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Ready Player Two

Opening : After I won Holliday’s contest, I remained offline for nine straight days — a new personal record.

Closing : And the only thing you can do is keep right on playing. Because the game that is your life still isn’t over yet. And there’s no telling how far you might be able to get, what you might discover, or who you might meet when you get there.

Review : A sequel to Ready Player One released in 2011. Three things I wish they really existed …

Brain-Computer Interface – simulation could become indistinguishable from real life. BOOM! Real-life experiences can be recorded and downloaded by billions of other people all around the globe. As a creator, you could make money off of it if you wish, just like how YouTubers monetise their videos. OMG so cool aye ?!

My question is: Would you give complete control of your minds to one of these things? I would. I wouldn’t mind turning myself into a cyborg.

A Digitised Copy of Your Consciousness – Forget about cryogenic freezing, we could achieve immortality through this. 🤯 Is the world ready to accept digitised human as people tho?

Continuity of Human Species – Billions of digitised human minds, launched out into space, along with a complete record of our entire culture. It’s kind of like an upgraded version of Plan B in Interstellar in which frozen embryos are used to reset the human race on a faraway planet.

Highlights

OASIS Neural Interface (ONI) is the world’s first fully functional noninvasive brain-computer interface. It allows an OASIS user to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar’s virtual environment, via signals transmitted directly into their cerebral cortex. The headset’s sensor array also monitors and interprets its wearer’s brain activity, allowing them to control their OASIS avatar just as they do their physical body—simply by thinking about it.

An ONI headset can also be used to record its wearer’s experiences in the real world. All sensory input received by their brain is digitized and stored as a .oni file on an external data drive attached to their headset. Once that file is uploaded to the OASIS, the entire experience can be played back and re-experienced by the person who recorded it, or by any other ONI user with whom they choose to share the file.

In other words, the ONI allows you to relive moments of other people’s lives. To see the world through their eyes, hear it through their ears, smell it through their nose, taste it with their tongue, and feel it through their skin.

Cutscene, Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

“Anorak was the result of Halliday’s first attempt to digitize a human consciousness—his own,” she said. “He referred to it as a real-life ‘savegame’ file.”

[…]

“Those huge .ubs files!” I said. “The user brain scans?”

[…]

The enormous user brain scan file that was created each time an ONI user logged in to the OASIS was, in reality, a backup copy of that person’s consciousness. And that copy got updated each time they logged in.

Chapter 30, Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

Those billions of other digitized souls will lie dormant throughout our trip, held in suspended animation as giant UBS files stored on the ship’s computer, and on its redundant array of backup servers, so that, if and when we ever find a new home for humanity, we’ll have the means to colonize that new world digitally as well as physically.

[…]

Stored inside the sprawling ARC@ADIA simulation, backed up on a redundant array of solid-state hard drives in the belly of the ship, is a digital library of humanity’s greatest hits. All of our books and music and movies and games and art—we brought it all along with us. A backup of our entire civilization that will survive as long as we do. All of human history and culture—a record of everything that humans were and are—it’s all stored here aboard this ship, like a cosmic ark, carrying a digital time capsule of who we were—and who we still are. And someday perhaps we will encounter another civilization like our own to share it with. Then we’ll finally get a chance to compare notes.

Continue?, Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline


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