RAR: Real Life or Simulated Reality?

[Jub]

Given things like Microsoft's HoloLens and our increasing understanding of the way the human mind works, I thought I might get a discussion started on the prospect that within the next few generations it might be possible to live an entire life without ever leaving a matrix like simulation. I'm not sure the best way to phrase things to start such a discussion, so I thought a sort of RAR like the one below might help, but don't think my listing of potential perks and drawbacks or the implications of this technology is by any means complete.

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If you had the choice to live out your days hooked into a virtual reality system so good that it's impossible to distinguish it from reality and networked so that you can visit like minded dreamers and even enjoy skype calls or VR visits with people still in the real world. What if in addition to that the system was so adaptable your wildest dreams can be realized in ways that the most skilled writer, animator, or other such creative type could only dream off. Would you choose to leave your current life behind to become a dreamer in a world of your own creation?

Well, we all know it isn't going to be so simple as just plugging in and living out your days, so let's assume that to reduce the suffering of the unemployed and reduce over population the world's governments are willing to pay for your needs to be maintained by a reliable company so long as you stay connected to the system. Let us also assuming that, to avoid your body becoming an atrophied mess, your body is set to exercise at an optimal rate while you are connected to the VR system meaning that you will, should you ever choose to disconnect come out in the best physical shape your age and medical conditions will allow for. At the current time, to help combat over population, people hooked into the VR system won't be allowed to breed. You can still tick the breeder box at induction into the system and should the policy be reversed at some later date your preserved genetic material will be made available for use by those who wish to use donated eggs and sperm for reproduction. Some men and women might even opt into the more extreme end of things and allow willing females who are still living within the virtual system to bear children to be put up for adoption when they are born. So far it doesn't look too bad, and I could see many people taking the offer at this point, but what if there was a potential cost to this?

The super obvious drawbacks seem simple, the company caring for you could do a poor job leading to you dying or their could be a disaster that you would have otherwise escaped from but couldn't due to being stuck in the VR system, but those wouldn't be the only drawbacks. For the scientifically inclined among us you couldn't discover anything with any value to the real world that was not already programmed into the system, unless you chose to interact with the real world and even then you'd be limited to what can be accomplished remotely. The system could potentially fake such discoveries, much as it can fake you having a child by introducing another actor to the stage, but these would be of no use to the real world beyond your civilization. You also have issues like your body being moved about, and potentially being stored in a place that wouldn't be easy or pleasant for you to live in should you choose to exit the system. Depending on the scenario we envision, you might even be sent to another world or solar system entirely as part of a genetic diversity program. With these, and other drawbacks I haven't acknowledged, does the prospect of entering a virtual world still seem as risk free as it did a while ago?

[Borgholio]

One aspect of the human psyche is the desire to be productive, to actually matter and make a difference. If I knew I was in a virtual world where nothing I did had any impact on the real world, I wouldn't be very happy with that. Might be fun to start with but eventually it would grow tiring and I'd want to leave. What I personally would find best is to use the simulated reality as a way of perceiving the real world in a more efficient or effective way. For example, in The Matrix we see that the Zion traffic control personnel are plugged into their own "mini-Matrix" and are using that virtual interface to manage the operational and defensive systems of Zion.

IRL, I work tech support. The best tool out our disposal is remote desktop, so we can fix the customer's computer ourselves without having to talk them through it. If that could be virtualized so that a computer with a bug in the code appeared to us as a Lego construct with a few colored bricks out of place, and to fix it we just needed to rearrange the bricks, that would be so much better than typing an arcane string of code in a monitor.

[Jub]

One aspect of the human psyche is the desire to be productive, to actually matter and make a difference. If I knew I was in a virtual world where nothing I did had any impact on the real world, I wouldn't be very happy with that. Might be fun to start with but eventually it would grow tiring and I'd want to leave. What I personally would find best is to use the simulated reality as a way of perceiving the real world in a more efficient or effective way. For example, in The Matrix we see that the Zion traffic control personnel are plugged into their own "mini-Matrix" and are using that virtual interface to manage the operational and defensive systems of Zion.

IRL, I work tech support. The best tool out our disposal is remote desktop, so we can fix the customer's computer ourselves without having to talk them through it. If that could be virtualized so that a computer with a bug in the code appeared to us as a Lego construct with a few colored bricks out of place, and to fix it we just needed to rearrange the bricks, that would be so much better than typing an arcane string of code in a monitor.

