Computers Will Entertain Us to Death | Hacker News Reader

Computers Will Entertain Us to Death

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104 pointsaaronwhite103 comments

I was obsessed by games when I was kid. They've almost lost their grip on me. Even when I go actively looking for some distraction I can't find anything good. There has been one exception in the last couple of years, minecraft.

There's virtually no innovation, but I'm not sure that's the reason, I think you just move on. I remember a crossover point where I looked at realistic graphics and thought "I could just go outside and go for a run" and then did.

> There's virtually no innovation

Innovation doesn't please shareholders nearly as much as re-hashing the same banal gameplay mechanics with slight tweaks every year or so (Call of Duty). The industry did it to themselves when they sold their soul to the casuals. I have little sympathy for them, but perhaps it's better for me personally.

I make time for a few games a year, and call it good. I'll get hooked from time to time, but never like I used to.

"Innovation" doesn't please shareholders because it doesn't sell games It's for the same reason that P&G or Nestle shareholders don't prioritize "innovative" food products. Games are a mature market. To first approximation, buyers want better versions of what they already like.

Sure, there's the occasional innovative hit (Portal, Minecraft, Angry Birds) that drives a bunch of profits for an lucky (usually independent) developer. But the overwhelming share of revenue in the industry goes to the rehashed genre pieces like CoD or Skyrim. If you want to blame someone, blame the buyers.

I think "Blame the Buyers" is a false notion of how powerless we are to make change for society. This is equivalent to "making a better horse" as opposed to building an affordable car.

Too many people misinterpret the 4Steps/Lean methodology to just do the startup equivalent of P&G's incremental "innovation" - instead of trying to be the Unreasonable Man that we all should be striving to be.

I certainly don't disagree there. I was speaking to the much narrower point about what "shareholders want" in games. Game studios produce copycat games because copycat games sell more copies.

There will always be room for the next minecraft. Just don't look to the studios to produce it.

Assuming that we're talking about basically the same group of target gamers - if an indie studio makes MineCraft and the other Call of Duty 10 - then blame the shareholders... or the shareholder model which directs effort into low-risk / low-"innovation" games. The buyers like new things - the studios put (by having shareholders) profit over making new games.

Personally, I got sick of feeling cornered whenever an authority figure and/or girl asked me what I do for fun. I never really stopped enjoying video games, I just saw one too many pairs of glazed-over eyes and almost-imperceptibly curled lips and decided it wasn't worth the stigma or the opportunity cost (lost 42 pounds since I quit!).

I think most of the stigma has gone away now. Admittedly I run in tech heavy social circles, but many of the people I know either still play video games or stopped due solely to lack of time and envy those who do still play.

Of course, you can have more than one hobby. I still play video games when I have time and the mood strikes me, but I also play Go and that is what I bring up when asked. (Not due to concerns about social stigma, I am just hoping they will also play Go and we can arrange a game.)

I mean, male peers were never a problem. It just so happens that male peers are the group of people in whose opinion I am least invested.

Both older (read: more powerful) men and women of all ages seem to respond much better when I mention "cycling", "hiking", or "boxing" than when I all I had was "playing video games", "watching downloaded television", or even "reading". It's kind of hard to untangle the effects of 42 pounds weight loss from any of these experiments, though.

When somebody thinks your a idiot because you do "reading", they can go to hell anyways.

I play Go too - we should play a few games =)

I enjoy social (multiplayer) games. The teamwork and the potential that presents itself for the group of people I'm playing with is usually what holds me, instead of just what the game presents at a basic level.

For example: I mostly play Battlefield 3 right now, and while the graphics are good, and the game plays nicely, the value comes almost entirely from the social experience in the context of the gameplay.

If you're looking, dwarf fortress is pretty neat. It's all ascii art, but the underlying mechanics are fantastically complicated.

You, sir, are a cruel cruel drug pusher. I cannot let this naked praise for DF go without a warning: you will straight up lose days to this game if you try to figure it out. I lost, literally lost, 96 hours to DF before I wised up and purged it from my hard drive. Even so, its delicious caverns of dirt-to-be-excavated and dwarfs to be managed still tempts me, beckons me back. So far, I've held fast.

tl;dr: df is cocaine

Thanks, I actually have a long history with roguelikes and tried to write a 7drl myself once (zengarden. you're a monk, and you tend a garden. occasionally you get stuff through the letter box, has a notion of crafting that I took from df. that's it). While many roguelikes are just tweaks of the hack model, the form itself allows a solo dev to focus on gameplay and build something complete. Hence, the genre has stacks of potential for innovation.

