The degeneracy, Depravity, Evil, which will form off in pockets of this world – will end up enticing a lot of people into them as the users become jaded to the simple simulacrum of reality, and real reality will be completely flat in contrast.
Does anyone think Virtual Reality will not be a very bad thing indeed?
In the beginning of the series Narcos the narrator tells of how rats addicted to cocaine will just endlessly take more and more to the exclusion of anything else, till they die. We know about addictions – so why are there not endless studies on the risks of this new fake high. Surely giving this to children is on par with giving them cocaine.
Peter LR
2 years ago
Definitely sounds like The Matrix!
PS why do we kowtow to China insisting we use the Chinese word for their capital city rather than the English word? Peter Hitchens explains:
“Good to see the proper English name for China’s capital revived again, in the phrase ‘Peking Pound’. Why did we ever stop using it? We don’t call Rome ‘Roma’ or Damascus ‘Dimashq’. France’s grandest newspaper, Le Monde, still refers to ‘Pekin’, and Germany’s majestic Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung uses ‘Peking’. ‘Beijing’ is a cowardly cringe to power.”
If the virtual world is as real as the real world, why bother?
Kevin Casey
2 years ago
Whatever happened to “escaping” into a good book and allowing your own imagination to form its own “virtual reality”
John Riordan
2 years ago
There is one simple reason why VR will eventually come to dominate our existence, and it’ll happen when VR isn’t merely as real as reality, but when it is better. I first realised this when contemplating the proposition of virtual holidays. Most people scoff at the idea that taking a virtual tour of, say, Tuscany could be anything like the real thing and they are right in the obvious sense.
However, what VR promises to change is oneself. This is the major drawback to authentic reality. Most people are averagely wealthy, clever and attractive, and live lives constrained by the physical absolute of being one person in one body, most of which cannnot be altered.
But what if you could inhabit a virtual world where you are rich, beautiful and famous, look entirely different and possess charm, wit and genius? That you can transcend the limitations that reality imposes upon your own existence in real life? A holiday from yourself, in other words? This is what will make VR work eventually, even though the experience of VR may remain perceptibly less authentic than reality: the point is that people will WANT it not to be as real as reality.
Last edited 2 years ago by John Riordan
John Riordan
2 years ago
“It could make the impact of cyber attacks much worse, be “used by criminals to create addictive digital drugs,”
And there’s this. Yes, it would be pretty bad if hackers were able to hack your mind as well as your computer, nobody denies this. But this surely also offers the prospect that medicine could invent digital drugs and therapies that would have beneficial real-world effects.
The degeneracy, Depravity, Evil, which will form off in pockets of this world – will end up enticing a lot of people into them as the users become jaded to the simple simulacrum of reality, and real reality will be completely flat in contrast.
Does anyone think Virtual Reality will not be a very bad thing indeed?
In the beginning of the series Narcos the narrator tells of how rats addicted to cocaine will just endlessly take more and more to the exclusion of anything else, till they die. We know about addictions – so why are there not endless studies on the risks of this new fake high. Surely giving this to children is on par with giving them cocaine.
Definitely sounds like The Matrix!
PS why do we kowtow to China insisting we use the Chinese word for their capital city rather than the English word? Peter Hitchens explains:
“Good to see the proper English name for China’s capital revived again, in the phrase ‘Peking Pound’. Why did we ever stop using it? We don’t call Rome ‘Roma’ or Damascus ‘Dimashq’. France’s grandest newspaper, Le Monde, still refers to ‘Pekin’, and Germany’s majestic Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung uses ‘Peking’. ‘Beijing’ is a cowardly cringe to power.”
If the virtual world is as real as the real world, why bother?
Whatever happened to “escaping” into a good book and allowing your own imagination to form its own “virtual reality”
There is one simple reason why VR will eventually come to dominate our existence, and it’ll happen when VR isn’t merely as real as reality, but when it is better. I first realised this when contemplating the proposition of virtual holidays. Most people scoff at the idea that taking a virtual tour of, say, Tuscany could be anything like the real thing and they are right in the obvious sense.
However, what VR promises to change is oneself. This is the major drawback to authentic reality. Most people are averagely wealthy, clever and attractive, and live lives constrained by the physical absolute of being one person in one body, most of which cannnot be altered.
But what if you could inhabit a virtual world where you are rich, beautiful and famous, look entirely different and possess charm, wit and genius? That you can transcend the limitations that reality imposes upon your own existence in real life? A holiday from yourself, in other words? This is what will make VR work eventually, even though the experience of VR may remain perceptibly less authentic than reality: the point is that people will WANT it not to be as real as reality.
“It could make the impact of cyber attacks much worse, be “used by criminals to create addictive digital drugs,”
And there’s this. Yes, it would be pretty bad if hackers were able to hack your mind as well as your computer, nobody denies this. But this surely also offers the prospect that medicine could invent digital drugs and therapies that would have beneficial real-world effects.