Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Become Someone Else.
In virtual reality we won't be restricted to a single personality, since we will be able to change 
our appearance and effectively become other people. Without altering our physical body (in real reality) we will be 
able to readily transform our projected body in these three-dimensional virtual environments. We can select different 
bodies at the same time for different people. So your parents may see you as one person, while your girlfriend will 
experience you as another. However, the other person may choose to override your selections, preferring to see you 
differently than the body you have chosen for yourself. You could pick different body projections for different people: 
Ben Franklin for a wise uncle, a clown for an annoying coworker. Romantic couples can choose whom they wish to 
be, even to become each other. These are all easily changeable decisions. 
I had the opportunity to experience what it is like to project myself as another persona in a virtual-reality 
demonstration at the 2001 TED (technology, entertainment, design) conference in Monterey. By means of magnetic 
sensors in my clothing a computer was able to track all of my movements. With ultrahigh-speed animation the 
computer created a life-size, near photorealistic image of a young woman—Ramona—who followed my movements in 
real time. Using signal-processing technology, my voice was transformed into a woman's voice and also controlled the 
movements of Ramona's lips. So it appeared to the TED audience as if Ramona herself were giving the presentation.
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To make the concept understandable, the audience could see me and see Ramona at the same time, both moving 
simultaneously in exactly the same way. A band came onstage, and I—Ramona—performed Jefferson Airplane's 
"White Rabbit," as well as an original song. My daughter, then fourteen, also equipped with magnetic sensors, joined 
me, and her dance movements were transformed into those of a male backup dancer—who happened to be a virtual 
Richard Saul Wurman, the impresario of the TED conference. The hit of the presentation was seeing Wurman—not 
known for his hip-hop moves—convincingly doing my daughter's dance steps. Present in the audience was the creative 
leadership of Warner Bros., who then went off and created the movie Simone, in which the character played by AI 
Pacino transforms himself into Simone in essentially the same way. 

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The experience was a profound and moving one for me. When I looked in the "cybermirror" (a display showing 
me what the audience was seeing), I saw myself as Ramona rather than the person I usually see in the mirror. I 
experienced the emotional force—and not just the intellectual idea—of transforming myself into someone else. 
People's identities are frequently closely tied to their bodies ("I'm a person with a big nose," "I'm skinny," "I'm a 
big guy," and so on). I found the opportunity to become a different person liberating. All of us have a variety of 
personalities that we are capable of conveying but generally suppress them since we have no readily available means 
of expressing them. Today we have very limited technologies available—such as fashion, makeup, and hairstyle—to 
change who we are for different relationships and occasions, but our palette of personalities will greatly expand in 
future full-immersion virtual-reality environments. 
In addition to encompassing all of the senses, these shared environments can include emotional overlays. 
Nanobots will be capable of generating the neurological correlates of emotions, sexual pleasure, and other derivatives 
of our sensory experience and mental reactions. Experiments during open brain surgery have demonstrated that 
stimulating certain specific points in the brain can trigger emotional experiences (for example, the girl who found 
everything funny when stimulated in a particular spot of her brain, as I reported in 
The Age of Spiritual Machines
).
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Some emotions and secondary reactions involve a pattern of activity in the brain rather than the stimulation of a 
specific neuron, but with massively distributed nanobots, stimulating these patterns will also be feasible.