There's an assumption behind these worried articles that there's a natural, non-virtual mode of existence for human beings when we're not reading books, watching movies or playing games. Perhaps we are living in the outdoors, breathing fresh air and weaving accessories from wild grasses.

However, this can't be true. As David Deutsch has argued, humans are knowledge creators: we thrive only by thinking about our environment and our problems and trying to improve stuff. It has been thus since we split from the rest of the primates.

We cannot perceive reality directly. Thinking itself is a form of virtual reality rendering. In order to improve stuff, we have to imagine how it could be different. So we all exist in virtual realities, whether we want to or not.

Obviously this doesn't address all the concerns in the article, but it might be a better starting point. One could go on to consider the educational value of games, perhaps by asking whether all learning can be regarded as forms of gaming. And then: which games are better than others and why?

Isn't most of what humans do wasteful? What about "lieing on a beach sipping cocktails to death" or "commuting to death" or "painting to death" or "watching TV to death" or "reading to death"? If you condemn computer games, you condemn all other forms of art at the same time. So I suppose the only worthwhile conducts of human life are technological and scientific research, and building infrastructure? I don't think it is as simple as that. And if you have created the perfect infrastructure and won against cancer, then what? Why live? What did you optimize for? That we can enjoy stuff seems to make us want to live at the same time.

> If you condemn computer games, you condemn all other forms of art at the same time.

Creating computer games can be an art. Playing computer games seldom is. There aren't that many games that you can play creatively, and really few where your creations can have any value outside of the universe of the game.

So art should never be consumed, only be created? If somebody listens to a song, he is wasting his time, but then what is the point of creating a song?

this game can be played created creatively - it's over 10 years old and has a following of at least thousands today in 2011

http://www.project1999.org/

the only worthwhile conducts of human life are technological and scientific research, and building infrastructure

Wow... the basis of my philosophy! IMHO: technological and scientific research - and art! - are basically the worthwhile "ends".

Building infrastructure (as well as mining, agriculture, most manufacturing, health care, SOME lawmaking, SOME politics, SOME entertainment, SOME advertising etc etc) ARE worthwhile, being the means to the abovementioned ends.

(and MOST politics, entertainment, lawmaking, advertising and so on are plain old not worthwhile, or even harmful).

Actually, I'm not condemning computer games at all, though my tone was generally dark (I hadn't had coffee yet). As provocative as my title was, "death" to me just meant that of the body, not the mind, I'm a singulatarian after all, as well as a video game nerd. I'm in favor of art, games, and the inevitable 'death' that comes after they've hit a not-so-distant inflection point.

I've lost friends to WoW. To my perspective, they could literally be dead and I would have the same experience - I know they are online but they are completely inaccessible inside their game world.

That Bruce Willis movie with the immersive VR was a catchy prediction for the new opiate. Large portions of society are waiting for the chance to lose themselves in a deterministic, programmed world that is more pleasurable than their reality. It's terrifying to consider the ramifications of this. If you can plug in, feed yourself some poptarts and hydrate every 8 hours, and otherwise float in limbo being someone you love more than your real self, we're going to see entire classes of people disappear, just like my WoW friends that I'll probably never chat with again.

http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html

  Caroline continued. "So they learn where the pleasure points are by hook or
  crook, then stimulate themselves directly. And when they get it right, they
  never do anything else. They get everything maximized, tuned up, and they just
  sit there forever enjoying it."

  "Right. Now is a creature that is doing that, not interacting with the world
  at all any more, human?"

  Caroline thought about it. "No."

  "Prime Intellect thinks otherwise. But it has its doubts."

Reminds me of http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orgasmium.

Without God/Prime Intellect to keep these people blissfully alive, though, natural selection will quickly check this kind of progression.

Once you short circuit your pleasure systems - which evolved to keep you alive and reproducing - you'll soon be displaced by a species with better self control.

> Large portions of society are waiting for the chance to lose themselves in a deterministic, programmed world that is more pleasurable than their reality. It's terrifying to consider the ramifications of this. If you can plug in, feed yourself some poptarts and hydrate every 8 hours, and otherwise float in limbo being someone you love more than your real self, we're going to see entire classes of people disappear, just like my WoW friends that I'll probably never chat with again.

