It is not fake at all. I used to play World of Warcraft a lot and I don't see that experience as fake at all. Everything that happened there affected to me as much as real life things affect. I actually learned valuable skills there too like how to lead because I was raid leader in big raid guild. Lots of social interaction and diplomatic skills was needed there etc.

I value my experience in there. My life there was important for me. Taming pets in some forgotten forest was something you can't do in real world even how incomplete that experience was because lacking of true virtual reality it still was experience. I don't belittle my life there at all.

Oligarchs become regional despots controlling resources and enforcing their will through kill bots?

This what you're referring to? https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/01/18/a-decades-old-model-of-animal-and-human-learning-is-under-fire

I'm trying to find a non-paid write up on this. Sounds interesting.

There is proof on this. How popular are isekai aka ending up in fantasy world stories in general. They are insane popular genre. And actually basic vanilla fantasy is escapism too and about any other fictional work. We always want to be something else than we currently can be.

People have always had issues accepting the world as it is, that's partially the appeal of religion.

S curves feeding off S curves.

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Some researchers (Huijeong Jeong and Vijay Namboodiri of the University of California, San Francisco) did a study recently that found we’ve been doing AI backwards the whole time.

i feel you, the drive to be closer to the real and away from the fake is huge driver for humans
but it's been proven that we need profound experiences for that, no amount of knowledge or thought could lead you there, as you are still living within the patterns of your perception (look up the 9 Dot problem)

you need to first hand experience the reality or nature that you seek, in order to transform your current percecption of reality to be closer to that

if we look at something like Zen buddhism for example, it's pretty much constructed around showing you the limitations of thought and perception , bias etc but no person outthere can write down what Zen is, you can only "know i" , meaning that it's a kind of knowing that is not ony verbal

i see VR as being a possible tool to offer something even more profound than that, by actually showing people, nonverably experiences that could transform them

if wisdom is the ability to generate meaning and live a meaningful life, and wisdom is extracted from experience through insights, then we we can generate those experiences and guide people through them so they can aquire that wisdom
this has been the role of stories for centuries, but we will be able to do it on an even deeper level

instead of reading about the myth of sisyphus , you can be sisyphus and experience it , see what he went through, and generate those insights yourself
i hope you can see the incredible value in that

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What about a memory wipe that would make all of your experience feel you just have been born again?

Would that make VR interesting as 50 or 60-year-old something human?

I do think paradise is achievable in the long term, but it is going to involve more paradigm shifts.

I think this is the problem.

It's not a forced positivity per se.

It's more of a "learning to drop the baggage of the past and move into a happier future."

Interesting take.

I've been moving in the opposite direction of VR on my personal spiritual end of things in that I'm not sure that what I am looking for would be found in VR or not.

In theory if VR arrives with AGI or something that is good enough, I think I will be too old to enjoy it. Unless theoretically science can 'fix' me. This makes your scenario pretty unlikely for me.

You can argue that we already live in societies where no one is 'real'. Everyone plays a role except around friends and family. But you can't control that reality like VR, right?

The problem is that we don't know who will create VR and how. Maybe like OpenAI and other technology companies they would force their moral values on us. Perhaps they will limit the VR products to something tame.

But personally, if I had the choice, I would go for the wildest dreams. With flying, magic, and interstellar travel. I don't really understand why that would be bad, unless we are talking about the load on the computing infrastructure.

I agree, up to this point most everything we've seen are cartoonishly simplified demonstrations in virtual worlds, or low stakes requests like retrieving a can of soda for you. I don't think these are simple little games because that's all AI is capable of right now, I think they're simple tasks just for demonstrative purposes and the AIs themselves are actually capable of much more as-is.

Couple this with the fact that the public is informed of AI progress much later than the AIs creation itself AND the fact the public can't know too many specifics because it's a national security risk AND it could be hooked up to GPT-4 AND it's multi modal AND OpenAI has 10 billion dollars to throw at compute AND we have AIs helping us create the next batch of AIs (plus much more going for it) then you have an insane amount of reasons why the truly life-changing stuff is so much closer at hand than you might otherwise intuit

The hardest part about making a positive impact on reality is that most people are negative about being positive.

Regardless, it’s certainly happening this decade.

Probably right - but could take a few years.

Are you daft? Go get a raft

1-It is important to understand that virtual reality (VR) fantasy and
escaping into a book fantasy are not the same thing. The main difference
is the level of immersion and first-person experience.

2-The drive to return to nature and the feeling of nostalgia and loss that is common in modern society is a reaction to the disillusionment caused by the modern way of life. Many people feel lost, and this feeling can be attributed to the lack of ability to navigate life in a meaningful way, and a mastery of oneself that encompasses all aspects of being human. it is a deep-seated drive for oneness, meaning, and transformation, we want to break out of our patterns and live outside the box for lack of better word

The longing to return to nature is not just about forests, but also about returning to our more harmonious human nature, toour childlike selves with all the curiosity and sense of exploration that comes with it. We strive to live in the flow state, but as we grow older and accumulate more knowledge and world experience, we often lose our ability to be one with ourselves and to enter the flow state. We enter a world of inner conflict and loss, and we enter the material world, which is often not satisfactory as we are trapped in the illusion of the world. athiests are more susceptible to this, that's why our ancestors were relatively better off, Religion and other spiritual practices exist to bring us back to our original state through powerful tools such as rituals, metaphors, and transformative experiences. These practices create systems that allow us to explore the world within the flow state. without them the world becomes rigid and materialistic,we get stuck and with every single aspect commoditized, things are much like a poorly designed video game.(look up transformative experiences if you're interested)

VR fantasy, on the other hand, could offer a world that a person could explore in perfect flow state, radically transforming themselves. A tailored world that offers tailored challenges and experiences that are then used to extract insight and wisdom. It could be thought of as a mix between a profound psychedelic experience and meditation. This potential is often overlooked. People naturally find this more intriguing than the current world illusion because it could allow us to finally be human again that is the true appeal of true VR

That's a shitty poem.

One point people make is about internal consistency. That's a big part of what we call reality. If you could work to build things and make friends, and random chance frequently came along and changed everything, you wouldn't feel like that work was worth doing. I think we care more about whether our current reality is reliable than whether it happens to be base reality.

Open source movement cannot be stopped by Disney or anyone for that matter.

If Ais training is made illegal public domain systems will be trained and those using illegal ais will simply hide in their discord groups.

Amazing!