If you signed up for a lifetime package, you could conceivably be tricked into thinking you'd left and returned to a productive life or have other techniques used to alleviate the desire to feel useful. It's even possible that this could be a side road into trans-humanism where you can be useful by controlling some form of drone as a form of work before slipping back into a fantasy land, but increasingly we're already having to find make work to keep people employed. For example, we could likely do away with clothing stores by using something like the Kinect to take your measurements and display our selection on a 3d model of you, order the right size of clothing from an automated warehouse, and even deliver it by an automated delivery system. You could replace most fast food places with a robotic assembly line style burger cooking system and replace the staff with a few technicians and a manager to help customers interact with the machine.

Assuming that all non-creative jobs are replaced by machines when you're asked to make this choice, does that change your answer any?

EDIT: Accidentally hit submit early.

[salm]

I think you´d have to ease people into that. Give them the technology and wait a decade or two. Then you will have a signifcant part of the population willing to spent all or most of their lives in VR. They´ll find ways to be productive in VR. It doesn´t matter that their productivity doesn´t affect the ouside world. They only have to percieve it to be productive and that will be the case if they have an impact on their VR world.
There are plenty of people who spend most of their lives in front of screens and I guess it´s going to be even easier to make people spend most of their time in the kind of super VR you propose. But if you want them to do it now you won´t be very successful. People will be scared of spending prolonged times in VR but this fear will go away after a long enough time.

[Jub]

I think you´d have to ease people into that. Give them the technology and wait a decade or two. Then you will have a signifcant part of the population willing to spent all or most of their lives in VR. They´ll find ways to be productive in VR. It doesn´t matter that their productivity doesn´t affect the ouside world. They only have to percieve it to be productive and that will be the case if they have an impact on their VR world.
There are plenty of people who spend most of their lives in front of screens and I guess it´s going to be even easier to make people spend most of their time in the kind of super VR you propose. But if you want them to do it now you won´t be very successful. People will be scared of spending prolonged times in VR but this fear will go away after a long enough time.

I think we tend to agree on this and I can see things going that exact way.

[Borgholio]

Yeah I can see artists, musicians, and designers working within VR most of the time. That kind of medium would be perfect for creativity. Also as I think about it, astronomers too. Being able to physically interact with a model of the Sun, or "walk" on the surface of another world in the footsteps of a probe would be a great boon to researchers.

[Irbis]

One aspect of the human psyche is the desire to be productive, to actually matter and make a difference. If I knew I was in a virtual world where nothing I did had any impact on the real world, I wouldn't be very happy with that.

How would your brain know the difference?

No, really, people spend days building that perfect castle in Minecraft or planning ideal dynasty in Crusader Kings. Why they do so if they do it in something obviously fake (and very crude graphically to boot) if their brain doesn't tell them 'hey, you're doing great!' in terms of impact?

Here, people are known to half (or even actually) starve themselves to death in World of Warcraft, now imagine something a hundred times as immersive. You want to be a stormtrooper/pony/elf/whatever? Now you can, go knock yourself out. Who will care it's not 'real world'?

Or hell, imagine simply living life while not needing to care about bodily functions, where you don't need to sleep, are never sick, and eat simply for pleasure. You could do your old job from there in a lot of cases, just quality of life would be a lot better. Why tech supporting or browsing SD.net from there would be any different?

IRL, I work tech support. The best tool out our disposal is remote desktop, so we can fix the customer's computer ourselves without having to talk them through it. If that could be virtualized so that a computer with a bug in the code appeared to us as a Lego construct with a few colored bricks out of place, and to fix it we just needed to rearrange the bricks, that would be so much better than typing an arcane string of code in a monitor.

Alas, if spotting bugs was so easy automating their solving away would be far simpler than coding fancy stuff like that. No, the only possible job I can imagine in such a world would be a reality show. If you can create interesting life, people would pay to watch it, like today we have bestselling books that do essentially the same thing in imagination. Like being an actor in Game of Thrones - Baelish would probably enjoy a lot more interest than Catelyn

[Borgholio]

How would your brain know the difference?

Because I remember sitting down in the chair and plugging myself in, perhaps?

No, really, people spend days building that perfect castle in Minecraft or planning ideal dynasty in Crusader Kings. Why they do so if they do it in something obviously fake (and very crude graphically to boot) if their brain doesn't tell them 'hey, you're doing great!' in terms of impact?

That's my point. They still need to feel productive. Building something in Minecraft might seem like a worthy way to spend time to some people, but if I knew there was a real world out there, I'd want to impact THAT at some level.

Who will care it's not 'real world'?

I would. And just like there are people out there who would happily live out their lives as an elf, there are people who would use the VR as a way to enhance their RL existence.