You're describing the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's `Snow Crash'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

Read it. It's fun.

Snow Crash is a great book. No argument there.

But that is NOT what the Snow Crash Metaverse is about, and there are countless science fiction stories that do directly approach this subject matter.

Stephenson's Metaverse is very much the WWW with 3d goggles and a semi-constrained semi-realistic physics. It has people playing games, like the web. It has people mingling socially, it has people mingling for business, and it has places where those lines blur, like the web. It has people telecommuting to work, even, and it looks a lot like using a VPN. It has spammy ads, like the web, and savvy clients have plugins that try to identify and block those ads, like the web. Except for the extrapolation that we'd want 3d intput for everything, and the extrapolation that we'd want computer-vision cameras converting the upper half of our bodies into input devices, it's basically a very conservative extrapolation of the web, with only minimal changes. It's the single least far-reaching speculation in that novel; nearly every page discussing something OTHER than the Metaverse is way-out-there stuff (franchise nation-states, the whole nam-shub thing, man-portable fusion power (for Reason), smartwheels and microradar as consumer-grade goods, rat-things, it just goes on and on).

As for stories that DO actually talk about this (unlike Snow Crash), my favorite is God Is An Iron, a short story by Spider Robinson, that he later expanded into the novel Mindkiller. And not that I'm the hugest fan of Niven, but Niven's Ringworld has, as a side point, the same thing going on (Ringworld is the book that Bungie basically lifted whole-cloth to write the plot for Halo, ha ha).

Oh, and for anyone still reading this a week later, I finally remember the name of the book I really wanted to give as an interesting in-depth commentary on all-consuming augmented reality (which is somewhat related to the topic of gaming as opiate):

Lady of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder

Aren't we programmers also living in the limbo of work and study to forget our nihilism? Or maybe it's just me. The programming mini-world with its mini-quests and mini-heroes, disconnected from the cold reality. And they didn't die or disappear, they just joined another group. It just happens that the barrier is quite thick. But yeah I'm still a bit worried by what you say.

I've been playing Skyrim lately and I can only describe it as endlessly entertaining. I had the very same thought that the article talks about.

Skyrim is almost completely realistic-looking. At some point in the near future, the games we play will likely be indistinguishable from reality, or even more likely, much better than reality in every way.

But the more surprising thing is that Skyrim has a system that randomly generates more stuff to do than you could reasonably do in a lifetime of playing the game. Now, it's essentially the same thing over and over, but there's no reason to assume that games in the future won't become even better at this. The key point is that there is stuff to do in the game that someone didn't have to manually create.

The logical conclusion is that at some point in the future, there will exist an endless supply of stuff to do that is more entertaining than reality, not just in the current "addictive until you eventually get bored a year later" way, but in the "automatically generated by algorithms so complex that the game is constantly new and surprising and you will never get bored" way.

I wonder where that will lead. Maybe it's the ultimate bread and circus for the populous, where one could lead an extremely happy and fulfilling life in a virtual world with essentially no cost to anyone.

And if you take a step back, that's exactly where we are today, at least in the developed world. For the most part, if you abandon all the trappings of the modern, virtual world, you can live a happy and fulfilling life for nearly zero cost. But we choose to buy cell phones, TV's, and other forms of entertainment that aren't really necessary.

Beyond the necessities, it's all entertainment, including that 40 hour job that you don't really have to do to live or that startup you founded because you believe it will make your life better.

This kind of article bugs me. It's evolution in action. Think of it as speciation: H. sapiens for those that stay, H. cyberneticus for those that go down the rabbit hole. Either way, if you don't want to play - don't play! More world for you! Where's the problem here?

Of course, I'm also looking forward to my property values going up when all you coastal people find your houses a mile offshore, so maybe I'm just excessively phlegmatic to start with.

The problem is we aren't evolved to handle such stimulation right now. That'll lead to unintended consequences. Just like eating fast foods leads to obesity, and modern loneliness leads to mental diseases. Many a million years from now.. but not now.

That's a pretty strong statement. If the simulation is good enough, what part of our reality-honed brains would be uncomfortable with it?

It's not really a strong statement. I'm saying it will have unintended consequences.. we don't know what they will be, but since it's so drastically different than the conditions we've had, I can't imagine we'll adjust "normally"

Speak for yourself.

