Forever Peace: sci-fi written by a Vietnam War veteran.
US Military uses robots for fighting that include mind-to-mind communication.. but bans links longer than N Days. After N days, a human with such an immediate connection to another becomes irrevocably pacifist.
That's great SciFi but maybe don't do the spoiler thing and edit your comment? The main side effect of mind-to-mind communication doesn't get revealed until the end of the story.
> In the Stanford lab, researchers have found even a single experience can affect people. In one test, researchers found that test subjects who had just cut down a virtual tree used fewer paper towels when cleaning up a spill after the experience than subjects who hadn’t cut down a tree.
It's testing whether the virtual reality experience can 'prime' people for a behavior change. It was intentional priming and I don't see an inherent flaw there. The experiment does sound weak though. How reliable is the control on the amount of spilled, how accidental it seemed, and the timing for each group who had different events preceding the spill? Also, what does the behavioral difference matter if they do not carry that behavior beyond the single experiment or if the ones exhibiting that behavior were already more paper towel conscious without the VR. I find the article really weak because of a lack of substantial examples, and the examples given lack detail.
I've heard that professor speak in EE380 at Stanford. The VR lab at Stanford isn't in the CS department; it belongs to the "communications" (marketing, PR) department. They have some scary results:
They have a VR simulation of swimming with dolphins. They let little kids try it. Then a few months later, they ask the kids about their experience of swimming with dolphins. A sizable fraction think it really happened, and add details as if it were real. It's possible to use VR to implant false memories.
They have the capability of mapping one face onto the video image of another person, and can construct, using morphing software, combinations of two faces. They've discovered that, if they construct a face which is weighted 1/3 or so of the subject's face and 2/3 of some politician's face, and play a campaign speech, people still recognize the politician but agree with them much more. Coming soon to an ad near you.
I was in Jeremy's lab as an undergrad and master's student. There was a team of student RA's which was from the communications department and a team of student programmers who were CS, EE and Symbolic Systems. Many of the grad students were also in technical fields.
Probably the scariest stuff, phenomenologically to me at least, is the gaze studies. Human gaze can be manipulated in VR to create very scary perceptions, avatars and agents can be made to seem as if they are staring at you unblinkingly and following your gaze whereever you are going, etc etc. Isopraxis, which is important to persuasion, can be done trivially and perfectly (that is, noisily), and social space manipulated also trivially.
I don't think it's usually part of the debate, but IMO it actually makes a lot of sense to justify ad-blocking as a mental-security measure, especially as more and more advertisers are deliberately setting out to try to hack your brain in a way that does not involve your conscious mind.
False memories are fairly easy to plant in many people. It's possible to plant them just by repeatedly asking someone about something that didn't happen:
> “Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire in the UK.
> “All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques.”
It's something commonly done accidentally by parents, where a parent will insist a child's version of events is incorrect because the parent remembers it differently, until the child's memory is replaced with the parent's narrative.
Side-note: people don't tend to realize that this is what the antagonist in the Star Trek TNG episode "Chain of Command" is trying to accomplish. He's not trying to make Picard "submit" by saying something he doesn't believe; he's trying to make Picard really, actually believe that there are five lights. (And in the end—despite Picard's insistence otherwise—he does.)
>Abstract: Social science research demonstrates that people are drawn to others perceived as similar. We extend this finding to political candi- dates by comparing the relative effects of candidate familiarity as well as partisan, issue, gender, and facial similarity on voters’ evaluations of candidates. In Experiment 1, during the week of the 2006 Florida gubernatorial race, a national representative sample of voters viewed images of two unfamiliar candidates (Crist and Davis) morphed with either themselves or other voters. Results demonstrated a strong prefer- ence for facially similar candidates, despite no conscious awareness of the similarity manipulation. In Experiment 2, one week before the 2004 presidential election, a national representative sample of voters evaluated familiar candidates (Bush and Kerry). Strong partisans were unmoved by the facial similarity manipulation, but weak partisans and independents preferred the candidate with whom their own face had been morphed over the candidate morphed with another voter. In Experiment 3, we compared the effects of policy similarity and facial similarity using a set of prospec- tive 2008 presidential candidates. Even though the effects of party and policy similarity dominated, facial similarity proved a significant cue for unfamiliar candidates. Thus, the evidence across the three studies sug- gests that even in high-profile elections, voters prefer candidates high in facial similarity, but most strongly with unfamiliar candidates.
