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They might be; in that case they're not building my personal vision of the future. With better VR, the sun is warm, the flowers do smell, and the grass does br

They might be; in that case they're not building my personal vision of the future. With better VR, the sun is warm, the flowers do smell, and the grass does brush against your skin. Your current experience of "reality" is not as real as you may think it is. Everything you've ever done or experienced has been communicated to your brain through sensory neurons. If we make a VR that can connect up your sensory neurons to the virtual world, your experiences can be just as "real" as "reality" is. And if VR is where all your friends are, and where your work is, and where your leisure is, who cares about "reality" any more? It's just an alternative plane of existence where resources are finite, you get cold in bad weather, you need to clean when the place gets dirty, you need to wait for things to arrive, etc.

inquirerGeneral 4y ago
... So the matrix, ok
felurx 4y ago
That sounds good and all, but at the end of it somebody has to run it, and I don't think there's any person or (kind of) organization I'd like to entrust with managing _reality_. (And if I had to make a list, Meta is probably close to the bottom.) The good thing about our universe is that it doesn't care what we do with it, and it doesn't have any incentives. But once there's a company in it that needs to maximize profit, things are going to get sticky. Democracy isn't perfect either and can turn bad. And what about the potential for technical malfunctions? What about hacking? What about abuse? What about those who can't afford the hardware? What about those who don't want to join? Building that utopia is going to require rebuilding half (or all) of society first, if we don't we have a near guarantee of getting a dystopia real fast, and even if we manage to avoid that there are too many intrinsic ways for this to turn horrible.
bckr 4y ago
> who cares about "reality" any more People who realize that Reality is where you can lose Wi-Fi reception, stop receiving nutrient liquid, and otherwise be enslaved and/or killed. Seriously, your future is a nightmare. If you want a perfectly clean, warm, automated existence, work on robots and O'Neill colonies, not the Matrix.

inquirerGeneral 4y ago

... So the matrix, ok

felurx 4y ago

That sounds good and all, but at the end of it somebody has to run it, and I don't think there's any person or (kind of) organization I'd like to entrust with managing _reality_. (And if I had to make a list, Meta is probably close to the bottom.) The good thing about our universe is that it doesn't care what we do with it, and it doesn't have any incentives. But once there's a company in it that needs to maximize profit, things are going to get sticky. Democracy isn't perfect either and can turn bad. And what about the potential for technical malfunctions? What about hacking? What about abuse? What about those who can't afford the hardware? What about those who don't want to join? Building that utopia is going to require rebuilding half (or all) of society first, if we don't we have a near guarantee of getting a dystopia real fast, and even if we manage to avoid that there are too many intrinsic ways for this to turn horrible.

bckr 4y ago

> who cares about "reality" any more People who realize that Reality is where you can lose Wi-Fi reception, stop receiving nutrient liquid, and otherwise be enslaved and/or killed. Seriously, your future is a nightmare. If you want a perfectly clean, warm, automated existence, work on robots and O'Neill colonies, not the Matrix.