Most people aren't evolved to resist serious strains of flu, but when an epidemic happens the next generation will be those who were. There are probably people who are perfectly capable of adapting to virtual reality worlds right now, just as there are those who can avoid getting obese despite the presence of vastly calorific foods and can avoid mental diseases despite the highly unusual (from a historical perspective) nature of modern society.

> Most people aren't evolved to resist serious strains of flu, but when an epidemic happens the next generation will be those who were.

It's true because diseases kill unprepared and leave only the (more-less) adapted. So far neither obesity nor computer games were successful in killing people on the mass scale fast enough. Also, we're actively engineering the computer games to be as immersing as possible. If a 'resistant generation' pops up, it'll probably at some point engineer addicting games for itself.

Obesity and playing games whole day won't kill but could slightly lower physical attractiveness and number of mating occasions.

Evolutionary speaking sterilization is as effective as death. And several diseases do reduce fertility which creates evolutionary pressure on par with deaths.

Susceptibility to addictive games is what makes us human - if you changed that in us, we wouldn't even be monkeys anymore. Would we be recognizable at all?

So yeah, maybe technical society is a nonviable evolutionary pathway in the long run. Why should I care?

You're right. some people will be. I rather not take my chances personally though. I'm humble enough to not want to fight against 1 million years of fine-tuned evolution.

Odd. Do you buy groceries, or are you posting this from your savannah hut? You're fighting a million years of fine-tuned evolution every time you turn on a light, sit in a chair, wear shoes, go to a store or restaurant, take a medicine, use a telephone, watch TV, read a book or magazine (let's not even talk about the Internet), eat potatoes (not like you evolved in the Americas), bake bread, eat baked bread, use money, sleep in a bed, wake up with an alarm, or let your wisdom teeth grow out because you lived past the age of 35.

You're so far off your evolutionary track there's simply no reason not to go further.

I don't watch tv. I don't eat bread. I don't eat potatoes. I don't wake up with an alarm. I prefer using a standing desk. I don't eat out often. I do use a phone and computer but only because they're necessities. I actually do think our modern lifestyle contributes to mental/physical diseases, so I'm not arguing our current life is the natural way at all. Medicine is a blessing, but when the rate of diseases like obesity and diabetes keeps rising, as well as suicidal rates/depression, there's many reasons NOT to go further.

I'm not saying live like the Omish, but we should look at our ancestors and see what we should retain, rather than change in order to make our life better.

> I do use a phone and computer but only because they're necessities.

Commenting on Hacker News is a necessity.

He's not claiming that he only uses his computer for necessities, just that he has one because it is a necessity.

Props for philosophical fortitude, but even the Amish are not even close to living the way we evolved. _Using a horse for agriculture_ is not what we're evolved for, see?

An aside for a moment: are you doing a paleolithic diet? We did that for a year or two while our daughter was going through Crohn's - the transition to it just about killed me. But saved her. So I know where you're coming from.

To address your main point, though: the decision as to what makes life better is yours, for you, and mine, for me - and if somebody decides their life is better because they can go virtual, well, that's none of your business or mine. I have very little patience for the ashes-and-sackcloth approach: whether it's dressed in evangelical or treehugging clothing, Puritanism just gets my goat.

I'm trying to stay unaddicted and I have friends who are far better at me at it. I don't game, but like most people, I'm a FB, Quora, Reddit, HN checker and I've started to realize that I'm hitting a point of diminishing returns with all these articles, photos, memes. I still come back and love the thoughts this article and discussion have provoked, but these are few and far between.

It's a hard balance. It's fun to go Reddit/funny just to have a few laughs and it's fun to post links and songs to entertain friends in other states/countries, but at what point is this really good for me or satisfying? Wouldn't it be better to take all my mindshare and energy and go learn the skills that will get me a more satisfying job? Or do the things that would get me more time with women (affection/sex)? More time in nature? More friendships? Strengthen my body...etc. etc.

I'm still in love with physical reality. I'm always in awe of the world when I look at Boston.com's big picture or watch nature videos on Vimeo.

I don't really have a point, just that it saddens me quite a bit to think how much people are missing out the world. And this is in an old argument, but it's no wonder people don't care about the destruction of the species/habitat when they're so amused in some virtual world. It's hard not to cross my fingers for some massive power outage/food shortage temporary wake up call.

