The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our technologies

Today I gave a talk where I showed some recent research to a really great group of students, followed by a lively discussion. Because my talk touched on the topic of virtual and augmented reality, a number of the questions were about the long term societal impact of advanced VR and AR.

I was surprised that questions kept returning, repeatedly, to variations on the worry that replacing the real with the virtual would result in people becoming disconnected from reality.

I kept giving variations on the same answer: Humans, by our very nature, live in a virtual reality. Century after century, we develop new technologies, then we convince ourselves that those artificial technologies are reality.

And those technologies are, indeed, reality, to the extent that we use them to communicate with each other. For in one way we are the same as any other species: Our day to day reality is comprised mainly of interaction with other members of our species. Everything else is just detail.

Therefore, any technology that supports our interaction with other humans seems like reality.

Think of all of the highly artificial inventions that we have somehow convinced ourselves are “real”: Agriculture, clothing, written language, moveable type, pianos, telephones, ball point pens, radio, washing machines, automobiles, cinema, airplanes, television, air conditioning, the Internet.

None of these things actually exist in any meaningfully objective sense, other than as interfaces that help people in their interaction with other people. Without human minds around, they are all just utterly meaningless collections of atoms and bits.

They seem “real” to us only because we find them useful for connecting with other human minds. Should it turn out that some kind of virtual or artificial reality ends up being equally useful for connecting with other human minds, then we will eventually cease to label it as technology.

Like the houses we live in, the shoes on our feet, the glass in our windows, or the stores where we purchase our groceries, they will become invisible to us, just another part of our reality.

But temporarily, while any of these things are still new — whether they be books, phones, movies, comic books or whatever — we can become convinced that *this* time will be different, *this* technology could be the end of civilization as we know it.

I understand the argument, but I don’t agree with it. If we didn’t manage to destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, we’re not going to do it with pixels.

2 thoughts on “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our technologies”

  1. Interesting — you’re moving the discussion away from the perceptual space.

    What aspects of the algorithms do you think pose the greatest threat?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *