I’m not an avid enough of a fan to defend Star Trek very strongly. It’s always struck me as a model society that’s pretty much evolved past racism and imperialism. The only wars they seemed to fight were wars started by hostile aliens or evil actors.
A benevolent illuminati, IIRC. Could be wrong. It’s been like 25 years since I read Foundations.
Always struck me as the ship needed constant maintenance. Also, it was a travelling science research lab. People studying new phenomena encountered en route; Studying and learning from new civilizations.
I have to put my two cents in because what I do all day is study the way people looked at the future in the past.
If you go back in time you find the culture works pretty much exactly as it does today. People thought the future was going to be wonderful and people thought the future was going to be terrible. At the same time. Sometimes on the same page. Incredibly marvelous inventions were going to make life better. Incredibly dangerous inventions were going to make the world worse. Progress would pull people together. Progress would ruin what we love. New technologies would end war by making it too terrible to wage. New technologies would be terrible because evil people would use them to win wars. You can extend these dichotomies as long as you want, and still find infinite examples.
Fiction has tended toward dystopias, true. Conflict is the basis for storytelling, as people have noted. But fiction also uses dystopias as warnings about the contemporary world. Darkness at Noon, Brave New World, 1984 weren’t about the future: they were about their present. Actually, utopias are also about the present, as Looking Backward was. They were popular for a time but were so dull that publishers stopped printing them. Most are only known to historians because few even at the time paid attention to them. They read fun stuff, just like today. Dystopias are horror novels and people always find horror novels fun. People are weird.
Basically, I disagree with the OP about a thousand percent. Selective perception at its finest.
It’s true, of course, that people will use VR for getting their rocks off. That will very clearly be the killer app.
But unlike crack, it won’t be something you dip into only for pleasure, to the detriment of everything else in your life.
Once VR becomes vivid enough*, I expect it won’t be long before people spend most of the time within such environments. i.e. live and work, not just entertainment.
If this seems weird, bear in mind the proportion of time you spend interacting with man-made environments and objects right now.
The only difference is that in VR, if you want to live in a spectacular city, we don’t actually need to push around millions of tons of concrete to do it. Granted, a big problem is if you’re spending all your time in various VRs how do you take your work environment more seriously than your game environment or whatever? It’s a real problem, but it won’t be enough to stop us doing it.
And of course, if we’re talking some kind of neural implant, then VR will ultimately be more vivid than interacting with reality, since it won’t be affected by the limitations of human sensory organs (e.g. the light you see must pass through a layer of cells so is always somewhat fuzzy).
You’re talking about VR on a level portrayed in films like Total Recall, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky and Inception. I think it’s less of an issue of “not taking your work environment serious” as it is not knowing what’s real and what isn’t. It’s not that much of a stretch to imagine everyone living in their own, self created Minecraft/Sims world while their bodies physical needs are attended to. At that point, does it matter what’s “real” and what isn’t? Does such a world become a high-tech prison or free mankind such that our only limits are our imagination?
Actually I’m saying the problem is more than just what is real, AKA whether you’re in a VR or not. (And, incidentally, that issue does matter as you need to know you cannot just jump off a cliff within the real world)
You also will need to know which VR you are in. After all, why would there only be one?
Is it your personal VR which you use to get your rocks off, a small group VR like a working group or a massively multiplayer VR? Is the person you are talking to a real person or part of the simulation?
And there’s a level above that: VRs may host other VRs – something like Inception. And, just like that movie, it may become difficult to keep track of where you are within that nested set of environments.
I have some ideas on how we might ameliorate some of these issues, but I’m probably hijacking this thread enough…
In the mid-Twentieth Century, science fiction was about Progress, and things getting better. Then the New Wave writers hit, and said,* Naaah.*
We live in a world with limits. If we go over the carrying capacity of a given region, famine and war must happen. We’ve been following the false god of economic/population growth for long enough now that that level of over-stress is all over.
Things don’t always look like they’re getting worse. They look like they’re getting worse now because the smart money is that this time they are.
ETA: I suspect there is almost no “always” in human history and culture–beyond basic things like, “People gotta eat.”
I have arrived to the conclusion that yes, there are limits, but taking into account things like Ephemeralization - Doing more with less as pointed by Buckminster Fuller tells me that we can still make it with a good quality of life level for most people.
But of course, I do remember that famines still happen today, and they are made worse by political reasons and lack of planning. What I do fear is that it is more likely that issues like deforestation, loss of fertile land and refugees due to climate change will cause a lot of pain because we did not prepare properly. And yet, at the same time we are very likely to get better in the food production and quality of life front.
Sounds paradoxical, but I can see a climate influenced example in Syria. We can see that the capacity of feeding the world population is still there, but a region of the earth was grossly unprepared and was saddled with a dictator that did not know how to deal with the situation.
I do think that overall we will get better, but if ignorance triumphs in many powerful countries of the earth the outlook will be less optimistic.
We have a global refugee crisis. It’s not just Syria. In too many countries, it is no longer simply a matter of the dispossessed going up into the interior; they cross national boundaries in desperation. And of course, there are (as usual) purged groups here and there, as in Burma.
My pessimism is based on how inflexible humans are and the usually stupid dictators, not on the technology and information fronts (that I have some experience too) that are bound to make things better overall.
The world is both more populated and peaceful than it’s ever been.
Would it need to remain that way for an infinite span of time before your opinion is refuted?
I think if you take how stupid and inflexible people are (which doesn’t seem to change), and project that forward into a world with more advanced technology, that world can quickly become a scary place.
I was thinking the exact same thing. It kind of goes back to discussions on whether we are already living in a VR simulation. My response is usually some version of “what do you mean ‘we’?” I know I’m real…the rest of you, I’m not so sure.
To my mind, technology has made the world into a far less scary place than it was 100, even 50 years ago. In 1962, the world was facing a nuclear showdown between two world powers. 54 years later, that seems a whole lot less likely, despite the fact that nuclear weapons are much more omnipresent and their capacity far more destructive.
I don’t mean to offend, but I’m so sick to death of that stupid Matrix meme. It’s so cartoonish and over-done. There is no reason to believe there is an alternate reality available to us. And even if such a thing exists in some alternate multi-verse concept, we have no way of crossing that boundary. So this one reality is all we share. Sure, we can have an argument about how we may differ in our perception of it, but not whether there is an alternative reality for each of us. There is not and no reason to believe otherwise.
So sure, with technology advanced far enough, humans might eventually be able to plug into an “alternate” VR experience. But how will that be any different or more real than a bad psychodelic drug of choice trip? Anything outside that trip will not become any less real. All we’ll have managed to do is to escape reality, not create a new form of it.
It’s my hope that we’ll have the foresight to avoid that kind of dystopian future based on some fundamental ethical/moral principals and global social policies.
Who would read a story or watch a movie about some utopian future where everything is better than what we have now? There’s got to be zombies, or environmental collapse, or Klingons, or something to make the story interesting. I suppose Thoreau could have written a book about an idyllic future if he was so inclined but its hard to do without being fucking boring.
However it will change – as we understand more about the brain eventually we’ll be able to augment our own abilities in various ways (arguably technology has already done this to an extent…dumb political opinions notwithstanding people are getting better and better at all kinds of standardized test), plus eventually minimize certain dumb instincts.
There’s an implicit logical leap you made there.
Do we have any reason to suppose any hyper-real VR exists? No.
Can we therefore conclude that we are not in a hyper-real VR and/or that this reality is that this is all there is? No.
As I mentioned upthread, the bar for realism in VR is ultimately higher than how real your experiences seem now.
Your vision in VR could ultimately be superior to your vision in the real world, tactile input could be greater and so on.
And as I said, it need not be just something done for kicks in your leisure time. Think of the most spacious, opulent building you can…well, that can be your new office.
Again I’m talking long-term here, no-one’s going to work in VR while it’s only audio-visual and requires strapping on glasses. But long term for humans (200 years say, is small fry in the grand scheme of things)
It’s not quite analagous as, for one thing, VR already exists. It’s just a very poor facsimile for reality right now.
It’s true there’s no evidence that any hyper-real VR exists and/or that we’re in one. And I hate the oft-cited point that it’s somehow irrational to assume everything around us is real…it’s not, it makes perfect sense while we have no evidence to the contrary.
But the concern we might be in a VR is not as baseless as belief in God. We have reason to think we could be in a VR even if we have no evidence of that hypothesis. But god has neither reason nor evidence at this time.
Sure…and perhaps we’re talking past each other at this point.
I was responding to your point that it will just be like an acid trip, which we use to escape reality. Maybe it will be like that…in the short term.
Longer term once VR is anywhere near as vivid as real experience, and then definitely once it surpasses it, I’m sure humans will spend most of their time in various VRs, using it for work, leisure and socializing. It will be the new reality.
Even if, yes, there has to be an understanding that there’s a base reality that underpins it all. But it won’t be as short term, potentially damaging or private as recreational drug use is today.
Would a sci-fi writer working in the 1950s grab his audience about 21st century people in 2016 driving gas-burning cars, using electric stoves, and watching football on television, no matter how large the screen? The internet and smartphones might be sufficiently far-out, but
Of course not; there kind of needed to be nuclear stuff, robots, air-cars, etc… to give it the proper “futuristic” feel.
Plus, like Damuri Ajashi pointed out, the story has to be sufficiently fantastic to be interesting beyond whatever the futuristic window dressing is.
Or look at it this way- if you were writing a sci-fi book in 1990 about 2015, is it more interesting to postulate a blasted, post-apocalyptic wasteland or a hyper-futuristic setting, or would it be more interesting to portray last year as it was- substantially identical to 1990, minus the internet, smartphones and computers?
You definition of “peace” is based on human-on-human violence, ignoring the level of human-on-sea-life predation, and the population collapse of fisheries previously used for food.
We are not at peace and we are not peaceful. We are simply in alliance with other present human beings in war against lives that are not human and lives that exist only in the future. When (in about 35 years) the oceans are functionally empty of fish, that alliance will end.