I've been thinking about this myself. I concluded that if a Matrix-like option was offered (not forced), where your body would be used as a power source but your mind would be in some distant, impossible fantasy world which you are able to make up yourself, many people would take that option instead of continuing to live their normal life.

I know that if I were offered something like that, a world where I could live out fantasies with no conditions, other than that I give up my body, I may very well take it.

The end of humanity as we know it, perhaps, indeed.

While I agree with most of the points the author makes, I can't see why he would concentrate on video games. It's not much harder to be addicted to the internet, or to anime or visual novels (see the Japanese hikkikomori), or to anything else that we can play/watch/do alone in the comfort of our own rooms. And these other addictions have much the same effect as those the author describes. In fact, I'd wager that most people who have played a game like Diablo 2 or World of Warcraft for a long time don't continue to do so because of the game itself, which has lost its immersive quality for a long time, but rather because of the friends they made, and the alternate society they are a part of. The greatest danger of MMORPGs is in my opinion that they are social games.

This reminds me a lot of this article: The Acceleration of Addictiveness (http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html).

Same theme. It goes a little more into talking about societal implication; e.g. there'll be a divide in society as a result between the norm - "addiction" in some regards - and those who can/choose to stay unaddicted.

Clay Shirky also describes 'society's collective bender' in more optimistic terms: http://google.com/search?q=cognitive+surplus

You might want to consider changing the lime green color background to something more neutral.

Right now, I coded my blog to a different 'fun' color that varies w/ the day of the post. Cooking up a new theme w/ readability improvements, I'll reconsider that color (though do check out http://restrictionisexpression.com for full effect)

The color is absolutely brutal on the eyes. I read about 3 sentences and then closed the tab. I actually came here to complain about it as well.

I actually felt pain in my head. Real pain, not virtual. :)

As long as we're nitpicking, you are using "it's" incorrectly. "It's" is not the possessive form of "it", it is a contraction of "it is". The word you are looking for is "its". Usually doesn't annoy too much but you do this twice in the first paragraph.

Fixed; forgot to proof read that paragraph, thanks Tycho. Always up for improvements no matter how small.

Oh, I didn't realize. Without scripting enabled (I use NoScript), the background does not appear.

> If I could take a pill to skip meals or sleep in a healthy way, I would.

Multivitamins and melatonin?

The only real question I have is: will this super-entertainment world be better than this one outside of the entertainment-sphere? I don't really care if people waste their lives in WoW or equivalent, so long as I'm not forced to join them or support them living in that world. (I'd like to see the day when basic needs like food/shelter/water are next to free in costs so people could waste their lives without burdening anyone else, if they wanted to.)

Even if I could be convinced that joining them would make me feel so good about the decision afterwards, I'd resist in the same manner I resist buying/making meth today. I'm still fascinated by reality, and I want to continue to be the sort of person fascinated by reality, so I'll refuse your drug that would make me say the same things about your virtual reality.

Others here have noted that the prediction pattern-matches against lots of older ones, it certainly goes back throughout the ages. It would be amusing if Star Trek got it right in the end: a holodeck used as occasional recreation (and for other things) in the same way our t.v.s and games are used as occasional recreation, rather than something real that many people spend their lives in.

Melatonin doesn't replace sleep, it makes you sleepy.

Ah, I read the original wish as "sleep in a healthy way", instead of "skip meals or sleep". I probably need some sleep myself.

It would be amusing if Star Trek got it right in the end

Don't forget that Lieutenant "Broccoli" Barclay had a Holodeck addiction/obsession.

Also, didn't Star Trek Enterprise variants always have some huge number of crew (or civilians, I don't recall) aboard? They couldn't all be transporting down to exotic locations every episode, so they must have had to make up something to do all day.

I assume the title is an oblique reference to Neil Postman's seminal book Amusing Ourselves To Death, in which the author argued that TV had created a Huxleyan culture in which it became impossible to carry on the kind of informed, rational public discourse that a functioning democracy requires.

How uncultured am I? :) Haven't read/heard of that, but will seek out, thanks!

It's interesting to go back and read previous generations attempts to look 40 years into the future and guess what the biggest problems will be. Generally you end up with "amusing" rather than "prescient", such that the exceptions are noteworthy.

While I fully anticipate that this sort of world will cause some sort of problems, I doubt we can really call them this far in advance.