>...the technology could affect users’ outlook and viewpoints more than other once-new technologies — such as televisions, the Internet or mobile phones — because it creates more lifelike experiences and often makes users active, rather than passive, participants.
Hasn't this exact same thing been claimed about videogames for the last twenty years or so, by people who want to regulate game content, with no conclusive evidence?
Wow, this VR simulation looks and feels EXACTLY like I'm sitting still in a chair, in an air conditioned room, with two pounds of earmuffs and safety goggles strapped onto my face!
Wait, what's that smell? It smells like stale coffee that someone brewed only just a few hours ago...
The quality of being realistic in a mediated environment is called telepresence, or presence. There's a journal for it. It's a small journal, although pretty old for a CS journal (not at all old for a social science journal) so I read an appreciable piece of the thing for an aborted attempt at my master's thesis (my actual thing was way more formal).
They've thought of all the stuff you just thought of. Even smells, in an Iraq War PTSD study or five (because they only have to simulate a few smells), and in some failed commercial products.
The head-mounted displays began with the "Sword of Damocles", which was named that because it weighed 150 pounds and was dangled over your head and rendered a princely 100 polys/sec. So everything will get better, don't worry.
People have a good reason to be cynical. At the early horizon of the Internet, people believed utopia was right around the corner. What they found was more income inequality while the biggest payouts in Silicon Valley went to people sucking up more of our information to sell us more ads.
So yes, we certainly can do amazing things, but more often than not, someone in the boardroom will eventually ask: "where's the profit?"
Just think of Facebook's Open Basics. They could afford to provide the extreme poor with the full internet, but they chose not to, since using Facebook at least would help the company collect more data and sell more ads. That was a deliberate choice.
> So yes, we certainly can do amazing things, but more often than not, someone in the boardroom will eventually ask: "where's the profit?"
That's because these entities are businesses, not charities. Their primary purpose is to generate profit, and the board is there to ensure that they do that. To expect a business to act like a charity is not reasonable.
At the early horizon of the Internet, people believed utopia was right around the corner.
Here's the thing. What one generation imagined as "Utopia" keeps on happening in limited contexts. But by the time it becomes reality, the conception of "Utopia" has changed. It's a moving target much in the same way hard AI is a moving target.
Today, I live in a world where I not only have to worry about getting enough to eat, I even have to worry about getting too many calories. In my society, poor people worry about that more! I don't have to worry about physical safety. I don't worry about disease. I have access to almost any information I want, including entertainments that even kings and queens could never have imagined.
Pick some level of baseline security for some 1st world industrialized nation. If you described that to Sir Thomas More or John Stuart Mill, and told them how many millions have it, they'd think you were talking a pipe dream.
We are all the descendants of those who happened to embrace and succeed along with technological change. That doesn't mean that we and our children will benefit from the next wave.
You forgot video games, which had the exact same reaction. People were afraid that "murder simulators" would ruin our morality. Expect that to be paraded around again, with a teensy bit more credibility.
Of course, cynicism is good for the tech. It's a way of making sure we know what we're doing.
Yeah, I mean if videogames affected people we would be hanging out in neon lit rooms listening to techno music and chomping pills by now thanks to Pac Man.
People were afraid that "murder simulators" would ruin our morality.
From what I've seen, it's not the "murder simulation" that's the most significant. It's the spending of so much time within world-like environments where an amoral stance is consistently rewarded.
I've known people who have formed their moral framework almost exclusively from their experience within such environments. I've even known people in positions of power, who exercise power accordingly.
Games and VR environments are simply media. Media does have an effect on how we see the world, but it's almost never in the simplistic way that alarmists come up with. Rather, it's subtler, but it is certain to be there.
I've known people who have formed their moral framework almost exclusively from their experience within such environments. I've even known people in positions of power, who exercise power accordingly.
This is a problem of separating fantasy and reality. If one understands that, say, Doom is a fantasy that does not work in the same way as the real world, then you won't have trouble realizing that you can't solve your problems with a well-timed shotgun blast while running at 90 miles per hour.
