Exodus to the virtual world

If you have any interest in virtual reality or computer games, I highly recommend this podcast of an interview with Ed Castronova, an economist who studies large-scale online games. He's the author of Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality and Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. (There is a transcript of the interview at the first link above, as well as references and discussion; you can also listen to it as a stream if you don't have an ipod.) Castronova blogs here.

I suspect Castronova would agree with me that if AI is eventually successful, then many, perhaps almost all, sentient beings in our future lightcone will be game characters who are themselves unaware that they live in a simulation.