I'd also observe that if one lives more or less their entire reality in some sort of VR simulation... so what? I can make arguments in both directions (at length, actually but I'll spare you) but it's too rich a question to implicitly assert an answer.

I'd also observe that if one lives more or less their entire reality in some sort of VR simulation... so what?

The meta-question here is very interesting. At what point do humans controlling their environment cease being humans? So yes, you could sit absolutely still and live a tremendously-rewarding virtual life because you have designed a world that emotionally compels you to never leave. To the rest of us, you look like a potted plant. Does that make you less human? Or, to put differently, if you were completely paralyzed, yet were able to think (I believe they call it "locked in") is there anything wrong with you that the rest of us should care about and fix? Is how we define being a human inexorably linked to physical social participation? I believe so, but I'm not comfortable with my own line of reasoning here.

Note that I don't have a problem with us evolving into something else. My only concern is that we acknowledge what's happening so that we can realistically talk about it. If we are evolving, then there will be a selection function that we had get pretty damn good at meeting. I imagine that function is going to be the ability to turn the system off from time to time. What I see instead is millions of folks who spend more time than even they are happy with plugged in and are in a great bit of denial as to exactly what social effect that is having. If you ask me, the singularity is already here. We just can't see it.

If we were to take the concept of a VR "thought is action" simulacrum seriously, I think that maybe current standards for what is seen as socially good can still apply there- it is better to "produce" so that others may "consume", than to primarily consume yourself. So maybe VR actors, musicians, and coders will still be seen as doing something worthy of more prestige than typical VR gamers. The only difference between then and now is how much physical activity your body needs to spend to accomplish that.

> Note that I don't have a problem with us evolving into something else. If we are evolving, then there will be a selection function that we had get pretty damn good at meeting.

That's how evolution works, though, of course. Some individuals will do better than others, and the overall population will gradually become more like them. I don't think there's any sense in worrying about what we'll evolve into - it will be whatever fits our environment best.

I think the more worthwhile concern is, in the relative short term, whether it will make us and those we care about more or less happy. That's probably much more complicated to answer.

I sometimes reflect about this and one aspect that was not mentioned and I believe will have a lot of weight on how all this evolves is the maltusian limits of the real world vs the cornucopian and limitless aspect of the virtual.

Simple economics tell us that as population grows and natural resources are depleted, real physical goods and services will become scarce and costly especially compared to virtual ones which seem to be created with a shrinking amount of matter and energy.

The implication of this are interesting for the evolution of humanity.

Will reality become a luxury, where the common people will be able to afford nothing more than basic subsistence including low cost per calorie diet and a few cubic meters of real word dwelling? Will only the rich be able to afford the additional matter and energy to provide for further floor space, better food and physical travel?

The cost difference between virtual experiences and real world experiences might become so large that most people will prefer to get the better bang for the buck available virtually.

What are the implication for jobs, how will value be created and distributed when people spend most of their time in a virtual world? Here, I don't mean just entertainment goods that are only worth something in the context of a game. I mean things like education, artistic virtual experiences, virtual social events, virtual performances, movies, music, etc. The virtual economy will be greatly influenced by intellectual property laws and I assume, a lot of these goods will have to include DRM for sustaining jobs even if the goods are really cheap compared to real world goods.

What activities will give meaning to human life? Intellectual endeavors, artistic endeavors and socializing should remain low cost and may still offer a lot of depth and complexity to people's lives, especially as the tools to support these activities become better. In fact, if you evaluate your life by the breath of ideas, relationships and arts you are able to master, a life lived virtually might become more fulfilling than one encumbered by the limits of the real world.

How will serious social relationships evolve in virtual worlds? What are the implications for reproduction?

In a virtual world, it is going to be really easy to move away when not getting along with a community. It will also be really easy to create new communities for like minded individuals. People might not have to get along they might just isolate themselves in smaller communities. What are the implications for the way politics will be performed. What are the implication for law enforcement? What are the implications for war and how will all this spill over into the real world? The communities will still have to collaborate to maintain real world security and defense.

Then there is the issue of the physical body's health needs. Will the human body be able to adapt to this type of life?

Will resource scarcity push humanity to a virtual existence? When you look at people living in their parents' basement spending all their time online, sometimes because of the lack of economic opportunity in the real world, it sure makes it look like the transition has already begun.