On the other hand, if you don't stop and think about how different Doom is from the world, then you get headlines about how Doom caused two teens to shoot up a school. Which, incidentally, is a bad example--the two teens you're probably thinking of were also neo-nazis, so it's far more likely that they played Doom obsessively because they wanted to kill people, and far less likely that Doom drove them to kill.
You're totally missing the point. This guy ran an organization like he ran online gaming groups. People were treated as disposable. Environment was toxic. All that mattered was a simplistic and materialistic notion of "winning." Nothing was ever physically mangled outside of a CNC machine.
Why do we fear technological advancement?
Tools and technology are neither good or bad, it is what we humans do with these tools that create our reality.
There's your answer. We fear what other humans will do with these tools.
I played VRLympix' Ski Jump game[1] recently, which isn't at all photorealistic but the vision and motion control is spot on.
Looking over the virtual edge of the ramp was a bit discombobulating but bearable. However, when I got up to speed and was approaching the jump, my lizard brain nearly panicked at the prospect of a potentially death-dealing jump/fall/crash, even though my higher brain knew that I was standing safely on a solid, flat floor. My brain seemed to trust the visual reference points at least as much, if not more than my inner ear and I had to lift the headset to stave off the feeling that I was going to fall over.
I never got how that was supposed to be so much worse than someone in ratty clothes in a ratty apartment reading books. Do people think any new technology is automatically The Matrix?
What's missing is material feeling, like you see a switch, you see your hand touching the switch and you feel something.
Could that be done using e.g. a metallic powder held in an oscillating magnetic field? If so, then shouldn't it also be possible to coat the particles with plastic, wood etc for a more realistic feel?
Awesome, kind of looks like a miniature holodeck. But I think with this technology it wouldn't be possible to convey the behavior of materials (e.g. metal feels cold to the touch, wood not)...
The alternative would of course be direct neural manipulation a la Matrix but I highly doubt that research in this direction will happen due to ethical concerns...
> "But I think with this technology it wouldn't be possible to convey the behavior of materials (e.g. metal feels cold to the touch, wood not)..."
Perhaps, though consider what makes metal cold to the touch, is it not just due to the way our brains interpret a certain set of electrical impulses received by our skin?
If that's the case, perhaps we could combine the haptic holograms with sensory gloves, e.g. the holograms provide the physical resistance of the virtual item, and the gloves mimic the electrical signals that convey the other physical properties of the item.
We're still talking about VR right? In the scenario I thought we were discussing the haptic hologram stuff would just be for simulating touch, you wouldn't be looking at it (though it could be great as a visual medium in other scenarios). As for movement, couldn't we use something like a Virtuix Omni to allow someone to move through the forest...
Anecdotally, I experienced mild depersonalization in 2014 after too many sessions in the DK2. (Other life stresses were also a factor though.) Very disorienting at the time.
But I know what that dissociation feels like now and can manage it, so I'm looking forward to pushing boundaries with CV1!
Summary: VR will change morality. The change won't be the end of the world. Most likely, some changes will be highly disturbing.
I enjoy computer games. I played FTL until I had all the ships and all of the achievements, so perhaps I qualify as a gamer. I volunteer at a videogame museum. I have many friends who are avid gamers. That said, I seem to keep on meeting young people have a moral system along the lines of, "If the laws of physics and the laws of the government where I reside allow it, I can do it, and it's moral."
The world isn't going to end, and it won't result in an instant Mad Max post-apocalyptic world, but technological changes do have an effect on morality. Pre 1400, insisting that people be on time to the minute, or even to 15-20 minutes would have been considered quite crazy. Birth control had a tremendous effect on what society considers moral. When music had to be distributed as manufactured objects, the technology brought about one set of moral standards with regards to the selling/owning/distributing of music. Now that all media exist as bits, we are now seeing a different set of moral standards come into being. (One of which is, "Pics or it didn't happen.")
So VR is clearly going to influence what society considers "moral" -- probably in ways we can't easily forsee. Many of alive today -- even typical members of the HN community -- are going to find some of these changes quite disturbing.
> That said, I seem to keep on meeting young people have a moral system along the lines of, "If the laws of physics and the laws of the government where I reside allow it, I can do it, and it's moral."
