The ultimate problem is that artificial worlds are going to be designed more alluring as time goes on, and our evolutionarily trained brains will get us sucked in like moths to a flame.
Okay, here we go.
When we sleep, we have these things called “dreams”. The weird thing about them is that usually while we’re putting on this show in our minds, there’s nobody watching. If we’re woken up, or sleeping badly, or for some other reason we’re not deeply asleep, then we get to sit in the theater box and watch the show. However, the vast bulk of dream content gets played out with no one watching.
Next paragraph is my theory of dream purpose. For where we’re going, it doesn’t matter if you agree or not. I suggest just follow along and don’t waste mental space carting along whatever dubious feelings you may have.
Life can happen fast sometimes, and because of that, we don’t have time to properly digest the implications of what-the-heck just happened. Normal events, we can file away as they happen, but surprising events, can take time to unpack. We need to figure out and digest the implications of stuff that happens to us, because we need to know how best to deal with things that may happen to us in the future.
In the simplest terms, dreaming is the way we figure out the relevance of past events so we’ll know how to file them away to prepare ourselves for the future. It’s true we may dream of scary dinosaurs, which may seem irrelevant to the future, but the real dream content isn’t the story on stage, but the emotional processing that can happen in all kinds of strange disguises. Maybe you were scared by a big bad boss. The point is the emotions we felt—and possibly processed—during the dinosaur dream.
While we’re awake, we also have dreams, reveries and various fantasies that float through our minds. Sometimes, we even invoke a little bit of what’s ludicrously called “executive” control, and conjure up various alternate scenarios to think through and try to figure out what we should do in any particular set of circumstances. In fact, this is what we normally think the brain does.
Here’s a slight diversion about my dog Buck. I’ve tried to figure out what’s going on inside his mind while he’s up and active. As far as I can tell it’s about 90% perceptual. He’s smelling something tasty, or hearing a noise he may have to attend to, or watching my eyes to see what I’m going to do next.
Now here’s the key point, just as his mental content is 90% perceptual, so our human mental content is 90% involved in the creation of artificial realities (dreaming, planning, contemplating, anticipating, whatever else you may want to call the show we conjure up in our minds).
Now we get to “evolution” and whatever that may mean. It doesn’t matter whether your explanation is Darwinian, religious, Lamarckian or any other way of explaining how humans got to take over the planet. The fact is that way back when, there were just these mini-organisms floating in water, and if they bumped into each other, one of them (in essence) ate the other. It was a pretty dangerous world, until one of the little critters learned how to avoid being eaten by developing the ability to sense danger from a distance by tasting or smelling the bad guy. Using only a few stray molecules the good guy could sense danger and hopefully get far enough away to avoid being eaten. The bad guy, could of course also use a few stray molecules to track down the supper he wanted.
Life went on and got more complicated. After a while, some clever little critter evolved the ability to hear his foe, and thus was able to detect danger from further away. After that, a tiny genius figured out how to grow a visual system and see an enemy from yet further away. We’ve been moving toward more and more remote exploration of the environment because it’s a heck of a lot safer.
And that’s how come we’ve ended up as Homo Virtual Reality.
Sadly, that’s the root of our impending demise. AI is coming faster than anybody knows. But the real long-term danger isn’t unemployment or robots killing us. The ultimate problem is that artificial worlds are going to be designed more alluring as time goes on, and our evolutionarily trained brains will get us sucked in like moths to a flame.
Doom isn’t coming because of the technology we’re making, but because of the technology we’re made out of.
It’s going to boil down to the following question. What would you do if you didn’t have to work, and an immersive virtual world would offer you a better life than the one out here? Why wouldn’t you, eventually, let go, and slide down into an adventurous, socially-packed and fascinating life? Do you crave love? Wow, you’re going to get it, and it’s going to keep you.
There’s a very slim difference between the artificial reality lots of people currently inhabit and the artificial reality the future is designing for us. For instance, the internet screen is 100% virtual experience. It’s nothing but pixels. As far as I can see evolution has played its hand and has nowhere else to go. I don’t see any escape from an eventual future composed of our own unique marvelous virtual reality (unless everything breaks down, and I’m not sure that would be better).
If we are doomed, it’ll be a doom we’re going to select with our own individual choices. Pass me one of those delicious Blue Pills. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! Hasta la vista baby.
Tom Paskal is an award winning journalist, author and screenwriter.