You can push the logic even further : as even sustaining your body in a small tank becomes unsustainable, one might really go all virtual : get rid of your body, and upload your mind in a piece of silicon (or whatever replaced silicon). The silicon would be much less expensive to run than your meat brain.

Even if you don't believe your upload wouldn't truly be you, you might take the option, if the alternative is certain death by starvation. Better die and spawn a ghost, than die and leave nothing.

Now it's not all pretty: if you assume a capitalistic, competitive environment, one could set up "interesting" forms of exploitation. An upload could be saved, stopped, restarted, spied on, tortured… Robin Hanson produced quite interesting (though horrifying) speculation about how such a world might look like.

"Better die and spawn a ghost, than die and leave nothing." What's the point of a ghost? How does this make your situation "better"? Your point is based on the assumption that death is inherently "bad".

Darwinism suggests that if ghosts can continue to exist (and reproduce?) and affect the world to create more of themselves (e.g. tell people that it's not so bad), then they will be selected-for.

Ceasing to exist is, in a strict Darwinian sense, bad. Reproduction and, to an extent, continued existence are good.

Seconded. It should be noted that some people see making children as a form of immortality. My own mom thinks along the lines of "what's the point of living forever, you just have to make children".

I say the immortality of my genes pale in comparison to the immortality of my thought processes. Even if the copy isn't really "me", it will have the same influence I could have had if it was. I may have other goals besides not dying. My ghost would have at least a chance of carrying them out.

death is inherently "bad"

Hell, yes. And it is not an assumption, it is an observation.

Yet behind each bread and butter eater there is a mind. Maltusian limits are only limits when the incremental human produces helps humanity extract a lesser ratio from what is to what could be. With the information age upon us I do not believe this is the case.

I was in an engineering class called "sustainable development" at Waterloo and got into an argument with my professor about a "maximum human population". My point, that I still hold to this day, was that the average extra human will increase our capacity for more humans by more than one. Whether it is from space cities or virtual realities we are not a virus that the movie The Matrix portrays us to be. We will expand to the stars, the sea, the deep earth, and other realities; whether they be on silicon chips or other dimensions. Just wait until Gataca comes or mind-computer interfaces. The average IQ in 2011 terms will be 150.

Using technology as not only a getaway but as a replacement for the 'human OS' (if you will) has been slowly happening over the past 30 years, and will continue to happen as long as technology makes real life better.

Think about how you work today: you sit down in front of a screen. You sit there for 5, 8, 12 hours and stare at a screen to do your work. Millions of desk-workers everywhere have become people staring at screens for about 8 hours a day, playing with a handheld screen when not at a desk.

A large part of it is because technology is enabling and seen as a benefit, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it is an invasive effect in the lives of the first world. As technology gets better, becomes more enabling, and allows us to do more with it, I don't see that stopping.

Well, yes, but 30 years ago I was at a desk staring at sheets of paper. Working at the computer is better for my posture, etc.

The lime green background color is killing my eyes. Didn't even read the whole article.

This kind of stuff always reminds me of Nick Bostram and the "Simulation Argument" http://www.simulation-argument.com

It always reminds me of Nozick's "experience machine" thought experiment.

This article reminds me of one of the Pendragon books: http://djmachalebooks.com/books/pendragon/the-reality-bug/

In the book, the protagonist discovers a world in which people have abandoned reality in favor of a more enjoyable virtual world. As a result, society declines to the point where the real world is crumbling down.

Not saying that's what will happen, but it's an interesting read.

It's also known as superstimulus; relevant LW article: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...

Obligatory reminder of the article I wrote 3 years ago and posted here, "Technology is Heroin" http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is...

Good to see people continuing to recognize this troubling fact and the community trying to come to terms with it.

I mean, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" was published in 1985, and Nietzsche wrote in 1874,

  Increasingly we lose this sense of surprise, so that we are no longer overly
  amazed at anything and, ultimately, find satisfaction in everything—this is 
  what is called historical sensibility, historical cultivation. Stated 
  noneuphemistically: the massive influx of impressions is so great; surprising, 
  barbaric, and violent things press so overpoweringly—'balled up into hideous 
  clumps'—in on the youthful soul; that it can save itself only by taking 
  recourse in premeditated stupidity.

So I'm not sure what the point of the "pre-date" claim is. I am curious if you've come up with any good suggestions on how to 'fix' the problem in those intervening years, though.

