Future Humans with Enhanced Imaginations May Have No Need for Virtual Reality

The idea of virtual reality has been around for decades. You put on a pair of goggles, and suddenly you find yourself immersed in a computer-generated 3D world. Technology has been slow at bringing this idea to fruition, but this is an area where we can be very confident that spectacular progress will be made. There are absolutely no theoretical roadblocks to creating an extremely vivid 3D landscape that you can view with virtual reality goggles. Making virtual reality a household reality is just a matter of making more progress in visualization technology that has been progressing at a high rate of progress for decades. No doubt within twenty years, you will be able to have spectacular virtual reality experiences at a reasonable cost.

But what about interacting with the 3D world you see while wearing the virtual reality goggles? It will be hard for an interface to allow seamless interactions. Someone wearing virtual reality goggles may be able to manipulate a controller with his hands, maybe something like a video controller. But this creates a kind of imperfect blend. You are using your hands (which you cannot see with the goggles on) to interact with the world you view while wearing the goggles. And what if you want to interact with the virtual world or its inhabitants in a way that the simple controller doesn't allow? For example, in the virtual world you might want to kiss a character on the cheek, but your simple controller may offer no way to do that.

Another idea for interacting with a computer-generated reality is an idea advanced on the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation: the idea of a holodeck. The idea is that you go into some special room where there are very sophisticated holographic projectors. All of the walls, the ceiling, and the floor of the holodeck are involved in the holographic projection. So after entering such a room, you might suddenly find yourself seeing just what someone would see at the Grand Canyon. You look all around, and everything looks just as it would if you were in the Grand Canyon, even at your feet. You may also interact with what looks like other people, but these too are just holographic projections.  There is no need to wear any special goggles.

The basic idea of a holodeck seems technically feasible, although in both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, the idea was stretched to what seemed like unrealistic extremes, as we would see people using the holodeck sitting on holographic chairs and lying on holographic beds. It would seem that a holographic projection would offer no such solidity.

The main drawback of a holograph is that it isn't a “use around the house” kind of thing, requiring a large expensive room capable of sophisticated holographic projection. Another drawback is that a holodeck seems unsuitable for a simulation in which you are walking around for long distances, such as a simulation in which you are walking around on the streets of a city.

But there's another idea for how future humans could experience something like virtual reality, an idea rarely considered. The idea is to somehow upgrade human imagination. If human imagination were somehow to be expanded far beyond its current limits, then people might have within their own minds something that would be better than virtual reality or a holodeck.

Consider the human imagination. Any one of us can conjure up a “movie in our minds,” in which we can imagine anything we can please. But what we see in our mind's eye when we daydream is kind of pale, dim, and shadowy, without many details. But imagine if that “movie in our minds” could somehow become as detailed and vivid and life-like as a widescreen IMAX movie.  And imagine if we could fill in endless imaginative details effortlessly.

Such a thing might be possible in the future, given some imagination upgrade in the human mind that might be achieved through technology, neural implants, drugs, or genetic enhancements. After such an upgrade, you might have no need for VR goggles or a holodeck. You could simply close your eyes and see in your mind's eye something that might be as vivid as virtual reality or a modern video game on a wide-screen TV. And you could shape that very-vivid reality effortlessly, just by imagining something different. In your mind's eye you could move from one city to another effortlessly, or from one planet to another planet, seeing each one as vividly as if you were watching a wide-screen movie. A hundred vivid details might flow into such scenes, flowing effortlessly from the wellsprings of your enhanced imagination.

It might be dangerous to make such an imagination upgrade a permanent part of the human mind. For with such an imagination, prisons would not be such a deterrent. Every prisoner would know that from his jail cell he could have something as enjoyable as trips to a thousand Disney Worlds, just by closing his eyes and letting his imagination gush forth.

Our Austere and Happy Future

Thesis 1: The next several decades will be a kind of Age of Enjoyment for people in the developed world. You will have a ridiculous variety of choices for stimulating entertainment, which will allow you to have huge amounts of fun throughout your hours outside of work. In addition, you will have options for experiencing consciousness and bliss beyond anything you've experienced so far. Twenty years from now, you will not envy the people living today.

Thesis 2: The next several decades will be ones of austerity, limits, and belt-tightening. Gigantic levels of government debt in the US, Great Britain, and Japan will lead to either anemic, tepid economic growth of only 1% or 2% per year, or frequent recessions in which Gross Domestic Product declines. Growing wealth inequality, rising oil prices, the specter of Peak Oil, and the need to reduce carbon dioxide outputs (because of global warming) will all lead to a landscape in which people have smaller houses and cars, spend less money, and take fewer trips.