Or hell, imagine simply living life while not needing to care about bodily functions, where you don't need to sleep, are never sick, and eat simply for pleasure. You could do your old job from there in a lot of cases, just quality of life would be a lot better.

Now that would make for some neat Sci-Fi. A world where people are jacked in to the VR system and have a robotic or physical avatar that they use to to interact with the real world, but since that only consumes part of their time and they never need to actually sleep or anything, they can spend the rest of their time doing other things.

Alas, if spotting bugs was so easy automating their solving away would be far simpler than coding fancy stuff like that.

But the idea that converting abstract ideas to physical and tangible shapes would make things easier to work with is a valid one, yes?

[Jub]

Because I remember sitting down in the chair and plugging myself in, perhaps?

It could literally trick you into thinking you had unplugged from it and gone back to the real world if that's what geniunely made you happy. Or you could do your same IT job remotely, though at this stage AGI is almost a certainty and your job probably already doesn't exist. Hence the government offering this program to keep people from being bored and causing trouble.

That's my point. They still need to feel productive. Building something in Minecraft might seem like a worthy way to spend time to some people, but if I knew there was a real world out there, I'd want to impact THAT at some level.

Picture a society that is post scarcity and with robots and AI to fill all current jobs. Nobody needs to work anymore and things are starting to get uneasy as people realize that they're not needed to keep things running anymore. Does that change your opinion any?

I would. And just like there are people out there who would happily live out their lives as an elf, there are people who would use the VR as a way to enhance their RL existence.

So in a world where you don't need to work and going on vacation is as easy as plugging into a machine and being there virtually with next best thing to perfect simulation, what's the difference between really going there and just plugging into the VR?

Now that would make for some neat Sci-Fi. A world where people are jacked in to the VR system and have a robotic or physical avatar that they use to to interact with the real world, but since that only consumes part of their time and they never need to actually sleep or anything, they can spend the rest of their time doing other things.

Now take that another step further and say that, aside from creative tasks, there is nothing a human can do better than an AI. You could inhabit an AI body if you so desired, but anything you could do with that you could do in the VR world only more so.

But the idea that converting abstract ideas to physical and tangible shapes would make things easier to work with is a valid one, yes?

Why would you do that? if your software can already spot the issue and detail it well enough to do what you describe, why have a human in the loop to play with blocks at all? The human is literally making the process take longer at that point.

EDIT: I work tech support too, and honestly our job could already be most replaced by emailing customers a simple troubleshooting flow chart and letting them punch in the issue on a touch tone phone. Throw in a chat bot to trick people into thinking they had a person on the line and suddenly you can fire 90% of your staff.

[Borgholio]

It could literally trick you into thinking you had unplugged from it and gone back to the real world if that's what geniunely made you happy.

Why would it be allowed to do that? Isn't this a voluntary program? If I choose to go into the VR and come back out again and I get duped into staying, then that sounds like a major flaw in the program as well as possibly a crime too.

Picture a society that is post scarcity and with robots and AI to fill all current jobs. Nobody needs to work anymore and things are starting to get uneasy as people realize that they're not needed to keep things running anymore. Does that change your opinion any?

Not really. It just means that there's no real economic or productive loss to having so many people living their lives in a VR world. If someone really didn't want to be in the VR world forever, then I don't see how it would be hard to give them some busy work to do in the real world.

So in a world where you don't need to work and going on vacation is as easy as plugging into a machine and being there virtually with next best thing to perfect simulation, what's the difference between really going there and just plugging into the VR?

The difference is that one is real and one is fake. For me, VR might be fine if I just want to casually see something. But if I want to actually GO somewhere and experience something with my natural senses, then I would want to do that.

Now take that another step further and say that, aside from creative tasks, there is nothing a human can do better than an AI. You could inhabit an AI body if you so desired, but anything you could do with that you could do in the VR world only more so.

Not if it hasn't happened in the real world yet. If I were inhabiting an AI body that was exploring a distant solar system, then there's no way the VR would be able to simulate that because it hasn't been discovered yet.

Why would you do that? if your software can already spot the issue and detail it well enough to do what you describe, why have a human in the loop to play with blocks at all? The human is literally making the process take longer at that point.

Right. "If". I know this AI is advanced but is it so advanced that it can diagnose it's own code or design more advanced code all without human intervention?

EDIT: I work tech support too, and honestly our job could already be most replaced by emailing customers a simple troubleshooting flow chart and letting them punch in the issue on a touch tone phone. Throw in a chat bot to trick people into thinking they had a person on the line and suddenly you can fire 90% of your staff.

