There has been a lot of talk in recent times about human interaction moving into a kind of 3D cartoon on-line world. Sort of a combination of Snow Crash and Ready Player One.
But I’m not so sure that this is really what people want. We humans are in love with faces. Not imitations of faces, but the real thing.
We love movies, theater, TV shows. We hang out in restaurants and shopping malls and coffee shops. We love activities that involve looking at actual human faces.
Sure we also love cartoons, but they aren’t as central to our emotional well being. People love Toy Story, but they are obsessed with the worlds of Harry Potter and Star Wars.
When we seek out entertainment, actors with real faces seem to speak to us in some special primal way. And in these pandemic times, we generally don’t reach for the many available on-line cartoon worlds to connect with the people we care about.
Instead we use video chats like Zoom and Skype. We don’t want to see simulations of the people who are dear to us — we want to see the real thing.
There is a good chance that this will always be the case, because it has been baked into our brains through millennia of human evolution. We are emotionally hardwired to seek out real face to face communication, and I suspect we always will be.