#6 - Virtual reality
During a lazy Sunday afternoon at my uncle’s house in Texas, I had two experiences of what I think will be the jointly exciting and depressing future of humanity.
Virtual reality
1. I tried virtual reality for the first time
My uncle had a Playstation VR headset and encouraged me to try a couple of games. From a simulated shark attack to a time-shifting game where you fight terrorists in an airport (with time only progressing when you move), I was amazed.
It was surprising to see how quickly my brain imputed a world around me, even when I logically knew that the virtual world didn’t exist. When I was diving in a shark cage under the water, I genuinely felt that I was somehow underwater. When I was looking directly forward, I felt that there was some sort of space behind, above and below me. This was even though I knew that I was standing firmly on a floor in a living room and not at the bottom of an ocean.
The virtual reality experiences were also physically and mentally exhilarating in a way that regular computer games are not. I was physically exhausted from ducking out of the way of shooting bullets. My mind was mentally exhausted from the weird feeling when a shark attacked the cage I was standing in and the metal bars broke and pierced the space where my legs should have been. Even when the visuals were cartoonish or explicitly artificial (like the rhomboid world of Superhot VR), the whole experience was impressive. It reminded me of the Black Mirror episode, Playtest.
2. I saw am 8 year old playing a virtual role playing game
While the adults were catching up and talking, my uncle’s 8 year old daughter was playing a virtual role playing MMORPG that seemed to have no real purpose. People walked around the world, did random things, interacted with each other and purchased items for their online persona (using real money). It immediately reminded me of the Black Mirror episode, Fifteen Million Merits, and the simpler Runescape that I played as a child.
Beyond the mechanics of the game, the thing I found most interesting when my uncle’s daughter talked about “her BFF’s” in an excited and expressive manner. When I asked her who her BFF’s were, it turned out that they were people she had met in the game. She had never met them in real life, seen a picture of them or even heard what they sounded like. All she knew was that, based on their interactions with her in this virtual game, they were worthy of becoming her BFF’s. My uncle’s older son also mentioned that many of his friends were people he had met, from places as far away as Nevada and Denmark, playing video games on Steam. Although, unlike his younger sister, he had at least heard their voices.
What does this mean for human relationships?
Virtual reality will inevitably become a major part of our lives. But the implciations of what that means for humanity and human relationships are unknown. What happens when we can experience anything in the world by just putting on a headset? How will we interact with the people around us?
To this date, every technological advance has allowed humanity to alter or enhance the reality of the world around us. For example, language allowed humanity to describe the world around us while writing allowed humanity to encode that knowledge into more permanent and transferrable mediums. Excluding mind-altering drungs, humanity has never been able to completely divorce the reality we perceive from the reality of the physical world around us. Until now.
Three implications
Redefining what it means to be human through separation of the mind from the body
Even today, there is a signfiicant difference between people’s online personas and their real lives. People selectively edit and alter the image that they portray of themselves online. When more and more of our interactions move online, we will be able to edit more and more of how we portray ourselves to the world.
Now imagine a situation where most of your interactions are being made through VR. People view you as a photorealistic, 3D digital replica of yourself.
Do you start to make small cosmetic changes to make your avatar reflect you on your best day? Do you make it look like you on holiday, with a perfect haircut, skin and sleep? Given how most of us choose profile pics/Instagram selfies, I think this would be a decision that most of us would make without second thought.
Now, do you start to make your digital VR replica look more like the perfect person that you want to be? Do you chisel the jaw, add on muscle and add luscious, flowing hair? Do you give your VR replica the ability to run the 100m in 5 seconds, hit a hole in one on every round of golf and cook every meal ever invented?
At what point do you begin to believe that this virtual replica more represents you than the physical body that you know underlies your mental existence? At what point do you completely believe that your virtual replica is who you are, and that your body is a simple life-support system?
That is, at what point do you stop calling your virtual replica a ‘virtual replica’ and start calling it ‘me’?
Virtual reality could lead to a state where everybody in the world considers themselves to be a virtual being with a body as a simple life support system. This could change the definition that most people use to define humans from a combination of physical and thought to simply thought supported by a life support system in the form of a body. Interestingly, this is the model of existence proposed by Hinduism, where people are simply eternal conciousness temporarily existing in a body.
Immortality
Following on from the above situation where every interaction you make is done online, through your virtual replica. At the same time, every thought you have is made through the frame of reference of your virtual replica. Now imagine that computers are recording every single thought and interaction you are having and computing that data to understand the very nature of who you are.
If you are able to use this data to accurately create a model or how someone thinks and experiences consciousness? If so, would this model this that they are in fact, the person they are modelling and not a computer model?
If this were the case, a person could effectively exist forever as a conscious computer model, interacting with others in the virtual reality world. Only, this time, there would be no physical life support system. Instead, someone’s entire existence would exist in data servers or quantum computers.
Is this immortality?
Commodification of incredible experiences
As virtual reality becomes more and more realistic and effective, you will be able to have more realistic experiences through VR. From virtually visiting the Colliseum to surfing in Tahiti, VR could allow you to access a diverse range of exciting experiences that would otherwise be costly ($/time) or otherwise restricted (physically, legally etc).
But what happens when you have one incredible experience after another, day after day?
Imagine a situation where you get home from work one day and have a quick virtual reality dinner with Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi and Leonardo Da Vinci. You finish the dinner and go on a virtual sky dive over Dubai. You follow this up with a virtual climb up Mount Everest, where you celebrate with a virtual degustation cooked by the team from Alinea and served by Victoria’s Secret models. You follow this up by playing in a virtual soccer game with Arsenal FC and beat the other team (comprising the best players of all time) 21-0.
Now imagine repeating this every night for the rest of your life…
Do you think there is a point where you just run out of experiences to try? Is there a point where every new experience just becomes less impressive? In this situation, does every subsequent experience of your life just become less and less impressive until nothing in your life can excite you any more?
I genuinely think that VR experiences could lead to a situation where people are permanently bored and simply use VR to take up the empty space that makes up their lives, like people who jump onto their phones whenever they have a spare second in their life (we are all guilty of this last one…).
An additional way in which we may commodify the incredible is through who we are as people. If everybody can have an 11/10 appearance, personality, intelligence etc., does every person’s online replica eventually approach a single ideal of perfection where everybody becomes a clone of one another?