How is it anything new?
> When music had to be distributed as manufactured objects, the technology brought about one set of moral standards with regards to the selling/owning/distributing of music.
Are you referring to copyright? I believe these changes happened earlier, when printed scores started to sell big numbers.
There were always contexts where people could think, "Here's what people think is proper, but what can we actually do?" However, virtual spaces of the early 21st century are particular in the degree to which social/nonverbal cues are almost nonexistent or completely gone, and where consequences are so very skewed towards an amoral stance of, "What can we get away with?"
New VR technologies may well be a reversal of these conditions.
So, it's nothing completely new at the most simplistic level. But if you look more closely, it's the unintended consequences arising out of the details that are the most interesting and significant.
Are you referring to copyright? I believe these changes happened earlier, when printed scores started to sell big numbers.
Printed scores are manufactured objects. If you go back even farther, to when you had to have your own instrument and enough talent to learn music quickly by ear, you'll find a set of moral standards around the "ownership" of music similar to the one developing from today's environment of easy digital copying.
> However, virtual spaces of the early 21st century are particular in the degree to which social/nonverbal cues are almost nonexistent or completely gone, and where consequences are so very skewed towards an amoral stance of, "What can we get away with?"
Can you provide an illustration of what exactly do you mean here?
> "If the laws of physics and the laws of the government where I reside allow it, I can do it, and it's moral."
Personally, I think that sounds right and proper, and it's reality that's the "broken" thing.
Living in reality means accepting that there are things that are "wrong" but where there's no sensible enforcement mechanism: "externalities", when it's the commons we're screwing over, or just "social ills" (e.g. hate speech) when it's a specific target.
Living in a consensual massively-multiplayer VR space, on the other hand, the rules of the space can be changed to suit its citizens: morality can be fully enforced, such that of course everything that's possible is good—because everything that's not good is impossible.
And I do mean consensual spaces, here—the plural is important; the most important thing such spaces give us is the ability to opt in or out of them, such that you can find one that fits your particular value system. You might personally enjoy a space with relatively few rules—a VR space equivalent to a "PvP server." Or you might enjoy a space with incredibly constricted rules, allowing almost no expression within their bounds, as in the game Journey. Or—and this is the thing we can't get from regular old reality given any amount of utopian politics—you can visit both, at different times of day, or even "multi-boxing" between the two in a weird VR sense we haven't invented yet.
Really, I'm just rehashing the content of these two essays:
Living in a consensual massively-multiplayer VR space, on the other hand, the rules of the space can be changed to suit its citizens: morality can be fully enforced
Are there any massively-multiplayer online spaces which are completely without griefers, trolls, or immorality of any sort? Which ones? (And try not to arrive at a non-empty set by redefining all complaints conveniently as "whining.")
It's pretty easy to avoid griefers/trolls when the community is closed or invite-only, or puts even the tiniest monetary barrier to entry. In the non-VR case, Metafilter and SomethingAwful do well. "Private servers" for most MMOs also do well, though they're rarely massively-multiplayer themselves.
But you're right that the concept of making literally any kind of social more into a "law of physics" of a VR space is basically impossible with current technology. We'd need somewhat-better AI (though not order-of-magnitude better) to recognize+classify e.g. speech and body-language that "break the rules" of a place, and refuse to transmit those to others.
And for one particular exception, I don't think any VR world could (or should) allow for enforcement regarding social norms of internal states—i.e. "thoughtcrime." Even if we figured out a way—even if it was inherent to the VR equipment to read your mind to do its job—thoughts are "yours", rather than being something one of your "faces" (i.e. the part of you people know as you in that space, which could itself have multiple avatar-characters) has on its own. Which further means that you can't really establish social norms about what you do outside of that VR space, using one of your other "faces." The "meta-norm" necessary there would be that a "face" is the root of identity, and so one "face" cannot be blamed for the actions of another, even if they have the same person behind them. (This presumes that there's still person-based authentication between the user and any VR space they interact with, and that there's one exactly one persistent "face" per {user, space} pair, that cannot be discarded and recreated.)
And for one particular exception, I don't think any VR world could (or should) allow for enforcement regarding social norms of internal states—i.e. "thoughtcrime."
