Tech oligarchs are encouraging the creation of virtual worlds as a cheap way to avoid problems in the real one.
Guys, I don’t want to alarm everyone, but the proles are getting restless. Not to worry though, I have a cunning plan- we’ll just hand out Google Cardboard VR goggles and Second Life subscriptions. They can’t see the environmental degradation if they’re too busy cranking their hogs on a virtual nudist furry sex colony!
It is not possible, on Earth, to give everyone all that they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson’s private island,” Doom co-creator and former CTO of Oculus John Carmack told Joe Rogan during a 2020 interview.
Yes, but we want no one to have private islands
A close friend of mine uses VR regularly. They got it after COVID to help with quarantine. It’s fun to use for about 3 hours and does give a sense of having gone somewhere new, which is neat-
But as a permanent distraction? No, absolutely not. VR causes headaches after extended use, and it doesn’t even work for some people. It’s also a limited sensory experience.
Until VR can fully simulate reality and put food in your belly it’s not a threat.
Open source the fuck out of vr before it’s too late. jezus
This is a cool project for an open source and federated VR network: https://web.immers.space
There’s also some open source hardware, like this headset: https://www.relativty.com/
and stuff like haptic gloves: https://hackaday.io/project/178243-lucidvr-budget-haptic-glove
Pretty dogshit bet on their end, honestly.
VR is cool tech toy stuff, but lots of people can’t afford them, or they can’t use them because they get sick or just have no room in their home. Also, VR can’t feed you, and unless they’re gonna have some VR-to-rent scheme or something, drowning in VR won’t keep people materially secure enough to keep using VR anyway.
The price on VR will eventually reach the point where it’s affordable enough for most people. We’re almost there already with stuff like the Oculus Quest. Also remote work through VR (assuming the tech works well enough) would basically mean no need for a physical location for companies/jobs that don’t require physical labor, which would be a lot. That would hypothetically mean no need for renting commercial space, and could dramatically reduce cost of living for employees who would otherwise be working together at some location in a high rent city. Those advantages would be a pretty big deal for those corporations that could take advantage, and this would likely drive widespread adoption.
Assuming it works well, it would have nearly all the same advantages as working in a shared physical office vs working at home. It really depends on the job of course, but for anything that requires any kind of collaboration, working with others in the same shared space for the duration of the work day is quite a bit different than just relying on conference calls and messages. There’s a lot of casual interaction that otherwise gets missed if you’re relying solely on video software. Also, for managers/employers, they like to be able to monitor and keep tabs on people like they normally would be able to do in a physical office and a shared virtual space would allow them to do that in a way that normal remote communication would not. Also, “company culture” and that sort of bullshit would play into this as well.
