So imagine for a minute that you’re a coding geek. And you read science fiction sometimes, and you know who Ray Kurzweil is and you actually believe in the Singularity. Now, imagine that somehow your geekiness lands you in Silicon Valley and somehow through a combination of raw talent and luck you find yourself given a few of the keys to the magic kingdom – the one where open source and virtual reality and Chai tea all mix it up and people don’t mistake TechCrunch for high-performance cereal.

That’s something like where Philip Rosedale ended up – he was given the keys and told to go ahead and build a world, and he pretty much taped it together with a lot of sweat and code, living out the garage myth of Hewlett Packard and Apple and whoever.

Well, I started thinking about all of this – and started wondering whether my tongue-in-cheek ribbing about the Singularity and that odd mind-set that seems to grip the Valley might not be, well, real.

Or maybe it’s simply a case of envy, and I can’t see the future because I don’t hang around with the right people.

User-Generated Content: The Metanomics Interview
OK, before I go on, I’ve made a hobby out of parsing Philip’s pronouncements I guess. I feel like a Kremlinologist trying to read facial tics for hints about the future of virtual worlds. (See the side bar for other Philip posts).

But more often than not, Philip has been cornered in passing or seems to have gotten the short end of what I imagine to have been a rushed telephone interview.

So when Robert Bloomfield (Beyers Sellers in Second Life) of Metanomics let me know that he had sat down with Philip for 75 minutes or so I was, to say the least, curious about what came out of it.

Facilitated by Metanomics, Philip has again given the world blocks to play with and surround with user-generated content – only this time its an interview, and I’m the lesser light of a stellar cast who will all work towards parsing and trying to put Philip’s words into context.

Have a read of the Metanomics intro to this post here.

And I say this because as much as Philip has had his hand on the Linden Lab wheel these past years, the reality is that the world has evolved sometimes in SPITE of the Lab which, with their shifting policies and constant attempts to improve the code, can change our experiences of the Grid. But the world is as much about how we react to that, how we bypass it or hack a way around our frustrations as it is any one person, or the Lab.

Philip’s Temporal Reality
OK, so back to the Singularity. It’s not a bad thing to believe that computers are getting faster, and smarter, and that one day they’ll be even smarter than WE are, and will start inventing themselves and in the process reinventing humanity.

Well, that’s the theory anyways. But I figured that if I started thinking about Philip’s version of the world against the backdrop of the possibility that he might actually BELIEVE in a future that I can’t quite picture.

Helping Grandma Get a Job
So let me give you an example. In Philip’s vision of virtual worlds, it makes good sense that your grandmother (or parent, which is more likely – not sure if Philip’s checked the average age of the SL user) will have a far easier time finding a job in a virtual world than on that big, bad complicated Web:

“I often ask the stock question, which is: If you had a grandparent or parent that was intelligent and interested in engaging with a new community, getting an extra job, finding something interesting to do in their older years, and they really weren’t that familiar with the internet at all, would you sort of teach them how to use Second Life, or would you teach them how to more generally just use the web? And I think the answer, interestingly if you think about it, is you’d actually be better off showing them how to use Second Life. Because even though the learning curve at the beginning would be brutal, you’d have to literally sit with them for that five or six hours of getting online, creating an avatar, getting dressed, finding some friends, finding something initially to do.

Once you got them to that point, then subsequent to that, everything’s relatively easy. How do you get a job in Second Life? Ask someone. You’ll find your way. How do you get a job on the web? Very hard problem. What do you do, you go to Google and type “get a job”? That’s going to be harder. You’re not going to find your way to LinkedIn or Monster.com or Craig’s List. I mean it’s hard. So I think that it’s very likely that the general application of virtual worlds will cover use cases so substantial and so diffuse that we’re ultimately going to see here a situation where Second Life and, more generally, virtual worlds and however we connect all these companies together spanning an amount of use that is greater than the web today.”

OK – so follow along here for a minute.

Um. So….I don’t know what kind of luck you’ve had finding a job in Second Life. I mean, let’s exclude camping for a minute. I mean – I can barely find a decent place to buy hair let alone a job to help me fill in my spare moments. And doesn’t it seem like Philip contradicts himself, describing the “brutal” first hours, whose brutality INCLUDES finding something to do, he then goes on to say that virtual worlds are a better way to find part time work

(I guess Wal Mart isn’t hiring these days….camping for seniors exists in the RL world too, you know).

But my point is this: did you spot the temporal shift?

First, he’s talking about the brutal first 6 hours, and then he’s talking about how “virtual worlds will cover use cases so substantial” that even Grandma can get a job.

Two universes: one, today, in which yeah, the first hours are brutal, it’s difficult to find people and stuff to do, and the second in some unspecified future in which it will somehow be more natural and intuitive to find work in a virtual world than on Craig’s List.

I guess the Web won’t evolve between now and then?

And just like the Web will evolve, so too must Second Life. And Philip hit the hot spots:

“getting online, creating an avatar, getting dressed, finding some friends, finding something initially to do.”

I’ll cover Philip’s comments on these topics, Web-based worlds, and ’small bets’ in a second  post.