| The most recent episode in this co-evolution story is the development of Virtual Worlds populated by Avatars. How recent is this episode? Avatars-in-Virtual-Worlds resulted from the convergence of Virtual Communities (Avatars) and Virtual Reality (Virtual Worlds). Two very competent books on Virtual Communities and Virtual Reality respectively - published at the beginning of this decade - could report only the first, few, fumbling steps of a pioneer Avatar-in-Virtual-World experiment, Habitat [BENEDIKT, Pages 273-301; RHEINGOLD 93, Pages 188-196]. However, in the few years since then, Avatars-in-Virtual-Worlds have proliferated. Bruce Damer, in the most comprehensive book to date on the subject, invites us into many such virtual worlds - World's Chat, The Palace, AlphaWorld, WorldsAway, Onlive! Traveler, Virtual Places, Comic Chat, OZ Virtual, and various Brave New Worlds and Gaming Worlds [DAMER].
Howard Rheingold has published recent books on both Virtual Reality [RHEINGOLD 91] and Virtual Communities [RHEINGOLD 93] and is now no doubt working on his Avatars-in-Virtual-Worlds book [RHEINGOLD 99?]. However, as I will argue here, this hypothetical book could be best seen as a sequel not so much to the above books but to an earlier and more obscure book - Tools for Thought: The People and Ideas Behind the Next Computer Revolution [RHEINGOLD 85]. That book followed the thread running through the history of computing which viewed the computer as a means of extending the user. It told the story, not of artificial intelligence (AI), but the less familiar story of Intelligence Amplification (IA). Avatars-in-Virtual-Worlds is the most recent chapter of this story.1
Before that story can be told, however, we must tell the prequels of Virtual Reality and Virtual Communities out of which this chapter emerged.
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