I’m going to pull a leaf right out of The Matrix here. Well, perhaps a few leaves from David Hume as well. This article is going to deal with the ultimate goal of virtual worlds. We have already taken the first stumbling steps towards it with sites like Second Life and Google’s Lively. The idea is to envelop ourselves in a virtual computer world where there are counterparts for everything that we have in the real world.
The sites mentioned above are only the first steps, and they are already tremendously addictive. There are games that are shared online by tens of thousands of players, called massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) where people are so involved in their online worlds that they frequently forget about their real world.
Let’s take this to the extreme. A time will come when technology will enable us to plunge headlong into the virtual world literally. We will be able to forget what is happening around us and experience the virtual world as if it were the real one. Like The Matrix, some probe will be pushed into us, and we will be able to live in worlds of our own creation.
Just imagine being able to be in a world where you are God. Artificial intelligence that will pass the Turing Test will already be so advanced that you will be able to have a family in the virtual world and raise them in the same way the real world allows you to. If you have any fantasies, then this is the place for you. You could indulge in whatever you want without any thought of repercussions; you can have the perfect body and could have an entire harem of beauties at your beck and call.
Image Credit: signalstation
Indeed, who will want to come out of this perfect world? It will be the ultimate addiction. Humans will be quite content to live inside them, keeping their real world bodies alive by being fed by tubes on the outside. I’m not being facetious. I’m dead serious. That’s what will happen if everything is unimpeded.
Real world relationships will dwindle and then become almost extinct. Who wants an imperfect or unsatisfying relationship when you can have the best, most handsome or beautiful and sweetest spouse (or many spouses!) in your own world where you are God?
The economic system as we know it will collapse utterly. People will not want anything else other than the ability to spend time online in their worlds. It will be available as a utility bill like the Internet. People will spend all their money buying online time (with a little for being fed by drip), and manufacture of all goods and services will drop to zero. Housing is perhaps the only industry that will remain, but not as we know it. All that will be needed will be dormitories where our bodies can lie, and thousands of such bodies can fit into one house.
Of course, any company that controls online access will flourish, and the industry will be responsible for 95% of the economy, if not more. It’s a scary thought, but one that we currently find repulsive only because we haven’t gotten accustomed to it. Once in that situation, it will be the most natural thing in the world.
The question now remains as to what work will people do to earn their money to buy online time. If the demand for all products is zero, then what possible work will be left? Perhaps online time will then be a free service, which no one can possibly gain by earning money.
I’m sorry if all this sounds a bit Orweilian. But this is where I see the future heading, and what can be done to stop it?
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I think you are taking far too an alarmist view on this matter. You are extrapolating from a handful of cases where people chose their virtual world addiction over responsibility, and applying that to all people. This type of human behavior already exists in humans with drug and gambling addictions, and yet our economy still stands – in fact, new sectors of economic growth formed as a result (casinos, addiction counseling centers, and so on). You are also assuming everyone will want to join into the virtual world. I have friends that I cannot get to play the Wii, do you think they will line up to have a giant needle plunged into their brain?
Regardless of the myopic view in this blog, let us assume that we do create a brain-computer interface vis-a-vis The Matrix. Such a world will require power to keep it going and hardware to build more systems. That means, at a minimum, power and manufacturing plants, and thus real world jobs. Now, maybe these can all be controlled from the virtual world, but even if that is the case, some human agent will have to break from his hedonism in order to do a job, even a virtual one. Unless you think we will all be living and playing with AI agents 24/7, there will be human contact in this world, even if it is virtual.
Furthermore, I think you have discounted the human desire for physical contact and the ability of a person to know that they are in a virtual world. The premise in The Matrix was that the world worked because no one knew they were in a virtual world. Those people that discovered they were in a virtual world needed to get out of it. If you knowingly go into the virtual world, then at any time you can interject your conscious mind into the virtual events to remind yourself of the real world.
I have to admit I was expecting more out of this article than a sensationalism. I thought I was going to read an actual discussion of how an economy would die. Instead, we have fear mongering regarding a technology that is a minimum of two human generations away from being developed.
