is a good reason for all those reports popping up all of a sudden: there will be a report about unidentified aerial phenomena presented to the U.S. Senate due in late June. Naturally enough, this has raised a lot of speculation about what exactly will be released.

Here at the SIC, this is no news for us.

Several years ago, according to our sources at Linden Lab (which shall remain anonymous to protect their identity, since many are still working there), the Board of LL was approached by a group of undisclosed officials of the military intelligence community. Allegedly, on a meeting that took place at 555 California Street, they explained that they would like to conduct an experiment in the virtual world of Second Life®.

Basically — so they said — extraterrestrial alien beings are not only real, but they’ve been around on Earth for quite a while, interacting with several governments around the world. Their intents are peaceful: most of them come from several locations in the galaxy and are just doing scientific research — you could call it anthropology — to document and learn how ‘primitive’ species lived in their societies, what problems they faced, and how they solved them. For these distant travellers, Earth’s society reveals much of their own incredibly distant past (measured in millions of years), when other civilisations had made their debut in space exploration (and colonisation). Such records are fragmented and very incomplete. So these alien researchers have been visiting all known civilisations on the galaxy, documenting their progress carefully and systematically, in order to learn much about themselves and their own past. Not all civilisations have solved their problems in the same way, of course, but the accumulated research is hopefully sufficient for each species to identify the many approaches taken, and how these relate to their own civilisation.

As a consequence, there are many visitors, from many different civilisations, all hovering around our planet, or, in many cases, physically establishing contact. However, they are aware of a huge handicap that is common to all of them: as species differ so much from each other, most are mutually repulsive, or, at best, indifferent. Xenophobia is, therefore, to be expected — they have encountered such cases over and over again — and this, in turn, leads to biased reports made by both the researchers and the subjects of anthropological studies. Because, as any good anthropologist knows, it’s not enough to study society and culture from afar: you have to interact with the natives, to understand how they think. And, ideally, they should gather testimonies from all classes of society — thus, while interacting solely with members of government (in absolute secrecy) will reveal a lot of useful information, they also know that government officials are not necessarily representative of the overall population.

Here’s the challenge: how to interact with ‘common people’, seeking to understand how they think, but avoiding not only xenophobia, but also keeping everything ‘secret’ to avoid unnecessary panic?

The solution is obvious: use a virtual world where you interact with others, no matter how you look like. The most repulsive-looking, smelly and yucky alien can just log in to SL, get a cute blonde avatar, and interact with others without raising suspicion. Even if their manners may be a bit odd — perhaps because certain interactions seen from afar (think soap operas and sitcoms) are not necessarily how people interact — that’s ok. SL is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-national environment. We expect others to be ‘a bit odd’. From gender-benders to people basically picking whatever skin colour they like, or simply using fantasy avatars (or abstract ones!), we’re all used to that, and we have been dealing with it for almost two decades now.

Similarly, alien researchers feeling uneasy in our presence can interact via Second Life without the need to, say, smell us. Even if our overall shape is offensive to their senses, well, many avatars are not necessarily human, so that’s all right. Perhaps some alien species would feel most comfortable around the furry community, for example — they could eventually have a ‘realistic’ avatar (i.e. one representing their own physical body in a realistic way) and be accepted by such a community — even knowing that, behind those cute furry avatars, there is an obnoxious-looking, smelly, sweaty human.

They’re even aware that many humans are quite fond of alien avatars! Indeed, inside SL, it’s really impossible to know if anyone using an alien avatar is a human or a genuine alien researcher (and vice-versa). Cute Japanese Anime girls might be slimy octopussy aliens in disguise; and they might be conversing with Grey avatars who are nothing more than middle-aged truck drivers logging in to SL from the isolation of their man caves.

