Maybe I can write more on near-far and signaling in another book. One thing at a time.
Most of the things that make our physical world luxurious or impoverished have little to do with the cost of simulating them. A dirty smelly hut is just as expensive to simulate as a vast mansion. Yes, they might spend 0.1% more relative to brain computing costs on computing VR if that increases work productivity by more than 0.1%.
The point: Not that a vast mansion will be too difficult to simulate relative to a smelly hut, but that anything simulated in sufficient detail will become luxury, while non-wealthy ems live in the relative squalor of palatial mansions that just don’t look/feel/sound/smell quite right, in an unpleasant way.
Yes, anything is expensive to sim in very high detail. But it isn’t at all clear that in typical settings the amount of detail you can get for say 0.1% of the cost of running a brain is usually unpleasant or disturbing.
You’re right, my intuitions had been swayed toward the “expensive verisimilitude” direction by the part in the beginning of Permutation City where the EMs keep committing suicide.
A dirty smelly hut is just as expensive to simulate as a vast mansion.
A mansion will have dozens or hundreds of rooms; how can equally difficult rooms be just as expensive to simulate when there are hundreds more rooms in one scenario than another?
The rooms will still need to be designed and available somewhere; even AAA games can’t get away with indefinitely big canned environments no matter how many paging or zoning tricks they use to reduce the immediate rendering costs.
Maybe I can write more on near-far and signaling in another book. One thing at a time. Most of the things that make our physical world luxurious or impoverished have little to do with the cost of simulating them. A dirty smelly hut is just as expensive to simulate as a vast mansion. Yes, they might spend 0.1% more relative to brain computing costs on computing VR if that increases work productivity by more than 0.1%.
The point: Not that a vast mansion will be too difficult to simulate relative to a smelly hut, but that anything simulated in sufficient detail will become luxury, while non-wealthy ems live in the relative squalor of palatial mansions that just don’t look/feel/sound/smell quite right, in an unpleasant way.
Yes, anything is expensive to sim in very high detail. But it isn’t at all clear that in typical settings the amount of detail you can get for say 0.1% of the cost of running a brain is usually unpleasant or disturbing.
You’re right, my intuitions had been swayed toward the “expensive verisimilitude” direction by the part in the beginning of Permutation City where the EMs keep committing suicide.
A mansion will have dozens or hundreds of rooms; how can equally difficult rooms be just as expensive to simulate when there are hundreds more rooms in one scenario than another?
If the em is only in one room at a time, only one room must be simulated in detail at any one time.
The future will have little winding passages constructed to prevent line-of-sight from one room to another?
Deus Ex was righter than they knew.
The rooms will still need to be designed and available somewhere; even AAA games can’t get away with indefinitely big canned environments no matter how many paging or zoning tricks they use to reduce the immediate rendering costs.