Depends on what you do tech support for. If it's tech support for an internet company, sure. I work for a medical firm and our tech support often involves troubleshooting X-ray machines, digital X-ray tracing and measurements, and things like that. I don't think a touch-tone phone system can handle that.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Or hell, imagine simply living life while not needing to care about bodily functions, where you don't need to sleep, are never sick, and eat simply for pleasure. You could do your old job from there in a lot of cases, just quality of life would be a lot better.

Now that would make for some neat Sci-Fi. A world where people are jacked in to the VR system and have a robotic or physical avatar that they use to to interact with the real world, but since that only consumes part of their time and they never need to actually sleep or anything, they can spend the rest of their time doing other things.

There was a (fairly) recent sci-fi film about that very idea with Bruce Willis in it, but I can't for the life of me recall what it was called.

Ah, hold on. It was Surrogates. Not a bad film.

[Channel72]

Given things like Microsoft's HoloLens and our increasing understanding of the way the human mind works, I thought I might get a discussion started on the prospect that within the next few generations it might be possible to live an entire life without ever leaving a matrix like simulation.

Nonsense. We're probably already living in a simulation.

Just kidding (or am I??*)

*I am.

Anyway... it's at least worth considering that if universe simulation ever becomes possible (what with Moore's law and all), we should consider the probability that any observer pondering this question already likely exists in a (higher-level) simulation.

[Jub]

Why would it be allowed to do that? Isn't this a voluntary program? If I choose to go into the VR and come back out again and I get duped into staying, then that sounds like a major flaw in the program as well as possibly a crime too.

Would that not be one very simple way of the program knowing about and solving your anxiety issue over not being useful? It could even do so before you consciously knew you wanted to leave and then subtly weave in more fantastic elements as you settle back in. The point is, I wouldn't worry about getting bored or feeling useless.

Not really. It just means that there's no real economic or productive loss to having so many people living their lives in a VR world. If someone really didn't want to be in the VR world forever, then I don't see how it would be hard to give them some busy work to do in the real world.

What busy work would that be? Literally anything you could do IRL you could just as easily do virtually and the fruits of your labor would be easier to share that way as it wouldn't need to be scanned and uploaded to the simulation before others could enjoy it. That perfect vintage you grew, bottled and aged, could be forever lost if done IRL, but in the machine it would be saved forever.

The difference is that one is real and one is fake. For me, VR might be fine if I just want to casually see something. But if I want to actually GO somewhere and experience something with my natural senses, then I would want to do that.

If you couldn't easily prove that one was real and one was fake, what difference does it make besides a shallow philosophical one?

Not if it hasn't happened in the real world yet. If I were inhabiting an AI body that was exploring a distant solar system, then there's no way the VR would be able to simulate that because it hasn't been discovered yet.

Yes, but your desiring that doesn't speed it up. At best you could commission a drone and hope it gets somewhere fun before you're dead of old age. Or they could simply note your interest and be sure to feed in any new data gathered about space and ensure that, while not perfect, your simulated exploration of space is as realistic as possible.

Right. "If". I know this AI is advanced but is it so advanced that it can diagnose it's own code or design more advanced code all without human intervention?

If it can simulate things so that you can literally manipulate blocks to get a computer back online, then it has obviously correctly diagnosed the problem and can remotely implement the fix. At that point it already doesn't need you.

Depends on what you do tech support for. If it's tech support for an internet company, sure. I work for a medical firm and our tech support often involves troubleshooting X-ray machines, digital X-ray tracing and measurements, and things like that. I don't think a touch-tone phone system can handle that.

Perhaps not, but a smart phone app that has access to a camera probably could. If you can do it remotely, your job could be replaced by a perhaps not very smart AI specialized for the task. We're not there yet for the more advanced stuff, but we could already replace a lot of jobs if we wanted to and yours isn't so special.

[Starglider]

As specified (fully accurate VR via neural implant but not transhuman AGI) it sounds like an excellent retirement plan; humans are still required to run civilisation but citizens older than 50 or so can and probably would have more fun be in full-time VR.

[Simon_Jester]

This technology would be a lot more desirable and interesting as a part-time thing. For example, it would be the logical endpoint of teleconferencing technology. It would

I would be happy to use this technology in a wide variety of ways... but in other ways, I would not. For instance, I actively prefer interacting with my current crop of friends on an AIM chat to, say, being in a virtual room with them... because that way I can have my interactions with them in a sidebar while still being able to do other things in between reading what they say and writing responses. I can 'unplug' and take a minute to get food, or skim a book, or hug my wife, or the like.