The experiment, our sources claim, had a reasonable degree of success. Because the avatar population in SL is mostly human, alien researchers have, over the years, get used to what they perceive to be an obnoxious shape. Like all anthropological experiments on Earth show, given enough time of mutual contact, xenophobia tends to diminish. It’s no surprise that the most racist people on Earth are those who have little or no contact with others having a different skin colour; those that have prolonged contact may still be racist to a degree (namely, acting in a paternalising way), but even that tends to fade over the generations. Second Life places all sentient species at the same level: we all know that the vast majority of the avatars don’t resemble in the least how those people actually look in ‘real life’, and even those that come closest will still have considerable differences.

Indeed, one of the major issues found by the alien researchers is that, after a few years, they could not even figure out if they were talking to an Earthling or another alien researcher — possibly even from a different species! This may have quite interesting consequences at the galactic level: species that formerly didn’t interact (even if they weren’t actively pursuing a mutual war of extermination) now use SL avatars to routinely talk to each other — and they found out that they have far more in common than they thought. There are even rumours of inter-species romantic partnerships, some of which would be physically impossible in the real world (since each species might live in planets with mutually lethal conditions), others would be culturally impossible (as is the case of two species being strongly xenophobic towards each other, based on their physical appearance and what is perceived to be disgusting personal habits). In Second Life, however, such barriers to companionship do not exist.

Therefore, don’t let be fooled by anyone having a gorgeous-looking avatar speaking flawless English with an Australian accent. Alien researchers have long ago deciphered most of the languages spoken on Earth; in front of a specially designed keyboard, they’re able to chat in text just like any fluent English speaker — with a little aid of a spellchecker and grammar checker — and nobody will ever notice anything. Even if the eventual different tools used to type text on the screen may induce some delay in typing (a giant slimy octopus, for instance, might have a really hard time using a standard Qwerty keyboard with 102 keys…), this is also quite well tolerated — lag, after all, explains basically any odd behaviours (such as bumping into other avatars).

And even as SL introduced voice so long ago, this hasn’t stopped aliens from using it as well, even if they don’t naturally ‘speak’ in the sense we humans do. Not only voice morphing is easy enough to do (it’s built in the SL viewer) — and we expect someone who looks like a monster to sound like one — but advanced text-to-speech synthesis as demonstrated by Google is easily available and very cheap to implement; if Google can do it today, imagine what an alien civilisation with millions of years of scientific research in AI can come up with.

After at least a decade of research (that’s what our sources claim), many alien researchers have been ‘training’ how to interact with humans, using SL as a ‘safe’ environment. They have experimented with different non-human avatars, to better understand the human reaction of such physical forms; sometimes, some species use their own ‘Real Me’ avatars and even speak with their own voices on SL Voice Chat — in broken, but quite understandable English. Sure, the senses of smell and touch — important for some cultures, obnoxious for others — are not easily conveyed through SL, but it’s a good starting point. Over the years, alien researchers have learned more and more about how to interact with us, and, these days, they run land leasing operations or fashion shops or even write fashion blogs, just like the rest of us. Remember, these are highly trained professional anthropologists. They just needed a ‘sandbox’, so to speak, to apply all their training, so that they can ‘go native’ and perfectly blend among us, being fully accepted (and not merely ‘tolerated with indifference’). They even have human boy/girlfriends, who have no clue about their real identity.

It is therefore time for them to take the next step. Not all alien species will be able to do so, since, by now, they have a very good idea of what kinds of shapes, smells, skin textures, and personal habits are absolutely obnoxious to us humans, generating a strong aversion that cannot be easily overcome, even if they speak flawless English and have perfect manners from our human point of view. However, some species are not so handicapped: either they’re perceived as ‘cute’ (because they’re small, furry, and look perfectly harmless to us, with their big, kind eyes) or at least evoke our curiosity (such as certain odourless Grey-like, humanoid beings). A very few have the ability to morph their exteriors to look almost human. Conversely, many of those researchers, having been around human avatars for so long (and, in their pauses, watching human TV and movies), have lost their xenophobic aversion to us — we’re ‘just another galactic species’ for them, not a particularly obnoxious one; sure, we have our quirks, but all sentient species have them as well, and anthropologists have long ago overlooked those.