Gene manipulation, advanced AI, advanced immersive VR, expanding population, a rush to control essential assets (water, food, power), internet with speeds that makes measuring the speed unnecessary, future Google Glass, quantum computing, further class inequality, further technological advancement with no effect on reducing the work day.
I for one welcome our Ghost in the Shell/Matrix/Blade Runner future.
54 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadForever Peace: sci-fi written by a Vietnam War veteran.
US Military uses robots for fighting that include mind-to-mind communication.. but bans links longer than N Days. After N days, a human with such an immediate connection to another becomes irrevocably pacifist.
Oh great. More priming studies.
They have a VR simulation of swimming with dolphins. They let little kids try it. Then a few months later, they ask the kids about their experience of swimming with dolphins. A sizable fraction think it really happened, and add details as if it were real. It's possible to use VR to implant false memories.
They have the capability of mapping one face onto the video image of another person, and can construct, using morphing software, combinations of two faces. They've discovered that, if they construct a face which is weighted 1/3 or so of the subject's face and 2/3 of some politician's face, and play a campaign speech, people still recognize the politician but agree with them much more. Coming soon to an ad near you.
[1] https://vhil.stanford.edu
Probably the scariest stuff, phenomenologically to me at least, is the gaze studies. Human gaze can be manipulated in VR to create very scary perceptions, avatars and agents can be made to seem as if they are staring at you unblinkingly and following your gaze whereever you are going, etc etc. Isopraxis, which is important to persuasion, can be done trivially and perfectly (that is, noisily), and social space manipulated also trivially.
What's even scarier is that it's possible to use traditional advertising to implant false memories.
http://www.wired.com/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/
Prove to me that is not happening to you this moment. ;)
https://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
Also this:
> “Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire in the UK.
> “All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques.”
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/...
It's something commonly done accidentally by parents, where a parent will insist a child's version of events is incorrect because the parent remembers it differently, until the child's memory is replaced with the parent's narrative.
Side-note: people don't tend to realize that this is what the antagonist in the Star Trek TNG episode "Chain of Command" is trying to accomplish. He's not trying to make Picard "submit" by saying something he doesn't believe; he's trying to make Picard really, actually believe that there are five lights. (And in the end—despite Picard's insistence otherwise—he does.)
>Abstract: Social science research demonstrates that people are drawn to others perceived as similar. We extend this finding to political candi- dates by comparing the relative effects of candidate familiarity as well as partisan, issue, gender, and facial similarity on voters’ evaluations of candidates. In Experiment 1, during the week of the 2006 Florida gubernatorial race, a national representative sample of voters viewed images of two unfamiliar candidates (Crist and Davis) morphed with either themselves or other voters. Results demonstrated a strong prefer- ence for facially similar candidates, despite no conscious awareness of the similarity manipulation. In Experiment 2, one week before the 2004 presidential election, a national representative sample of voters evaluated familiar candidates (Bush and Kerry). Strong partisans were unmoved by the facial similarity manipulation, but weak partisans and independents preferred the candidate with whom their own face had been morphed over the candidate morphed with another voter. In Experiment 3, we compared the effects of policy similarity and facial similarity using a set of prospec- tive 2008 presidential candidates. Even though the effects of party and policy similarity dominated, facial similarity proved a significant cue for unfamiliar candidates. Thus, the evidence across the three studies sug- gests that even in high-profile elections, voters prefer candidates high in facial similarity, but most strongly with unfamiliar candidates.
Hasn't this exact same thing been claimed about videogames for the last twenty years or so, by people who want to regulate game content, with no conclusive evidence?
Wait, what's that smell? It smells like stale coffee that someone brewed only just a few hours ago...
This is so realistic!
They've thought of all the stuff you just thought of. Even smells, in an Iraq War PTSD study or five (because they only have to simulate a few smells), and in some failed commercial products.
The head-mounted displays began with the "Sword of Damocles", which was named that because it weighed 150 pounds and was dangled over your head and rendered a princely 100 polys/sec. So everything will get better, don't worry.
Tools and technology are neither good or bad, it is what we humans do with these tools that create our reality.
Yes, we could fill children's heads with a false reality, but on the contrary we can also provide education that is 100x better to the entire planet.