There are real advantages to being able to deliberately use non-immersive interfaces to store stuff I want to be able to engage with and disengage from at will. To reproduce all those advantages fully you'd basically need to stick me in a VR room that was a pure VR duplicate of my existing living environment... at which point really, why bother?

IRL, I work tech support. The best tool out our disposal is remote desktop, so we can fix the customer's computer ourselves without having to talk them through it. If that could be virtualized so that a computer with a bug in the code appeared to us as a Lego construct with a few colored bricks out of place, and to fix it we just needed to rearrange the bricks, that would be so much better than typing an arcane string of code in a monitor.

This is interesting. The idea that the VR interface technology could be used to simplify tasks seems plausible. The catch is that at some point, if the computers underlying the interface can figure out a virtualized remote desktop so all you have to do is rearrange a couple of Lego bricks... frankly, the computers can then do that themselves without your intervention, at which point paying you to do the job becomes superfluous.

If you signed up for a lifetime package, you could conceivably be tricked into thinking you'd left and returned to a productive life or have other techniques used to alleviate the desire to feel useful. It's even possible that this could be a side road into trans-humanism where you can be useful by controlling some form of drone as a form of work before slipping back into a fantasy land...

The idea that I might be methodically deceived about the basic terms and character of my existence is one of my (several) problems with the idea of signing up to 'live' in a virtual world.

...but increasingly we're already having to find make work to keep people employed. For example, we could likely do away with clothing stores by using something like the Kinect to take your measurements and display our selection on a 3d model of you, order the right size of clothing from an automated warehouse, and even deliver it by an automated delivery system. You could replace most fast food places with a robotic assembly line style burger cooking system and replace the staff with a few technicians and a manager to help customers interact with the machine.

The main untapped source of employment is that, at least in the US, we could be employing people to deal with other people to a far greater extent than we now do. We've created a society where, for example, daycare and teaching are a lot less labor-intensive than they could be, and we'd arguably get better results by making them more labor-intensive... but making the logistics of that consistent with the structure of our economy is problematic.

Yeah I can see artists, musicians, and designers working within VR most of the time. That kind of medium would be perfect for creativity. Also as I think about it, astronomers too. Being able to physically interact with a model of the Sun, or "walk" on the surface of another world in the footsteps of a probe would be a great boon to researchers.

The problem is that this is only really going to help if you already have all the information that you could learn that way. In other words, if I walk around on virtual Mars and pick up a rock, in order for my VR simulation to tell me what is underneath that rock, the computer had to know what was under the rock.

In which case, frankly, there isn't much benefit to sticking me in a VR rig, as opposed to just handing me a photograph of whatever the Mars rover found when it picked up the rock.

Likewise there's no scientific advantage to being able to swim around in a stellar photosphere in VR unless you know that what you see in the simulation corresponds to the reality... which requires you to already have most of the information by observation of reality, in which case the simulation is superfluous.

You'd see far more of scientists simply using the underlying computer technology to simulate ultra-complicated systems, and to try a huge number of variations on those systems, in order to observe how the simulations played out... without bothering to enter those simulations and experience them directly.

Because I remember sitting down in the chair and plugging myself in, perhaps?

It could literally trick you into thinking you had unplugged from it and gone back to the real world if that's what geniunely made you happy. Or you could do your same IT job remotely, though at this stage AGI is almost a certainty and your job probably already doesn't exist. Hence the government offering this program to keep people from being bored and causing trouble.

In that case I'd be out of my mind to sign up for the service in the first place- because people are prepared to literally commit fraud to convince me I've left it. In which case I will never have any assurance I've left the system and am no longer under the control of others.

And there's the joy of having to worry about something like this happening:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3060

Picture a society that is post scarcity and with robots and AI to fill all current jobs. Nobody needs to work anymore and things are starting to get uneasy as people realize that they're not needed to keep things running anymore. Does that change your opinion any?

I would still be uncomfortable with the idea that the underlying character of the universe I occupy is someone else's property, as opposed to being a neutral thing that is beyond anyone's control.

So in a world where you don't need to work and going on vacation is as easy as plugging into a machine and being there virtually with next best thing to perfect simulation, what's the difference between really going there and just plugging into the VR?

To people who care about this, the difference is precisely that you are really there, as opposed to simply experiencing the things you (think you) would experience if you had gone.