Don't forget Kierkegaard, who made very similar observations well before Nietzsche.

No doubt there is a very human pattern at work that hasn't changed over the centuries. Also no doubt that there is a technological amplifier at work as well.

I look at it like money: having lots of money tends to make you more of what you already are. So if you're a jerk, being rich is just going to exacerbate that. In a way, then, being able to handle great wealth is an indication of a very stable (and perhaps dull) personality.

Technology is doing a very similar thing with distractions. Some folks are easily distracted. Some are not. As technology improves, people who are less-easily distracted are finding they are spending more and more of their time plugged in. The best argument here is self-reports: many people freely acknowledge that they spend more time plugged in than they are comfortable with.

As far as solutions, I tried a couple myself, along with some volunteers from HN. Didn't get a lot of traction, sadly. "Purposeful interruptions" was the line we were pursuing. At the time of the essay, my money was on a new form of morality taking hold -- that it simply won't be "cool" to spend too much time physically inert. That hasn't happened, sadly.

PG also wrote an essay a few months after mine along these lines. I keep hoping that with so many smart people looking at this we will start seeing some breakthroughs.

I guess if we were to trace the genealogy of the idea, Plato's Republic has the words,

  "Now, the true city is in my opinion the one we just described--a 
  healthy city, as it were. But, if you want to, let's look at a 
  feverish city, too. Nothing stands in the way....This healthy 
  one isn't adequate any more, but must already be gorged with a 
  bulky mass of things."

I tried a solution once, too: I threw away my computer.

How did you decide to acquire it back, if I may ask?

I never got my laptop back. Eventually I needed a computer again, but for about 6 months I survived fairly well without one. I guess, for me, it reached a point of addiction & needed a clean break to recover sanity.

Ha. "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common." - Assyrian clay tablet, ca. 2800 B.C.

It's an inherent part of being human to see the present day as the end of days.

We see the world through our experiences. We are getting older, having more problems as we age, so we see that the world is getting worse.

Or, we're seeing through more of the nice, shiny veneer of youth that says "Everything's OK" and mark this new vision as worse than the old one, inferring a decline.

I think you've misjudged the tone of the discussion. I don't think that most people commenting here are greatly troubled by what's happening.

It's not that technology is heroin, it's that heroin is technology. World of Warcraft is also technology. Cars -- technology? Technology. Movies -- technology.

We keep inventing these entertaining and pleasurable things, and at first we get lost in them. We are like children playing with our new toy. And after a while we calm the hell down, we develop patterns and social customs that help us use the toy for entertainment in a harmless way.

You might think technology is bad, but personally I think there's nothing wrong with WoW or heroin. It's just that people can drive in a car at 150mph+ recklessly, all day, stealing money from their families or they can use it to get somewhere and occasionally for fun.

There's even the theory that addiction to video games helps explain the Fermi paradox:

http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_print.html#miller

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550112

Excellent, that is an interesting explanation to the Fermi Paradox.

So what we have to do is gamify exploration and conquest and we'll rule the galaxy within the next thousand years.

As if writing verbose rants (mirroring equivalent rants about movies, radio, books, plays, etc. throughout human history) is somehow a superior activity.

the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

- Ratatouille

Perhaps the only thing saving us from enslavement to superstimulus is the hedonic treadmill.

And vice-versa.

Hopefully capitalism and women will prevent a disaster by rewarding productive and diciplined humans with wealth and children.

If a society does not threaten its people with poverty, misery and slavery as a consiquence to wasting your life on video games, then that society will crumble to make way for one that does.

Great point, thx.

The point I'm wondering though is will technology make it so that it's just as easily to accomplish productive tasks from within a physical-less VR simulation, as it is to play video games? In which case neither producers nor consumers need to remain in physical reality for long, since they can accomplish their tasks via thought alone?

In the last few decades we've seen white collar workers become shackled to the desktop, and then shackled to the internet. Just how many hours a day do any of us spend away from the Net? How much of the physical world are we missing compared to our ancestors?

Quite frankly, ordinary life is not that different from WoW. You go on quests, you level-up your character through education and courses, and then you earn points (money) that you can spend on shiny things like cars.

Seriously.

But real life is not balanced, and not fair, and everything takes forever. And you can't save and load game, so most people are too afraid of failure to try anything really cool or dangerous.

But they want to feel the achievement so they do it in games, where everything is fine-tuned to be achievable.

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