> If I naively extrapolate, within decades we'll have period where we have profound cultural shifts every year or so, then every week.
I think in reality there is some sort of lower bound here in what we consider "reality" today (the physical world, with its governments, etc). We already are seeing the internet as a place where revolutions happen on very short timescales, even overnight. This will only increase as VR takes hold of our minds and existence.
To be honest, I'm a little afraid of that. There is something to be said for change in the physical world and how profound big changes are, and I hope one does not transplant the other and that they evolve together. We still need infrastructure, places to live, and government to make the online/VR revolutions a possibility.
>If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
What? Why?
A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution.
Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit.
(Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?)
Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced.
Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where
you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit.
Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.
> Could this remove political desire for rapid change?
No, since in the end you do have to return to the "real" world. Unless we can upload ourselves to the metaverse, a majority of humans will continue to want change in meatspace.
> And the disturbing part is that I am not even sure why - on its face value it seems great
And that is exactly the reason why it is not the right direction. Think about it. Why would one choose a virtual world over the new one? Because apparently the real world is not good enough. On the surface the virtual looks better, but if you engage in it, I think you will probably find out that it is as boring and hard as the real one.
People have lived for centuries without it. In those years there have both been plenty of fulfilled lives and unfulfilled lives. Clearly, the shiny happy virtual world is not a prerequisite for a fulfilled live. Now think about what made those lives fulfilling. Whatever the answer, it can be done in the real world. It probably is also not superficial and also not shiny. So trading the current world for the shiny virtual world is not the ultimate solution to whatever it is that you are looking for. It can be a tool, like the telephone is. But not more.
> The culture needs to shift from assuming video and pictures are real, to assuming they are made the easiest way possible.
That sounds like a dystopia, but I guess we're going into that direction. I expect that a lot of fringe groups like flat-earthers, lizard people conspiracy, war in Ukraine is fake, will become way more mainstream.
>> generally people have adapted more or less fine
I don't think that such adaptation is a "done deal". We're very much a work in progress as far as the latest social media stuff goes, meaning from about Facebook onwards. And without being all scaremongery, I really wonder if we _are_ fine.
There seems a growing number of studies and anecdotes to at least give the suggestion that ever heavier immersion in the virtual world correlates broadly with increased dissatisfaction and distress, especially for younger people. There were never any such indications for Walkmen, or pagers, so I do think already it's different.
Let's not chuck all our tech in the bin - but let's be cautious and observant about what's happening around us.
> It's crazy watching the world turn into a dystopia and being powerless to stop it.
We feel powerless - I feel it too at times - but we're not. Who would have thought the world could change this much? We can change it also for the better. The social world we envision is very deeply ingrained in humans, probably through evolution. We are social creatures, not sociopathic.
I think a start is standing up for our human values (honesty, respect, fairness, justice, compassion, humanitarianism, reason, knowledge, etc. etc.- doing the right thing). The Internet has been seen as a different place, an experimental place, where those values don't matter or don't apply - we could try something different; it has been like a virutal game world where we can act out being someone different. The experiment is over. It turns out the values do matter (of course, there's reasons they survive human history) - and they matter more than in the physical world, due to the power of communication on the Internet.
It's time to stop accepting what we wouldn't accept at a dinner table or in a professional social situation (or choose your analogy). The Internet is part of IRL, no different than a restaurant. HN, for example, has much improved; I hope it will go further and adopt that concept.
> part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing
And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. As VR becomes mainstream, along with eye and face tracking, we can expect interaction over the internet to feel 99% as authentic as interaction in real life.
> There is some old Roman bit about easy/good/soft times breeding weak men who bring tough times
Contemporary moral systems look down on suffering. As engineers, we should strive to create a society where suffering and "hard times" are eliminated. The end-goal is everyone being able to enjoy life with tragedies and hardships eliminated.
This is not to say that we should get rid of all intellectual challenges - just that (by any contemporary moral system) it should be the end goal to rid ourselves of suffering.
> The internet, in all of its forms, simply increases awareness of what's going on around
I think this gets overlooked too much by people in tech sociological bubble.