EDIT: I work tech support too, and honestly our job could already be most replaced by emailing customers a simple troubleshooting flow chart and letting them punch in the issue on a touch tone phone. Throw in a chat bot to trick people into thinking they had a person on the line and suddenly you can fire 90% of your staff.

Most people would be allergic to the flow chart. Of those who remain, the flow chart would get prohibitively difficult to make because diagnosing the problem is usually not done just by asking binary questions.

[salm]

The problem is that this is only really going to help if you already have all the information that you could learn that way. In other words, if I walk around on virtual Mars and pick up a rock, in order for my VR simulation to tell me what is underneath that rock, the computer had to know what was under the rock.

In which case, frankly, there isn't much benefit to sticking me in a VR rig, as opposed to just handing me a photograph of whatever the Mars rover found when it picked up the rock.

Likewise there's no scientific advantage to being able to swim around in a stellar photosphere in VR unless you know that what you see in the simulation corresponds to the reality... which requires you to already have most of the information by observation of reality, in which case the simulation is superfluous.

I don´t think that is true. VR and 3D models in gnereral can give you a better way of interfacing with the information you gather.
It is very usefull to create 3D models of certain things by scanning them with a 3d scanner and then examining these models on a screen or in a VR device. It is possible to see the object from different angles and perhaps even open up the model to see it´s interior. This offers a whole new set of point of views which might lead to new explanations.
This sort of thing is allready done. Archeologigal objects are 3D scanned or scanned by means of MRT. Caves and other things are 3d scanned for later examination. 3D models can be a lot more usefull than a simple photograph beause, oviously, you get the layer of depth while a photo allways remains flat.
In medicine MRTs have been used for ages.

So, while you obviously need the information stored in the computer somehow it makes it easier for humans to identify the relevant information. Computers can store the information but they can not decide if it is interesting.

[Borgholio]

The catch is that at some point, if the computers underlying the interface can figure out a virtualized remote desktop so all you have to do is rearrange a couple of Lego bricks... frankly, the computers can then do that themselves without your intervention, at which point paying you to do the job becomes superfluous.

At this point though, we're talking about a civilization-altering level of advanced AI that could probably make the human race entirely obsolete.

[Joun_Lord]

If the overseers of the program are willing to do whatever with your body, potentially make you an unwilling astronaut, build babies from your DNA without your permission, leave you plugged in permanently, and potentially see much of your body as waste and try to get rid of it, no I'd not sign up for it. Sure being in a simulation sounds for for awhile but no forever and certainly nowhere near fun enough for my body to be chopped for spare parts or fired off to some other planet. Hell I'd probably want to go to another planet to colonize and spending the trip in some simulator would certainly mean my body and dangly parts could probably be more easily preserved (not to mention me pretty much sleeping the whole trip would probably save on space usage and supplies) but I want it to be my choice. And I'd certainly never choose to be a brain in a jar.

I spend alot of time on computers so being in a simulation wouldn't be too bad but sometimes I like to be unplugged, sometimes I like to go out and stretch my man-boobs, take a hike and feel all those aches and pains of climbing a mountain. I get hurt, I get cut on branches or fall down or stub my toe booting some duffle bag filled with cast off meth supplies in pure white hot rage but thats part of the experience (though I wish the meth part wasn't, fuck you white trash).

I love technology too but at times I'm a bit luddite in my attitude towards increasing teching of our lives. Things like Facebook and Twitter share goddamn everything, from what you had for lunch, the last time you porked, what you stole, every goddamn thing. Thats far too much of yourself online. Plus things like cell phones stuck up everyones asses and computers and cameras in every thing, its nearly impossible to stay anonymous IRL or online, to be alone, to be left alone. Being plugged in a VR until the day you die with assholes real or computer constructed in the simulation bugging you all the time and asshole IRL probably playing dress-up and hide the pickle with your unconscious form, that sounds hellish.

Though there would be some good things if it was a temporary thing. Shopping would awesome. Rather then gazing longingly at some .jpeg of you want to buy, you cna try it. Try on clothing, swing that bat or fantasy katana that seems designed to injure you. Put on hands on that computer or video game system to get the feel of it.

Some jobs would be easier online. I could see virtual house shopping being a big thing. Rather then driving out to the house you want to buy the realtor could have a VR system in the house to project your avatar into it to see it before you consider moving your meatbag into it.

Computer repair might be easier though not LEGO bricks easy. You still have to solve the problem yourself but you can do it mostly in VR. Software could be solved by making a literal virtual desktop of the customers computer to figure out the problems and cyber Google the solutions. Hardware problems could be worked on by a 3D scan of the customer computer. You can work on it in the VR and figure out what component is shit (still have to poke into the computers guts but now in cyberspace), then unplug and simply do the the repairs quickly without a lengthy stay at the customers place or their computer staying at your place too long.

