2010 Jack Arcalon

VR principles


   Virtual Reality (VR) is mankind's last hope.
The purpose of virtual reality will be the same as that of Artificial Intelligence: to generate more wealth with less human effort.

Of course it can't happen soon enough.
It has always been much easier to make more people than to make the products these people so desperately want to consume. With our current economy, providing everyone a tolerable life in an overpopulated world would destroy the environment.
The tiny minority that can afford these 'necessary luxuries' is completely unwilling to give up or even reduce their oversized cars, display screens, pollution-spewing power plants, airlines, farm subsidies, streetlights, air-conditioned McMansions, tidy lawns, and exotic vacations.
The sacrifice is just too much. It's a political non-starter.
Yet eventually, the rest of mankind will demand all these products for themselves. World energy usage would have to triple.

If successful, VR will simulate everyone's ideal reality at a much lower environmental cost. This would transform the world beyond recognition.
People would live in decentralized habitats, in a miniaturized landscape of mobile homes, narrow roads, and solar panels, shipping stations and small workshops.
There will be no more large factories or airports, city centers or universities.

The required technology will be much harder to invent than Hollywood realizes. The real research hasn't even begun, not even in theory.
True VR will require ultra-high definition 3D display visors, full-body interface clothing with embedded pressure wires to simulate heat, weight, motion, and friction, and interactive simulations that would melt today's mightiest supercomputers.
Even the experience of sitting in a chair would require trillions of high-level calculations per second to accurately recreate.
VR will simulate the experience of floating, being prodded from a thousand directions, and dizzying acrobatic maneuvers barely allowed by the laws of physics.
To save processing effort, most VR environments will rely heavily on pre-rendered recordings. Vast arrays of elements will need to be combined in milliseconds. At first, there will be only a few environments to choose from.
Most important will be the instant ability to zoom in at any level of detail, a godlike illusion of total control.

Of course the unspoken killer app is VR sex. This market will be particularly immense.
It would appeal to those unlucky losers who are unsuccessful on the dating market, a surprisingly large percentage of males.
If they're unlucky enough to live in restrictive traditional or polygamous or Islamic societies they may miss out again. The men in charge of those places will want to keep their elite status, and will no doubt ban most forms of VR, except under highly monitored conditions.
Somewhat less conservative but still religiously driven societies like the USA may also restrict the technology, depending on which party is in power. Proponents of traditional marriage will be among its strongest critics.

Meanwhile, famous and attractive females will be paid millions to allow themselves to be scanned at high resolution.
The mysteries of erotic attraction, such as they are, go beyond physical parameters. Part of the 'courtship ritual' is the acquisition process. It's all about ownership.
The ordinary concerns of daily life are an essential part of erotic idealization. VR sex will include many levels with increasingly difficult tasks, a bit like videogames.
The VR customer's sex life will be split into dozens of conveniently managed components. Users will invent detailed character biographies and scenarios.
For some, their fantasy lives will come to dominate their free time.

One thing is clear. If present trends continue, civilization will become purely virtual by the end of the century. The fantastically inefficient human body will become an obstacle long before then; but not before the medical-industrial complex will have extracted quadrillions of dollars in new taxes in futile but lucrative efforts to keep elderly and otherwise injured persons alive just a bit longer.
VR is also the method by which individual human brains will first be indirectly measured in some detail, a process very few people have even dared think about as yet. It will allow users' behaviors, abilities, and personalities to be recorded without having to penetrate the skull.

At first, life in a VR world may seem much simpler, like living in a cartoon.
Soon, the simulations' owners will begin to exploit the complex structures and rules that can be generated inside virtual reality.
There will be no more natural limits, only computational ones.
Then real history will begin.



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