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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a future where everybody in the world can have a house as big as they like, with literally no limits. You never need to do any maintenance. You can have whatever furniture you want, it's delivered instantly, and you never have to pay.

Space is infinite. Resources are infinite.

You just need an absolute bare minimum of subsistence to keep your physical body alive, keep your electricity on, and connect you up to the Internet.

We just need people to stop caring about the physical realm and only care about the virtual realm.

That is how we achieve practical post-scarcity. That is what the metaverse should be.

OK, right now it's not there, but it'll never get there if we never start.

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Aren't the creators of this multiverse trying to embed artificial scarcity into it already?

In any case, what's a giant garden in which the sun isn't warm, the flowers don't smell, and the grass doesn't brush against your skin?

They might be; in that case they're not building my personal vision of the future.

With better VR, the sun is warm, the flowers do smell, and the grass does brush against your skin.

Your current experience of "reality" is not as real as you may think it is. Everything you've ever done or experienced has been communicated to your brain through sensory neurons. If we make a VR that can connect up your sensory neurons to the virtual world, your experiences can be just as "real" as "reality" is.

And if VR is where all your friends are, and where your work is, and where your leisure is, who cares about "reality" any more? It's just an alternative plane of existence where resources are finite, you get cold in bad weather, you need to clean when the place gets dirty, you need to wait for things to arrive, etc.

That sounds good and all, but at the end of it somebody has to run it, and I don't think there's any person or (kind of) organization I'd like to entrust with managing _reality_. (And if I had to make a list, Meta is probably close to the bottom.) The good thing about our universe is that it doesn't care what we do with it, and it doesn't have any incentives.

But once there's a company in it that needs to maximize profit, things are going to get sticky. Democracy isn't perfect either and can turn bad.

And what about the potential for technical malfunctions? What about hacking? What about abuse? What about those who can't afford the hardware? What about those who don't want to join?

Building that utopia is going to require rebuilding half (or all) of society first, if we don't we have a near guarantee of getting a dystopia real fast, and even if we manage to avoid that there are too many intrinsic ways for this to turn horrible.

> who cares about "reality" any more

People who realize that Reality is where you can lose Wi-Fi reception, stop receiving nutrient liquid, and otherwise be enslaved and/or killed.

Seriously, your future is a nightmare.

If you want a perfectly clean, warm, automated existence, work on robots and O'Neill colonies, not the Matrix.

... So the matrix, ok

Sounds like a dystopian hellscape if you ask me.

In what way is it dystopian? You can live whatever life you want.

The Amazon series Upgrade does a really great job mocking the idea that a virtual world would be better than the real world.

People who lived in caves might have done a great job of mocking the idea that towns and cities would be better than caves, and yet here we are.

(But thanks for the recommendation, I will check it out).

How does raising children work in that world? Do you just strap them in when their infants?

(Also curious how sex and exercise work…)

You don't need exercise.

I'm not sure about children and reproduction. My best guess is that humans are replaced by AI quite quickly and they solve it for themselves.

Or maybe we just have a state-sponsored reproductive conscription scheme, where the best people are selected to donate sperm and eggs, the children are born from test tubes, and the state keeps the children alive until they're old enough to fend for themselves.

(I grant that this is getting dystopian now).

If we're all plugged in at birth, why does it matter our 'genetic makeup', why select the 'best of the best' if everyone in existence just gets booted up into the metaverse?

Sounds more like the matrix than the metaverse. And almost nothing in it can replace the real thing, and the things that could be are already digital, like books or movies.

With current technology it can't replace the real thing. But:

- people make better technology all the time; VR of today is at a quality and immersion level that was unimaginable 200 years ago

- a lot of people in the world live in pretty poor conditions (relative to the lifestyles of rich programmers on HN); at the margin there will be people willing to trade a loss of fidelity for an increase in quality of life, and the amount of people making that trade will only increase as the immersion level improves

You'd get bored after a few days... Putting effort into obtaining stuff is what makes obtaining stuff rewarding

You can still put effort into obtaining stuff. You just don't have to pay.

You can still do art. You can still create stuff. It's just that it's more like building software than building houses: the tools are free, the materials are free, you don't need any permits, etc.

That sounds absolutely horrible.

What part sounds horrible? You can have whatever life you want. Assuming sufficiently high-quality VR, it is obviously better than actual reality.

You'll own a house you can't live in, with a pool you can't swim in, sipping cocktails that are not refreshing, with a girlfriend that is not a girl and not attracted by the real you either.

But you can do all of those things. If you can't do those things, it's not a sutiable replacement for reality.

Well a simple response is that if you can feed yourself on virtual food you're creating something out of nothing.

The life I might want would involve a whole lot of wild nature and absolutely no advertising, among other things which might be difficult to synthesize in VR.

You can have as much wild nature and as little advertising as you want. My vision isn't for a corporate-owned virtual prison. In my future the user is fully in control of their computer.

You could have a much richer experience of nature in VR than you could ever have today.

That you privilege "real" nature over the infinitely many possible "virtual" natures is a hangover of pre-metaverse thinking. It will only take a couple of generations for this kind of mindset to fade away.

do you realize how dystopian that is?

No.

So why should I stop caring about the physical realm especially given YOLO (who knows you might be reincarnated as a bug for those who believe in that)?

Because you can have a better life in the virtual realm.

Life is defined more by relationships than things. In this a virtual world will be no different.

The things you lose is the valuable lessons in the physical world like production and decay, health and sickness unless they are also brought over - then why be virtual?

Production and decay are only valuable to learn because you need to learn how to deal with them.

Learning about production and decay in the VR future is no more valuable than learning how to make fire from sticks is valuable today. OK, it's intellectually interesting, but it's just not a practical consideration in daily life any more.

Re health and sickness: muscles would obviously atrophy, but you don't care because you don't need them. I think diseases would spread less because physical human bodies won't be mixing as much.

I'm not sure what happens to human reproduction. Maybe human-inhabited VR is only a brief prelude to the true AI-owned future anyway.

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