The shape of the world is at any point in time a function of (1) the various frictions to information flow that are present, and (2) exploitation of the same by the powerful.
The shape of the pre-information-age world in particular contained within it latent sources of conflict and instability (examples abound, I won't specify here) that could only be maintained by keeping some people voiceless and others in the dark.
What we're witnessing now is a tumultuous transition period as we reach a new equilibrium.
Two of the forces that will determine the shape of that new equilibrium: (1) People acting in their interests based on new information and (2) new restrictions on information transmission better adapted to the evolving state of technology.
> I find it very strange that technologies like the internet appear to have created a world with more ambiguity and less transparency than we've had before
Any technology created by humans will be a mirror of human shortcomings. Techo-utopians believe that technology will make humanity somehow better. It won't. We'll just use it to do the same terrible shit we've been doing since the dawn of time.
> We can imagine a possible scenario of the collapse of our own civilization. Our ability to perceive decline would be compromised early in the process.
Social media and the Internet is the new opium of the masses. We view the world through this crappy lens and it never matches what's really going on. We think we have a clear picture, but everywhere there is chaos and decline. Klaus Schwab's 'Great Reset' proposal won't cut it. We need mobilized mass revolution and political will to get out of the various messes we are in.
> If, somehow, this stuff is to make it into the real world [...] it will have to be VERY different from what it is now.
Either that, or the nature of expectations in the real world will have to change, kind of like they did in the 90s when, after a few technological iterations, real people decided that shopping online was not so batshit crazy after all; or like people did in the late aughts when they decided that sharing every damn thing they were doing, and taking pictures of their tacos, was how one conducted oneself socially.
> For example, I predict the increasingly suffocating digital zeitgeist will give rise to a form of competition which would be the mechanist's version of a demo scene.
I think it's not just that. The internet allows niche hobbies to thrive where previously they would die out, because it makes it easier for people to find peers who are into the same thing. Hence it's easier to maintain the minimum required "population" for a subculture to "survive". The people involved are just dispersed across the planet.
> It's easy to make this judgement now when the headset has just been launched. But over the coming decades we are going to new see new types of social interaction that could enhance the world rather than break it apart.
So ... in many ways my life has been this "over the coming decades" first the internet in general, then social media, then smart phones. And at each of those steps I said what you just said about this.
But I dunno man! I have to say that I feel like the "this will lead to deterioration in valuable human bonds" crowd has been more thoroughly vindicated than my "we have to wait and see whether the good dominates the bad!" crowd.
>> "we're not sufficiently civilized to make it reality."
To me, the opposite is true, society has become too civilized. True change would require risks that the majority of Internet users would see as too risky, unnecessary, and a threat to stability & safety.
> For the generation growing up now, the Internet is their window on the world. They take it for granted. It’s only us, who have seen it take shape, and are aware of all the ways it could have been different, who understand that it's fragile, contingent. The coming years will decide to what extent the Internet be a medium for consumption, to what extent it will lift people up, and to what extent it will become a tool of social control.
I agree completely. This is something we should be cognizant of.
> One thing that's important to be mindful of is that this on-campus experience many of us remember is in many ways evaporating anyway.
I read here that you're not talking about the pandemic specifically, but of the increasing digitization of society as socializing, work, entertainment and education all go online. and you're right, this is a huge social issue that connects to mental health, social cohesion, political life, social skills gaps and how we relate to each other. It's a change we are crashing into without any idea of the consequences. And yes, maybe digitizing our formative coming of age experiences is a step too far, or maybe we just need VR tanks.
> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.
What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.
I think in reality there is some sort of lower bound here in what we consider "reality" today (the physical world, with its governments, etc). We already are seeing the internet as a place where revolutions happen on very short timescales, even overnight. This will only increase as VR takes hold of our minds and existence.
To be honest, I'm a little afraid of that. There is something to be said for change in the physical world and how profound big changes are, and I hope one does not transplant the other and that they evolve together. We still need infrastructure, places to live, and government to make the online/VR revolutions a possibility.
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