Thus, they’re now prepared to face humans in the Real World. Not the world of secret government bases hidden in the middle of the Nevada desert — that was certainly good for a first start, but not representative of the human species in general — but walking among us in the middle of New York or a busy European or Chinese city. Because the majority of them are not able to ‘pass’ as human, there has to be a global announcement, to explain to the worldwide population about what’s going on. The governments of the world will need to assure that these alien researchers are harmless, and, like all sentient species, curious — curious about us, our culture, our societies, our environment.

The governments will also explain in detail about their experiments in Second Life; many SL residents, watching those explanations, will realise that their ‘bestie’ is, in reality, a weird-looking brown-and-blue-spotted fish with four nostrils hailing from Tau Ceti. But, on the other hand, they have been used to talk to a weird-looking brown-and-blue-spotted fish with four nostrils avatar for the past decade, who insists to be called ‘Hrrmph-aah!’ and who has always claimed to be a space traveller from Tau Ceti, so… what, exactly, is the problem?

This is in essence what the next phase of the project will be: abandoning the whole ‘pretence’ or ‘charade’, and explain it to the whole world. Therefore, here at the SIC, we have been asked to publish the following statement, which no doubt you’ll see on different media, in a form or another:

Only the Enlightened will have any idea what this is all about; surely, however, the truth behind this shall be revealed in due time.

Interesting turn of events. Do we also live in an alternative reality?

At the time of writing, nothing changed, except that the pace of development seems to have been increased. Then again, after dropping Sansar, all developers allocated to that doomed-to-fail project have returned to Battery Street to continue working hard on Second Life, so, no wonder that there have been some improvements lately.

Sansar is not even a visually contiguous virtual world; it’s meant to be used for ‘experiences’. And what kind of experiences…? Well, the very same kind you have in Second Life today. Oh, sure, you can animate your own avatar using VR gear, and that certainly isn’t possible in Second Life. But most people who were lucky enough to be picked for the ‘open beta’ don’t have such gear, and their avatars are remarkably expression-less compared to the ones in SL. The jury is still out about which ‘experience’ is worse, High Fidelity’s or Sansar’s.

The point is, the more people try these other attempts at doing something new and wonderful, the quicker they return to Second Life.

So maybe that was the plan all along.

Or is it just a marketing stunt, to make sure Facebook shares remain up while facing dwindling returns from ads? Will Zuckerberg drop everything as soon as Facebook’s shares are steady again?

What will eccentric and insane investors like Richard Branson, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, John McAfee, or even Elon Musk do about this? (Jeff Bezos is just laughing out loud…)

Who does own Second Life today? Who gets all the money from avid shoppers, who will shell out US$100 over a weekend without blinking — and do it every weekend, just for fun — and there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of them logging in every day?

In its second decade of existence, Second Life’s inhabitants at the top of the pyramid are even more obscure than before. Long has gone the time when “opinion makers” would rule the Lindens. These days, commerce is king. And commerce has never been so profitable as today.

As mesh content slowly replaces everything we have seen in the past decade, and materials bring the SL renderer in the viewer up to the standards of the 21st century, residents dump all their old, outdated content, and buy everything from scratch. Never, as before, has content sales boomed as they boom today. Money is exchanged as never before. Still, it all happens under the hood. Nobody knows how much money is really exchanged. Nobody knows who gets it all. Nobody knows how Linden Lab will manage to keep everything working smoothly to deal with the growing economy, now that land sales are not bringing the income they did to LL before.

It’s a different world out there this decade: a world where you are is less important than how you look. Will Linden Lab be able to cope with the change? Will we see a “sales tax” on content replacing tier on land? Only a few know the answer; and they are silent.