Taking a trip, some people might be okay with seeing a virtual Parthenon or Pyramids. Certainly would be okay seeing places one cannot normally go like mars or inside a volcano, riding a asteroid, on see the Battle of Gettysburg. Encouraging people to take virtual trips rather then real ones might be a good way to save on resources that would otherwise be expended. Same with virtual visitations, don't drive or fly halfway across the country to see the in-laws when you can just see them in the series of tubes or say there is a solar flare and don't at all.

VR should enhance real life, not replace it.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that this is only really going to help if you already have all the information that you could learn that way. In other words, if I walk around on virtual Mars and pick up a rock, in order for my VR simulation to tell me what is underneath that rock, the computer had to know what was under the rock.

In which case, frankly, there isn't much benefit to sticking me in a VR rig, as opposed to just handing me a photograph of whatever the Mars rover found when it picked up the rock.

Likewise there's no scientific advantage to being able to swim around in a stellar photosphere in VR unless you know that what you see in the simulation corresponds to the reality... which requires you to already have most of the information by observation of reality, in which case the simulation is superfluous.

I don´t think that is true. VR and 3D models in gnereral can give you a better way of interfacing with the information you gather.

It is very usefull to create 3D models of certain things by scanning them with a 3d scanner and then examining these models on a screen or in a VR device. It is possible to see the object from different angles and perhaps even open up the model to see it´s interior. This offers a whole new set of point of views which might lead to new explanations.

This sort of thing is allready done. Archeologigal objects are 3D scanned or scanned by means of MRT. Caves and other things are 3d scanned for later examination. 3D models can be a lot more usefull than a simple photograph beause, oviously, you get the layer of depth while a photo allways remains flat.

In medicine MRTs have been used for ages.

So, while you obviously need the information stored in the computer somehow it makes it easier for humans to identify the relevant information. Computers can store the information but they can not decide if it is interesting.

Well, my key point here is simply that how you interface with the archived information is less important than actually having the information. There are other ways of examining a Martian landscape than by immersing yourself in VR and virtually 'walking' around it. The VR approach is useful but not essential, and in some cases might actually be inferior to other methods for all I know.

What is critical is that you actually gather the information first- that before you ask the computer "what is under that rock," the computer must actually know what is under that rock, or have a machine in position to pick up the rock and find out (look forward to several minutes' lag in your virtual reality while it does so and radios the result back from Mars...)

This requires a great deal more than just the VR technology.

The catch is that at some point, if the computers underlying the interface can figure out a virtualized remote desktop so all you have to do is rearrange a couple of Lego bricks... frankly, the computers can then do that themselves without your intervention, at which point paying you to do the job becomes superfluous.

At this point though, we're talking about a civilization-altering level of advanced AI that could probably make the human race entirely obsolete.

We seem to wobble in and out of saying so, but... kinda, yeah.

The problem is that any technology advanced enough to make a job trivially easy will also make it easy to mechanize.

[Borgholio]

What is critical is that you actually gather the information first- that before you ask the computer "what is under that rock," the computer must actually know what is under that rock, or have a machine in position to pick up the rock and find out (look forward to several minutes' lag in your virtual reality while it does so and radios the result back from Mars...)

This requires a great deal more than just the VR technology.

How much of a step would it be to having a human consciousness fully transferred into the body of a rover to conduct the investigation first-hand?

[salm]

Well, my key point here is simply that how you interface with the archived information is less important than actually having the information. There are other ways of examining a Martian landscape than by immersing yourself in VR and virtually 'walking' around it. The VR approach is useful but not essential, and in some cases might actually be inferior to other methods for all I know.

What is critical is that you actually gather the information first- that before you ask the computer "what is under that rock," the computer must actually know what is under that rock, or have a machine in position to pick up the rock and find out (look forward to several minutes' lag in your virtual reality while it does so and radios the result back from Mars...)

This requires a great deal more than just the VR technology.

Well, VR isn´t usefull for gathering information. Just like photographs aren´t very usefull for gathering information. You need somebody or something going out there and actually take the photos or do the 3D scanning. If you don´t have any way to collect the info you obviously won´t have the information.

But having the information alone isn´t useful, either. If you can not interface the information having it is completely useless for example.
Obviously there is no perfect interface for everything and looking at an image might be more useful than VR in a lot of cases. Just like VR or sound or a written text might be more useful than photos in other cases.

