Artificial Intelligence

Not exactly the type that technicians and computer scientists dream about. At least that kind of artificial intelligence has logic to it. Nope, it's another kind, one that has people totally disinvesting themselves of their inborn common sense, and has them dreaming themselves into a world other than the very real one they inhabit. Until the real world, so utterly lacking in glamour and potential, fades into a world that can be manipulated.

An on-line presence, through virtual reality. Where a man, bald, middle-aged, not entirely all there, and a woman, displeased with her natural attributes can change the colour of her hair, the shape of her body, her very personality to make her more alluring to the man who has altered his persona to that of a younger, more virile male, and there's the perfect match.

Through their virtual lives, they cling to one another, having finally discovered the presence of a soul-mate. Emotional needs finally met.

Fantasy overtaking reality, there's a huge relief. We don't, after all, have to settle into being the people we were born to be. We can be whomever appeals to us, fulfilling our daydreams of appearing to others as we would wish to appear to ourselves; re-born, utterly other than the dreary individual we perceive ourselves to be, and there we can find our true selves.

There is an Internet game, called Second Life, and isn't it just too wonderful for words, allowing anyone dissatisfied with the banality of their unremarkable lives to make themselves over entirely. To become infused with a sense of mystery, a mastery over their bleakly unprofound destiny.

Through the virtual world we can plan out the trajectory of our lives, not, as in the real world, helplessly drift into a life stream that simply is not us.

Take, for example, a 28-year-old in London, England. Who, like an estimated ten million people worldwide, play this very life-affirming-reality-denying game with themselves and with others of like mind. Living in an infantile world peopled by social misfits in arrested adolescence; their real lives impermanent and unappreciated, their on-line lives virtually dominant.

She met her husband through Second Life. Each having fashioned themselves in such a way as to appeal to the other. Knowing instinctively that they had at last, found someone to whom they could relate without a moment's hesitation. They moved into a house they shared in Cornwall, then married one another. Their marriage repeated virtually in Second Life, a "fairy tale" of a wedding.

Married bliss, quite nothing like it. The husband, David Pollard is tall, has long hair and wears a well tailored grey suit, while the wife, Amy Pollard, a dozen years his junior, is a virtual Hispanic with long black hair. In their pedestrian real-life appearance, he is large and balding, she has red hair, and they somehow find it rather discomfiting that reality does not match virtuality.

Amy Pollard is now in the final stages of the process of divorce proceedings, for she is adamant she simply cannot live with her husband's "unreasonable behaviour". Most women might agree, finding it completely unreasonable that their spouses hive themselves off time and again to have intimate relations with other women. "I caught him cuddling a woman on a sofa in the game."

That's right, in the game, on Second Life. Mr. Pollard carried on a series of extramarital relationships of a very cozy and evidently fulfilling manner with other women in their virtual lives of hedonistic delight. Why he even had sex with an online call girl. The divorce is pending, then Mrs. Pollard will be free to flaunt her newly-divorced character and go fishing again for Mr. Right.

The solicitor who handled this case is rather blase about it, for it doesn't appear to be unusual at all. This divorce case the second she'd handled in the space of a week for similarly mis-matched intellectual adolescents on Second Life.