Thanks for the info bit on Theodore John Kaczynski. I didn’t know about him till now. Read up on wikipedia about him.

I feel that technology is advancing much more quickly than our natures are. Which is why sometime we make the worst use of technology instead of the best.

We’re going to enter a phase where we will develop technologies that our nature’s are not ready to handle, and will make a pig’s breakfast out of everything.

Something like the Monkey King in Buddhism who got out of control.

Its amazing that some of the people who others think a certifiably insane and off theri rocker, can have incredible grasp on future outcomes.

Our world will always adapt, but the fears expressed here and unfortunatley by Kaczynski are well worth noting and may actually be very true.

It is a hard “pill” to swallow. But regardless of red or blue, the fundamental strength of virtual existences will impact us tremendously. Its our job to stay ahead of technology implications in real world scenarios, and make decisions and adjustments which deter such outcomes

And why wouldn’t a VR addiction ruin our health or finances either? In your scenario in the original blog, you talk about people spending their money on buying online time, but there is no mention of how income is made in the first place. Is everyone performing some type of virtual job to earn money? How do they pay rent? Pay for the feeding tube? Pay for their equipment? I won’t disagree that the economy will change, perhaps to one being based on predominantly virtual good sales, but there are still real world commodities.

Unless we are assuming some Utopian society where a government just gives us all of these things for free, I do not see how an economy would be destroyed. Where is the government getting its money from? Is the virtual world creating real food? Real energy? Building homes? Assuming some government agency is going to do this all for us, where is it getting the money to do it?

In your scenario, people would simply stop having real relationships because they could just have the perfect relationship with a robot. Well, if that happened, there would be no new children. And say people do have kids, well, the virtual world isn’t going to raise a baby.

What about personal health? If we are all immobile our muscles will atrophy, our hearts will weaken, and our lives will be quite short as a result. Or will we have solved all medical problems before then? You can’t get real drugs to deal with ailments out of a computer.

You also alluded to the answer in stopping any doomsday scenario from happening – government regulation. They have stepped in saying some drugs are bad. Gambling is practically illegal in the US. What makes you think an agency won’t step in to prevent anything drastic from happening?

I think there is a valid discussion to be had on the real world economic impact of virtual goods, but claims of a destroyed economy because we will live in a virtual bubble are beyond speculative. Anyway, you are entitled to your opinion on this matter, but I think your could use more evidence and fact, and less gross speculation.

Thank you for your comments!

Though you are right about the quality of addiction of Virtual reality vis a vis drugs, there are some fundamental differences.

First of all, we avoid drugs not because we simply choose to, but because they ruin our health, and ultimately ruin us financially too by reducing our capacity to work and the high cost of drugs. In addition, the government heavily restricts these substances.

Many people don’t try video games because that is not their idea of a good time. However, in the virtual work like the Matrix, you can do whatever you want.

Most people who work with computers are already addicted to the Internet to some extent. This is because there is something for everyone, isn’t expensive, and doesn’t inherently ruin your health. The same is true for the virtual world which will just be an extension of the Internet.

Your point about the infrastructure necessary to maintain the system is well taken, and the pervasiveness of AI is exactly what I’m talking about and have already discussed in my earlier article: http://www.amateureconomists.com/blogs/2008/08/27/will-robots-destroy-our-economic-system/

If that is too much of a stretch of the imagination, we can come up with something innovative like each person has to get up and perform compulsory manual interventions (if any) for say one week in their lives. But this may or may not be necessary.

Thanks for reading this article. I’ve had a lot of fun writing and discussing it!

Bhagwad Jal Park

Regardless of the myopic view in this blog, let us assume that we do create a brain-computer interface vis-a-vis The Matrix. Such a world will require power to keep it going and hardware to build more systems. That means, at a minimum, power and manufacturing plants, and thus real world jobs. Now, maybe these can all be controlled from the virtual world, but even if that is the case, some human agent will have to break from his hedonism in order to do a job, even a virtual one. Unless you think we will all be living and playing with AI agents 24/7, there will be human contact in this world, even if it is virtual.

Furthermore, I think you have discounted the human desire for physical contact and the ability of a person to know that they are in a virtual world. The premise in The Matrix was that the world worked because no one knew they were in a virtual world. Those people that discovered they were in a virtual world needed to get out of it. If you knowingly go into the virtual world, then at any time you can interject your conscious mind into the virtual events to remind yourself of the real world.

I have to admit I was expecting more out of this article than a sensationalism. I thought I was going to read an actual discussion of how an economy would die. Instead, we have fear mongering regarding a technology that is a minimum of two human generations away from being developed.