Lets assume we develop the capacity to create virtual worlds that are near indistinguishable from the real world. We hook you up into a machine and you now find yourself in what effectively is a paraller reality where you get to be the king of your own universe (if you so desire). Nothing is off limits - everything you’ve ever dreamt of is possible. You can be the only person there, you can populate it with unconscious AI that appears consciouss or you can have other people visit your world and you can visit theirs aswell as spend time in “public worlds” with millions of other real people.
Would you try it and do you think you’d prefer it over real world? Do you see it as a negative from individual perspective if significant part of the population basically spend their entire lives there?
I don’t think it would hold my indefinite attention to be honest. The reason why I use escapist media: video games, tv shows, books, fanfiction, etc. is because there’s a reason to them. There’s an ultimate goal, or plot. There’s a certainty that I can’t get in real life and it’s bounded by stipulations that I find acceptable (limited map size, max level, resource management, storyline, hours to complete, etc)
If the simulation was just like real life. I think I’d be too lost. Would I try it for the novelty? Probably. But after a while, I think I’d be too concerned about the “trueness” of my experiences.
If it was reliant on my will/my desires, I think I would be addicted but it would eventual feel meaningless/not enough. I think it would also feel too wrong to interact with simulations of the people I know in real life. Even if the interactions were benign, there’s just an ick-factor for me. With the other option, having to interact indefinitely with AI would just introduce a weird dysphoria with the world, like if I fell in love with a character in the simulation and I have to deal with the reality that they don’t actually exist. That would break my brain and suck tremendously.
It would be like when you render your likeness in the Sims and you play it for too long, but then you start looking at your character and all they’ve accomplished, and you begin to think you could’ve spent the hours playing to actually work on your real life. 😅
As for playing with other people in public worlds, I think it would have the same issues I already have with playing with random people online: wherein some people are rude, some carry this looming sense of betrayal as to who they actually are, and some I would come to miss in real life, but exponentially made worse by how well it’s all rendered.
And this doesn’t even include the various ways this technology would logistically work. Will I have to deal with ads? How expensive would it be? How much of my privacy do I have to give up? Are there physical dangers to using the machine? Etc.
So, I don’t really know but I’m leaning away from using it. 😅