So yes, we certainly can do amazing things, but more often than not, someone in the boardroom will eventually ask: "where's the profit?"
Just think of Facebook's Open Basics. They could afford to provide the extreme poor with the full internet, but they chose not to, since using Facebook at least would help the company collect more data and sell more ads. That was a deliberate choice.
That's because these entities are businesses, not charities. Their primary purpose is to generate profit, and the board is there to ensure that they do that. To expect a business to act like a charity is not reasonable.
This is why we fear such leaps of technology, because the people doing it lack empathy and sympathy in place for profits.
Here's the thing. What one generation imagined as "Utopia" keeps on happening in limited contexts. But by the time it becomes reality, the conception of "Utopia" has changed. It's a moving target much in the same way hard AI is a moving target.
Today, I live in a world where I not only have to worry about getting enough to eat, I even have to worry about getting too many calories. In my society, poor people worry about that more! I don't have to worry about physical safety. I don't worry about disease. I have access to almost any information I want, including entertainments that even kings and queens could never have imagined.
Pick some level of baseline security for some 1st world industrialized nation. If you described that to Sir Thomas More or John Stuart Mill, and told them how many millions have it, they'd think you were talking a pipe dream.
Inequality is always the big problem, of course.
Of course, cynicism is good for the tech. It's a way of making sure we know what we're doing.
From what I've seen, it's not the "murder simulation" that's the most significant. It's the spending of so much time within world-like environments where an amoral stance is consistently rewarded.
I've known people who have formed their moral framework almost exclusively from their experience within such environments. I've even known people in positions of power, who exercise power accordingly.
Games and VR environments are simply media. Media does have an effect on how we see the world, but it's almost never in the simplistic way that alarmists come up with. Rather, it's subtler, but it is certain to be there.
This is a problem of separating fantasy and reality. If one understands that, say, Doom is a fantasy that does not work in the same way as the real world, then you won't have trouble realizing that you can't solve your problems with a well-timed shotgun blast while running at 90 miles per hour.
On the other hand, if you don't stop and think about how different Doom is from the world, then you get headlines about how Doom caused two teens to shoot up a school. Which, incidentally, is a bad example--the two teens you're probably thinking of were also neo-nazis, so it's far more likely that they played Doom obsessively because they wanted to kill people, and far less likely that Doom drove them to kill.
What this guy needs is a rude awakening. And, hopefully, he will get one.
There's your answer. We fear what other humans will do with these tools.
Looking over the virtual edge of the ramp was a bit discombobulating but bearable. However, when I got up to speed and was approaching the jump, my lizard brain nearly panicked at the prospect of a potentially death-dealing jump/fall/crash, even though my higher brain knew that I was standing safely on a solid, flat floor. My brain seemed to trust the visual reference points at least as much, if not more than my inner ear and I had to lift the headset to stave off the feeling that I was going to fall over.
1: Here's a video of someone else playing it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtZgRqQw2uI
Could that be done using e.g. a metallic powder held in an oscillating magnetic field? If so, then shouldn't it also be possible to coat the particles with plastic, wood etc for a more realistic feel?
Take a look at this, I think it could be the start of what you're looking for.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/03/haptic-japane...
The alternative would of course be direct neural manipulation a la Matrix but I highly doubt that research in this direction will happen due to ethical concerns...
Perhaps, though consider what makes metal cold to the touch, is it not just due to the way our brains interpret a certain set of electrical impulses received by our skin?
If that's the case, perhaps we could combine the haptic holograms with sensory gloves, e.g. the holograms provide the physical resistance of the virtual item, and the gloves mimic the electrical signals that convey the other physical properties of the item.
http://www.virtuix.com/
But I know what that dissociation feels like now and can manage it, so I'm looking forward to pushing boundaries with CV1!
Think about how many concepts are social fictions that everyone takes for granted as real. Hyperreality is already here in more subtle ways.
I enjoy computer games. I played FTL until I had all the ships and all of the achievements, so perhaps I qualify as a gamer. I volunteer at a videogame museum. I have many friends who are avid gamers. That said, I seem to keep on meeting young people have a moral system along the lines of, "If the laws of physics and the laws of the government where I reside allow it, I can do it, and it's moral."
