Second Life lead claims we'll live in something akin to the Matrix

In other words, we’ll all become permanent residents of an Earth-sized virtual world and only seldom return to the real world (in a way turning some of the ideas in the Matrix trilogy from science fiction to science fact).

The only thing that would be missing is a law enforcement program named Agent Smith. The question I would ask though, what would become of the real world when everyone is jacked in either inside their homes or in centralized structures? Sure, there’s the allure of living in a place where anything is possible and where you can have any body you want (even that of an animal or of a fictional creature), but perhaps we should just stop at having it be a fun diversion for a few hours when real-life affords you the time.

Would it be a brave new world, or a scary new future?

People have made stupid nonsense predictions in the past and were wrong almost every time

or that one guy who said that we will never need any more mega pixels than 5.

I think the thought of this caused me enough shock that I just shat myself. But as much as I hate to say it, This prediction might actually have more merit then any of us would like to admit.

I think something along the lines of a virtual battle arena is more likely, where people can come home from work and enter an arena of their choice and fight against AIs so intelligent that it’s debatable whether or not it’s ethical to kill them… All these super composed and successful business men and people from all occupations will go home and enter their own personal arenas and just fight to the death… Man that’s gonna be glorious…

If something like this were to occur it would shortly become the norm leaving people yearning for something more. Sure in the early days people would see it as awesome, but once it’s everyday reality it becomes mundane just like cell phones, computers, cars, air planes and space shuttles.

Of course you’ll always have hipsters that, in this future matrix world, prefer to hang out IRL(in real life) much the same way they prefer to listen to vinyl today, it’s a counter culture thang :slight_smile:

P.S. My girlfriends father has a lot of VHS tapes and I remember thinking, oh man hipsters will be all over those in about twenty years. “VHS looks better than digital media.” You know you’re gonna be hearing it.

O you just pick a fantasy world of your choice and just explore it, whether it be a sort of Middle-Earth inspired world (complete with fire drakes that resemble Smaug from the recent movies), or some tech-centric locale like the city from Tomorrowland. Who says it will have to be a battle arena?

This prediction might actually have more merit then any of us would like to admit.

It seems more and more that the end game of the transhumanists is to replace the real with the virtual, because the real world is not enough (who says you even have to have a human form in the virtual world and who says you can’t have mega-mansions virtually because of how it might have realtime modeling tools to allow for that).

They believe that the concept of organic life is obsolete and everything needs to become artificial (despite things looking organic in the new digital universe). I would have good reason to advocate why this reality should not happen (outside of the entertainment sphere at least) but this idea has the endorsement of some big names in the tech. industry.

I don’t buy it. Every revolution in human history has been accompanied with a bifurcation. There are still hunter gatherers and agrarian societies. Less than half of the population has internet. No matter where we go there is likely to be large numbers of people who choose not to participate. That is the way that it propagates. All complex systems yield diversity through novel offshoots. Diversity is to be expected. There will likely be a relatively comfortable place for you in the future.

I honestly can’t say how long my own interest in the cutting edge will last. I don’t think I’d like to be an upload. I like the smell of rain too much.

Will it ever be enough? Moments ago I was popping a few cashews into my mouth thinking about this thread and it occurred to me, you know, what, a couple thousand years ago eating a single cashew was well outside the grasp of the average person, such a rare and exotic import would’ve been ear marked for the aristocracy.

A glass bottle, the color purple, pizza delivery… We all live like kings and don’t even notice.

P.S. Back in Roman times the color purple was exceedingly expensive. I don’t recall the details, but the process of making purple dye involved boiling snails so the dye itself stank tremendously. Nonetheless the color purple was so hard to make and so rare that it was the must have color for Roman aristocrats wanting to showcase their wealth. It’s funny, sure they wore their highly sought after purple garments, but they all smelled like they were homeless.

I didn’t even realize second life was still around.