Strangely enough, Thesis 1 and Thesis 2 are not mutually exclusive. In fact, there's a good chance that both will come to pass.

If you think that these two propositions are mutually exclusive, you may have given too much credence to some of the tenets of the Religion of Consumerism which almost all of us have been indoctrinated in since birth. You may have been indoctrinated in a monotheistic religion every Sunday, but the average American has also been indoctrinated in the Religion of Consumerism seven days a week, through media such as television and the internet. The high priests of the Religion of Consumerism work on Madison Avenue, and are abetted by leaders in Washington D.C, who foolishly regard Gross Domestic Product as if it were a good measure of national happiness.

Below are some of the hallowed tenets of the Religion of Consumerism:

1. The way to become happy is to accumulate material possessions and consume goods and services.
   
2. The larger and more expensive the material possessions you acquire, and the more goods and services you consume, the happier you will be.
   
3. The way in which you obtain status in life is by conspicuously consuming and acquiring goods, possessions, and services, so that you provoke envy from your fellow consumers.
   

If these tenets were true, then there would be no hope that we might be happy in a future of stagnant or slightly declining Gross Domestic Product. But luckily these tenets are not true. The Religion of Consumerism is a false creed.

Let me cite a few quick facts to support this claim. A study has shown that lottery winners are not happier than non-winners. Another study shows that having an income over 75,000 dollars a year does nothing to increase your happiness. Apparently multi-millionaires aren't happier than a person who makes merely 75,000 a year. Another very revealing study  examined the effects on happiness of eight types of consumption (leisure, durables, charity, personal care, food, health care, vehicles, and housing), and found that only one of them (leisure) produced an increase in happiness.

Based on these findings, let us construct a counter-creed to the Religion of Consumerism, which we may call the doctrine of frugal happiness. It might go something like this:

1. The main way to be happy is to engage in activities that you enjoy, either at work or at home (or ideally both).
   
2. If you have lots of activities that provide pleasure to you, you can be happy while spending relatively little money, and without having much wealth.
   
3. You should pay no attention to what others think about the quality or cost of goods and services that you consume, and should never pay more or buy more to impress other people.
   

Because this doctrine is valid, there is a large chance that you will be very happy in the future, even if future decades are ones of frugality, belt-tightening, and austerity.

Let's take a look at a plausible scenario for what life might be like for you in the future.

You and your friends don't drive much, because gas has gotten very expensive. You don't go on many vacations to places far away, because plane tickets have become very expensive. You haven't got as much money as you used to have, because the government has raised taxes to help cover the interest payments on the many trillions of dollars it borrowed. With the economy being weak, you don't work as many hours as you would like. But nonetheless you sure as heck aren't spending any time sadly staring into space. That's because you have countless low-cost opportunities for enjoyment and pleasure. You have a little gadget with the power of a 2013 supercomputer, which you bought without paying much money. You can download countless hour-long videos for free from many different web sites such as www.youtube.com, and you can read any of thousands of free illustrated e-books. You can video chat with your friends all over the world for free, or almost nothing. You have a choice of hundreds of insanely entertaining video games you can play on your video console using your wide-screen TV. The games have 3D graphics so realistic it's like watching a movie, and the artificial intelligence is so good that it's hard to believe you're not dealing with a human when you match wits with a computer character. You can go on interactive virtual tours of thousands of spots in the world, allowing you to do things like virtually walk along the rim of an active volcano, or virtually canoe down the Amazon river. If you ever want to talk with someone, and your friends are busy, you can talk with any of numerous software chatbots which look just like real people, and give answers and responses so realistic you can't believe that they're not humans. If you get tired of using your brain, you can try some marijuana, which was effectively decriminalized a few years back. Plus there are numerous opportunities for altered consciousness experiences, given a huge number of designer drugs, and electrode head caps providing various types of electrical brain stimulation. There are also countless opportunities for web-based erotic entertainment, which is becoming increasingly interactive. 

 

Now in such a world, are you going to look back with envy at the people in 1985 who had more car trips, plane trips, and bigger houses?

No, you will not.

Remember, the study cited above concluded that the only type of spending that increases happiness is leisure spending. So if the future gives us an ocean of super-entertaining leisure available for relatively little cost, the American of the future is likely to be a happy one, even if he drives less, flies less, shops less, and has a smaller car and house.