Lets assume we develop the capacity to create virtual worlds that are near indistinguishable from the real world. We hook you up into a machine and you now find yourself in what effectively is a paraller reality where you get to be the king of your own universe (if you so desire). Nothing is off limits - everything you’ve ever dreamt of is possible. You can be the only person there, you can populate it with unconscious AI that appears consciouss or you can have other people visit your world and you can visit theirs aswell as spend time in “public worlds” with millions of other real people.
Would you try it and do you think you’d prefer it over real world? Do you see it as a negative from individual perspective if significant part of the population basically spend their entire lives there?
you’re assuming though that the virtual worlds wouldn’t help to solve (or at least make irrelevant) those things
virtual worlds would likely be significantly more efficient than reality: if you don’t need to make physical products because you only need software and 3d models, manufacturing for most things just evaporates… less extracting resources from the earth, less energy spent refining resources and assembling parts, etc… no need for lighting, entertainment and social venues, office space… people would need far smaller houses so when they do need to travel, it’s probably going to be somewhere much closer to them - and for that matter, why travel?
perhaps lots of our worlds problems fall away when people can have whatever they like - when we aren’t competing with each other, and exist in a (virtual) world of plenty, perhaps some of societies more intractable problems will just cease to be problems. i’m not saying that would happen, and i don’t have any citations, but i’d say it’s certainly possible
what’s so special about the real world? if your experiences are fundamentally the same thing, why does it matter if it’s a real or a virtual experience? certainly there are things we can’t do virtually - scientific advancement and generally discovery likely requires some interaction with the real world, but even than could be done via interfaces to the outside world rather than specifically existing all the time in the real world
This reminds me of the conversation at the end of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and I think the arguments for and against are effectively the same.
Come to think of it Huxley would have had a lot to say about VR if it’d been around in his day.
Correct, I didn’t go as far as OP with the proposition of “virtual worlds that are near indistinguishable from the real world”. With that assumption your arguments invalidate my concerns.