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Virtual Reality


Virtual reality is a growing business (just witness the success of the movie Avatar). If you haven't already seen something called project Natal "Milo" - look for it on Youtube - go now, check it out, I'll wait...



There, how was that? I find the fact that Milo is so real very disturbing on some level. At what point does Milo become "real", does he become a person? If his circuitry becomes more sophisticated and he becomes more autonomous, should we take consideration of his apparent personhood? I show you this video to demonstrate that this sort of issue is not necessarily that far away. Computing power keeps increasing exponentially, and scientists are coming up with better and better ways to model behaviour (i.e. see John R Anderson at the ACT-R laboratory) note, this is not me!

Computational models of cognitive behaviour are in their infancy now, and as of yet there aren't many models that translate well from one task set to another - in other words we have lots of little models for specifics, but no one model that does it all (though recent research on threaded cognition by Salvucci et al., may be on the right track).
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