Dear Dustin,
Thank you for your comments!
Though you are right about the quality of addiction of Virtual reality vis a vis drugs, there are some fundamental differences.
First of all, we avoid drugs not because we simply choose to, but because they ruin our health, and ultimately ruin us financially too by reducing our capacity to work and the high cost of drugs. In addition, the government heavily restricts these substances.
Many people don’t try video games because that is not their idea of a good time. However, in the virtual work like the Matrix, you can do whatever you want.
Most people who work with computers are already addicted to the Internet to some extent. This is because there is something for everyone, isn’t expensive, and doesn’t inherently ruin your health. The same is true for the virtual world which will just be an extension of the Internet.
Your point about the infrastructure necessary to maintain the system is well taken, and the pervasiveness of AI is exactly what I’m talking about and have already discussed in my earlier article: http://www.amateureconomists.com/blogs/2008/08/27/will-robots-destroy-our-economic-system/
If that is too much of a stretch of the imagination, we can come up with something innovative like each person has to get up and perform compulsory manual interventions (if any) for say one week in their lives. But this may or may not be necessary.
Thanks for reading this article. I’ve had a lot of fun writing and discussing it!
Bhagwad Jal Park
“First of all, we avoid drugs not because we simply choose to, but because they ruin our health, and ultimately ruin us financially too by reducing our capacity to work and the high cost of drugs. In addition, the government heavily restricts these substances.”
And why wouldn’t a VR addiction ruin our health or finances either? In your scenario in the original blog, you talk about people spending their money on buying online time, but there is no mention of how income is made in the first place. Is everyone performing some type of virtual job to earn money? How do they pay rent? Pay for the feeding tube? Pay for their equipment? I won’t disagree that the economy will change, perhaps to one being based on predominantly virtual good sales, but there are still real world commodities.
Unless we are assuming some Utopian society where a government just gives us all of these things for free, I do not see how an economy would be destroyed. Where is the government getting its money from? Is the virtual world creating real food? Real energy? Building homes? Assuming some government agency is going to do this all for us, where is it getting the money to do it?
In your scenario, people would simply stop having real relationships because they could just have the perfect relationship with a robot. Well, if that happened, there would be no new children. And say people do have kids, well, the virtual world isn’t going to raise a baby.
What about personal health? If we are all immobile our muscles will atrophy, our hearts will weaken, and our lives will be quite short as a result. Or will we have solved all medical problems before then? You can’t get real drugs to deal with ailments out of a computer.
You also alluded to the answer in stopping any doomsday scenario from happening – government regulation. They have stepped in saying some drugs are bad. Gambling is practically illegal in the US. What makes you think an agency won’t step in to prevent anything drastic from happening?
I think there is a valid discussion to be had on the real world economic impact of virtual goods, but claims of a destroyed economy because we will live in a virtual bubble are beyond speculative. Anyway, you are entitled to your opinion on this matter, but I think your could use more evidence and fact, and less gross speculation.
Get out of the rabbit hole and give Morpheus the red pill back, Neo. Sorry, couldn’t resist:
This sounds just like what Ted Kaczynski was concerned with… aka the Unabomber.
Its amazing that some of the people who others think a certifiably insane and off theri rocker, can have incredible grasp on future outcomes.
Our world will always adapt, but the fears expressed here and unfortunatley by Kaczynski are well worth noting and may actually be very true.
It is a hard “pill” to swallow. But regardless of red or blue, the fundamental strength of virtual existences will impact us tremendously. Its our job to stay ahead of technology implications in real world scenarios, and make decisions and adjustments which deter such outcomes
@insight-full:
Thanks for the info bit on Theodore John Kaczynski. I didn’t know about him till now. Read up on wikipedia about him.
I feel that technology is advancing much more quickly than our natures are. Which is why sometime we make the worst use of technology instead of the best.
We’re going to enter a phase where we will develop technologies that our nature’s are not ready to handle, and will make a pig’s breakfast out of everything.
Something like the Monkey King in Buddhism who got out of control.