Second Life

"The virtual world provides the body," said Dr Ben Goertzel, founder and head of Novamente.

"We have a pretty fully functioning animal brain right now and we are hooking it up to the different virtual worlds,"

On the research side, said Dr Goertzel, virtual worlds also solved the problem of giving an AI a relatively unsophisticated environment in which it could live and learn.

a story about a Second Life player who had gone from fat to thin. The player had told Philip that after seeing himself manipulate the image of his avatar, he reckoned that he could also manipulate his actual physical being. This is a strange story of simulated world impacting real life on a most basic flesh level.

Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark. Now, if we limit the comparison to developed countries, where per-capita energy consumption is 7,702 kWh a year, the avatars appear considerably less energy hungry than the humans. But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do. More narrowly still, the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.