I Wanna Be a VR Cow
You have reached the end of the world, please turn back
If you take a cow and put it in miserable conditions but then through some device manipulate its senses so that it feels happy, are you doing a good deed or an evil one?
That sounds like an abstract question worthy of a whole dry philosophical book. However, thanks to the amazing Russians, it is now a reality. They have actually put VR devices on cows and as a result, the cows are happier (how you measure that is beyond me). As the guy in Parasite keeps saying, "So metaphorical".
This is the kind of thing that would make René Descartes really sorry that he was born 400 years ago and not today. We have become his demon, messing with the perception of other beings, feeding them fake information about the world around them. Of course, unlike the demon, our purpose is not torture or entertainment but a way more mundane one - we just want more milk.
Now, the only real question I'm interested in is when will we become fully willing to be in the place of those cows - living in the same physical world we do now but also inhabiting a world of our own (or someone else's) design. A world that is arguably better than our own, a world with less suffering. I believe it's simply a matter of when the technology will be good enough to make us believe. Escapism is in no way an uncommon behavior among humans. We use everything from books to hard drugs in order to leave our life and to explore something else. Forgetting our problems for a short time and going on a journey. The only limitations around this are the lack of money and the tolerance we build against drugs. You can't really be high all the time, there is always a short period of agony before you can get high again, even if you do have all the money you need. And most people simply don't have all the money they want, especially those prone to be dysfunctionally high all the time.
But what if they did? There is more and more talk of Universal Basic Income - a sum of money given to everyone by the government every month, no strings attached, as long as you don't break the law. You don't need to work, you don't even need to pretend you're looking for a job. Just stay alive. If you get enough free money to pay for food, rent, and access to the VR world, why would you ever leave? Because the real world is more interesting? It's just a matter of time before it isn't. With a good enough tech, you will be able to feel everything you could possibly feel outside the simulation - only quicker and in more variety than you could ever imagine. And your friends will be there too.
One can almost see a society where the VR world is the place where everyone is. How much of an improvement will that be for a country like Japan, with its limited space and notoriously overcrowded cities? Such a transition will have implications way beyond anything I can put in a single essay, but there a few obvious ones.
1. Privacy
By now we already know that our relationship with technology is two-way. Any piece of technology we use doesn't just give us information, it also gathers information about us. Whether it is to personalize our experience or to sell our data to the Illuminati overlords, we are no longer just another person sitting behind the TV screen. The companies providing the services have complicated profiles of each user, ranging from name and browsing patterns to actual physiological data and even DNA. This will only get worse once you get in VR. Having your eye gaze tracked by Facebook sounds bad only until they give us that amazing new feature™, then we'll probably pay extra to get the new tech required. Once someone knows exactly what you are seeing at every moment, what you are hearing, what tactile feedback you are experiencing, what is left of you that is really private? Your emotions and feelings? Humans are pretty predictable beings. There are countless searches showing that the vast majority of people will react to a certain set of stimuli in a certain predictable way. If I know what makes you sad or happy (because I'm monitoring you 24/7), then it probably isn't that hard to predict how you feel given that I also know everything you are perceiving, down to the smallest detail. It is not that far fetched to say that your only way to have a truly private life will be to unplug completely from the VR. Or host your own VR server. That is unless the Illuminati poison the sky and make private VR servers illegal. Damn those evil secret societies, ruining our cyberpunk hacker dream. I could almost see the group of rebellious hobo shamans eating shrooms around a campfire, escaping the reality of the world in which everyone chose to escape the reality of the world. Is that an act of rebellion against the VR or just a less invasive way to achieve the same result?
2. Relationships
I don't even know where to begin here. I guess the first thing to note is that in China there is this girl chatbot who can become your virtual girlfriend. She is used by millions of people daily and a lot of them talk about her as if she was actually their girlfriend - that is to say, they seem to have formed an emotional (and sexual) relationship with her, the kind you would usually have with another human being. Now, obviously, being a chatbot there is plenty lacking there, like the ability to actually touch your girlfriend. It is perfectly clear that she is simulated. But in the VR world, everyone will be simulated. Even if you ate talking to a real person you will be seeing and touching their virtual avatar, not their physical body. And it doesn't seem impossible that in the future we will have machines that pass the Turing tests without an issue. The Turing test is a hypothetical situation where you communicate with a machine. In order for the machine to "pass" it has to make you believe you are communicating with a real person. So who of all the people in your VR world is real? How can you tell? Do you even care? If the simulations are believable enough, what does it matter whether or not those are real people.
3. Babies
This is probably the weirdest part of the whole thought experiment. What do we do with the babies? How do you have a baby in such a world? Do you have to log out and go physically meet the person after whatever courtship you do in VR land? Why hold back? Why not have the system do that for you. There is already a variety of sex robots out there. Maybe in the future, you will be able to "have sex" with your VR machine and get your sperm or eggs collected. Grow the baby in a lab somewhere and wire it up to the simulation as soon as it's born. Or even before. I honestly have no idea what this part of human life is going to look like. It seems to me to be the aspect of this whole thing with the most ethical problems attached to it. And to answer whether or not it is okay to put a VR set on a baby without letting it grow up and choose, maybe we need to go back and answer if it's okay to do that to a cow. After all babies and cows aren't that different - they sit in the same place, eat and poop, occasionally making some noises. And we seem to not really have a problem putting the cow into VR. This baby problem could take a whole article, so we'll leave it for now and move on to something else.
4. Death
How do you handle physical death? Given that we don't solve the problem of death and for some reason we are not immortal when we enter our VR world. What happens when you die? Do you just get deleted, removing your avatar? With so much data gathered about you that would seem a waste. Can your loved ones pay extra to get a simulated version of you? One that is so well done even they can't tell the difference? Is that a bad thing if it makes them happy? And if your death causes them to suffer is it a good idea to find a way to avoid that suffering? Like never telling them that you died and instead quietly replacing you with a simulation? Would that be a legal right of the person dying, or is the right to know that you're dead belong to the others?
There is a lot more to say on those four points and on many more. The world of the future will be complicated, and it will probably be more different than anything we can imagine. I don't think of this text as a prediction of the future, but more of a series of talking points, each able to start a conversation about our underlying human nature and the universal problems we face in our lives. Maybe we'll never get the VR world, maybe when we get there we will be too different from our current selves. However, there is still one last point I want to discuss. I mentioned the idea of using this VR world as a form of escapism from the reality we are currently inhabiting. The human mind is astonishingly good at finding ways to escape. I believe this desire to just leave, to abandon suffering is a root cause of many addictions. Virtual worlds aren't that different, they can just as easily be used as a vehicle to run away from the problems of our lives. I wish I had an easy solution for that but I don't. But it seems that in a world full of people trying to escape, intentionally staying present is an act of rebellion. Not against the evil tech overlords but against our own culture. The dopamine dealers are only one side of the coin. It is still us, the addicted, that create the demand for whatever it is they sell, be it heroin or a new app to scroll through.
Stay present.
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