They say that we live in our ancestors Utopia. That being said there will probably be aspects of the future that we won’t be comfortable with as our ancestors would find some of our modern conveniences strange or even disturbing. My great grandmother thought indoor plumbing was disgusting. :slight_smile: With Drexlarian nano-tech everything is recycled as useful elements. There will be no need for toilets… much less trash cans. Something to think about wile sipping ones Earl Gray hot. :smiley: DARPA is working on it right now.

See, I’m predicting an arena because we don’t want to create something that is an alternate reality where even us losers can live out epic lives because people won’t want to leave. (I believe there was a lore piece about this in the first Assassin’s Creed- they have fully immersive VR games but they specifically didn’t make them too perfect because then productivity would go down, opposite the intent.) People aren’t going to go live out their lives in the arena, but they will escape to it temporarily, just to get away from their stressful days. It would increase productivity and decrease crime, because everyone is too busy killing these AIs (or other players in online arenas) to actually care for hurting each other. Not to mention how much business this would create. Of course, we’d have to be careful we don’t end up like the Romans…

My major concern with these fantasy virtual worlds is that we can live out our wildest and greatest dreams, but it removes our humanity. What I mean by this is, when you’re in a virtual world, you can be as heroic as you want, because you don’t feel pain and you don’t have to worry about death. And removing those hardships from your world would probably make it pretty empty.

I think what you’re talking about, Rainstar, is just Unreal Tournament.

Anyway new technology would likely need to be developed for anything like this to work. The big problem they’re running into with VR, such as occulus rift, is that it makes people sick when moving virtually. Car simulations or sims where you’re seated seem to work fine for most, but when the eyes tell you that you’re walking and the rest of the body tells you that you’re not it seems to cause a lot of dizziness and nausea.

Epic is working on a tech demo for occulus right now called Bullet Train, it’s a first person shooter, but due to the sickness issue the game won’t let the player walk. Instead they teleport to different locals and shoot enemies from a static position similar to the old Virtua Cop games. Apparently Epic tried a scene where the player was on a very slow moving escalator in an attempt to spice things up and even that was too much and caused players to become sick.

Yeah right now it looks like VR isn’t going to be all that wonderful. At least not for games, it could offer some useful benefits in areas like the medical industry though. For instance a surgeon could use a VR helmet to control a surgical robot working on a patient thousands of miles away. Just hope the network is reliable :slight_smile:

Yup, essentially just UT on steroids.
I don’t see the VR headsets going much further, particularly because of the demands on the hardware. Epic is doing some interesting stuff with it, but I don’t really think it’s enough. The next level of immersion will probably have to wait another ten years or so before it’s fathomable.

I think it’ll be closer to Surrogates with Bruce Willis.

Bah, humbug. These fancy computer-things will never take off. People walking around talking on the phone? No way that will stick around. And we’ll never put a man on Mars… you can bank on that.

I don’t know. I can see there being some markets for augmented reality devices like those google glasses, I see todays VR the same way I saw computers in the 1980’s. Its a neat toy with quite a bit of untaped potential. In some technical fields (hands on real world) You often are in situations where it is one person acting as the hands and the other reading and note taking due to not being able to remove eyes/hands from the hardware in question. And even when working by oneself I could see an intelligent augmented reality device saving 3 or 4 hours of seek time a day for a technician.

And what is that technician going to do with all the extra free time? More work no doubt.

You make it sound like being able to do more work in a given amount of time is a bad thing.

Actually I was thinking he could do the same amount of work in less time and then go home and spend some quality time with his family. That would be nice, especially for his children I’m sure, but instead people would rather his children be raised by TV so he can stay at work and ship twice as many units.

I mean I really don’t need a new model cell phone every six months, progress is fast enough as is no?

When people claim to always see the cloud behind every silver lining, they figure that any scenario going forward has negative connotations and might conclude then that human life is hopeless and pointless.

When you start getting to the first part of that, perhaps your personality is getting a bit dark and musty.