Imagine interfacing an ancient vase with a sonar. You could then hear the object, kind of like a sonar on a ship. That would be pretty useless compared to seeing a photo. That means that the interface is immensly important. It directly determins if we can use the information at all and determins how quickly and efficiently we can access the information. Sure, it would be possible to describe a vase with the sonar scanner but it would take large amounts training and time for a person to get something usefull out of it. It can be done. There´s some color blind russian dude who can hear colors with an array of sensors and a headset but for most people that is increadibly impractical.
The same goes for a cave. You can photograph each and every spot of a cave system but for somebody who has never been there it is immensly difficult to assess the dimensions and shape of the cave system from a stack of photographs. It is increadibly easy on the other hand to asses the dimensons and shape in VR because it is very similar to being there personally. It is probably even better than being there because you can zoom out and look at the whole cave system from above similar to a map.

<edit>I mean, that is what encryption is about. Other people can have the information but if they don´t know how to interface it, it is completely useless to them unless they spend resources on decrypting it.</edit>

[Simon_Jester]

Well, what I am in turn getting at is that often, the most useful modes for displaying the information we really want about a physical area or system bear little resemblance to what we would see if we were standing there. I might be more interested in the moisture content of the rock combined with the topography, and find anything more detailed than a false-color mapping overlaid on a topo map to be a distraction rather than a help.

So it's a two-way street; the VR technology is more useful as a generalized interfacing device that can project arbitrary images and data processing and do simulations of arbitrary systems. This is basically just a logical extension of what scientists already use computers for (crunching huge data sets, modeling complex systems, and creating graphics to efficiently display information). The ability to put on VR headsets and so on and 'walk into' the graphic interface will sometimes be desirable, and sometimes irrelevant, but it really represents an incremental advance over the existing art in most fields.

[Starglider]

At this point though, we're talking about a civilization-altering level of advanced AI that could probably make the human race entirely obsolete.

Tech support is too hard for current AI, but it is orders of magnitude easier (for a computer) than designing systems from scratch. So not necessarily.

[madd0ct0r]

Well, my key point here is simply that how you interface with the archived information is less important than actually having the information. There are other ways of examining a Martian landscape than by immersing yourself in VR and virtually 'walking' around it. The VR approach is useful but not essential, and in some cases might actually be inferior to other methods for all I know.

What is critical is that you actually gather the information first- that before you ask the computer "what is under that rock," the computer must actually know what is under that rock, or have a machine in position to pick up the rock and find out (look forward to several minutes' lag in your virtual reality while it does so and radios the result back from Mars...)

This requires a great deal more than just the VR technology.

Well, VR isn´t usefull for gathering information. Just like photographs aren´t very usefull for gathering information. You need somebody or something going out there and actually take the photos or do the 3D scanning. If you don´t have any way to collect the info you obviously won´t have the information.

But having the information alone isn´t useful, either. If you can not interface the information having it is completely useless for example.
Obviously there is no perfect interface for everything and looking at an image might be more useful than VR in a lot of cases. Just like VR or sound or a written text might be more useful than photos in other cases.

Imagine interfacing an ancient vase with a sonar. You could then hear the object, kind of like a sonar on a ship. That would be pretty useless compared to seeing a photo. That means that the interface is immensly important. It directly determins if we can use the information at all and determins how quickly and efficiently we can access the information. Sure, it would be possible to describe a vase with the sonar scanner but it would take large amounts training and time for a person to get something usefull out of it. It can be done. There´s some color blind russian dude who can hear colors with an array of sensors and a headset but for most people that is increadibly impractical.
The same goes for a cave. You can photograph each and every spot of a cave system but for somebody who has never been there it is immensly difficult to assess the dimensions and shape of the cave system from a stack of photographs. It is increadibly easy on the other hand to asses the dimensons and shape in VR because it is very similar to being there personally. It is probably even better than being there because you can zoom out and look at the whole cave system from above similar to a map.

<edit>I mean, that is what encryption is about. Other people can have the information but if they don´t know how to interface it, it is completely useless to them unless they spend resources on decrypting it.</edit>

we're nearly at the point you describe for structural inspections. full scans of railway stations overlaid with video imagery are pretty standard here now, and that's just as a faster way to produce 2d drawings.

[Darmalus]

With the ability to communicate with people outside VR land, I'd probably never come out, just pilot a (rented?) robot body around to play with the meat-people at in-person events.

My greatest concern would be accidentally giving myself brain-damage by constantly stuffing myself into full-sensory virtual bodies I wasn't born with.