What Happens When Virtual Reality Gets Too Real
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
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.
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.)
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.
>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.
Prove to me that is not happening to you this moment. ;)
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh great. More priming studies.
But I know what that dissociation feels like now and can manage it, so I'm looking forward to pushing boundaries with CV1!
I for one welcome our Ghost in the Shell/Matrix/Blade Runner future.
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.
Think about how many concepts are social fictions that everyone takes for granted as real. Hyperreality is already here in more subtle ways.
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.