The world isn't going to end, and it won't result in an instant Mad Max post-apocalyptic world, but technological changes do have an effect on morality. Pre 1400, insisting that people be on time to the minute, or even to 15-20 minutes would have been considered quite crazy. Birth control had a tremendous effect on what society considers moral. When music had to be distributed as manufactured objects, the technology brought about one set of moral standards with regards to the selling/owning/distributing of music. Now that all media exist as bits, we are now seeing a different set of moral standards come into being. (One of which is, "Pics or it didn't happen.")
So VR is clearly going to influence what society considers "moral" -- probably in ways we can't easily forsee. Many of alive today -- even typical members of the HN community -- are going to find some of these changes quite disturbing.
How is it anything new?
> When music had to be distributed as manufactured objects, the technology brought about one set of moral standards with regards to the selling/owning/distributing of music.
Are you referring to copyright? I believe these changes happened earlier, when printed scores started to sell big numbers.
There were always contexts where people could think, "Here's what people think is proper, but what can we actually do?" However, virtual spaces of the early 21st century are particular in the degree to which social/nonverbal cues are almost nonexistent or completely gone, and where consequences are so very skewed towards an amoral stance of, "What can we get away with?"
New VR technologies may well be a reversal of these conditions.
So, it's nothing completely new at the most simplistic level. But if you look more closely, it's the unintended consequences arising out of the details that are the most interesting and significant.
Are you referring to copyright? I believe these changes happened earlier, when printed scores started to sell big numbers.
Printed scores are manufactured objects. If you go back even farther, to when you had to have your own instrument and enough talent to learn music quickly by ear, you'll find a set of moral standards around the "ownership" of music similar to the one developing from today's environment of easy digital copying.
Can you provide an illustration of what exactly do you mean here?
Personally, I think that sounds right and proper, and it's reality that's the "broken" thing.
Living in reality means accepting that there are things that are "wrong" but where there's no sensible enforcement mechanism: "externalities", when it's the commons we're screwing over, or just "social ills" (e.g. hate speech) when it's a specific target.
Living in a consensual massively-multiplayer VR space, on the other hand, the rules of the space can be changed to suit its citizens: morality can be fully enforced, such that of course everything that's possible is good—because everything that's not good is impossible.
And I do mean consensual spaces, here—the plural is important; the most important thing such spaces give us is the ability to opt in or out of them, such that you can find one that fits your particular value system. You might personally enjoy a space with relatively few rules—a VR space equivalent to a "PvP server." Or you might enjoy a space with incredibly constricted rules, allowing almost no expression within their bounds, as in the game Journey. Or—and this is the thing we can't get from regular old reality given any amount of utopian politics—you can visit both, at different times of day, or even "multi-boxing" between the two in a weird VR sense we haven't invented yet.
Really, I'm just rehashing the content of these two essays:
• http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
• http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/06/the-future-is-filters/
Are there any massively-multiplayer online spaces which are completely without griefers, trolls, or immorality of any sort? Which ones? (And try not to arrive at a non-empty set by redefining all complaints conveniently as "whining.")
But you're right that the concept of making literally any kind of social more into a "law of physics" of a VR space is basically impossible with current technology. We'd need somewhat-better AI (though not order-of-magnitude better) to recognize+classify e.g. speech and body-language that "break the rules" of a place, and refuse to transmit those to others.
And for one particular exception, I don't think any VR world could (or should) allow for enforcement regarding social norms of internal states—i.e. "thoughtcrime." Even if we figured out a way—even if it was inherent to the VR equipment to read your mind to do its job—thoughts are "yours", rather than being something one of your "faces" (i.e. the part of you people know as you in that space, which could itself have multiple avatar-characters) has on its own. Which further means that you can't really establish social norms about what you do outside of that VR space, using one of your other "faces." The "meta-norm" necessary there would be that a "face" is the root of identity, and so one "face" cannot be blamed for the actions of another, even if they have the same person behind them. (This presumes that there's still person-based authentication between the user and any VR space they interact with, and that there's one exactly one persistent "face" per {user, space} pair, that cannot be discarded and recreated.)
I think Tumblr has that one covered anyhow.
I for one welcome our Ghost in the Shell/Matrix/Blade Runner future.