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Comment by pharke | Hacker News Reader

I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point. The current generation of VR seems like the first halting steps into that world. Progress towards realtime raytracing and massively online social worlds look like the next steps. The lofty goals of brain machine interface companies whisper faint possibilities of "jacking in" at some distant date.

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We need to have a stable and sustainable enough industry and society for technological advance to keep occuring. We may never populate space or even get our act together soon enough to prevent early destruction of what we've got. The mundane issues of trust, politics, human nature, etc, may prevent us from exploring many possible futures.

I'm saying this not to be a downer, but to impart that we should all have an eye on solving or mitigating those mundane problems, so we can get on to solving the more fun ones.

>> I'm still holding out hope that we'll get that "mysterious and sexy place" at some point.

In the year 2000 up to maybe 2004, it was definitely a mysterious and sexy place... The absence of good search engines made it mysterious and pornography made it sexy.

The human brain processes ~40gigabits/second of information. Current direct brain interfaces are probably closer to 400bits/second Computer to Brain. I think it's very possible that we will hit wetware limitations for direct brain interfaces an order of magnitude or two less than ~40gigabits/seconds. With less information to process the digital worlds created by brain machine interfaces will be significantly less stimulating than the real world.

In conclusion I believe the real world will always feel more real, and be generally preferred because the digital world will provide less total information to our brains than digital worlds, even with brain machine interfaces.

Neal Stephenson's 2019 book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" describes a path forward to the mysterious and sexy place through upload. Upload removes the wetware limitations and provides the most likely candidate for a mysterious and sexy place.

I would argue that that number is a bit high for sense input. Figures I've seen are about 20x lower on the high end. The only time I've seen estimates as high as the one you gave are when they are considering the full field of vision for each eye and translating that directly to pixels assuming there is 100% fidelity. Human vision doesn't work that way, we dedicate far fewer neurons to our peripheral vision outside the fovea. You also have to remember that neurons transmit data at a much slower rate than electrical connections (100m/s vs 300,000km/s) so the path to building a better brain machine interfce is to have a large number of electrodes which seems to me a fairly straightforward problem to solve e.g. make them smaller and adding more of them. The other side of the coin is that we aren't aware of all of our sensory input all of the time so you can get away with only transmitting the important stuff which greatly reduces the bandwidth needed. Further out, there's likely some form of abstraction going on inside our brains and if we can communicate data on that level we'll likely need even less input to create a realistic experience.

As an aside, I don't think I'd opt for the type of uploading outlined in that novel considering it involves a posthumous destructive scan of the connectome. There wouldn't be any continuity so you'd probably just end up with a copy. The only type of uploading I could see working would be a Ship of Theseus approach where you gradually replace your biological neurons with artificial neurons and even that causes some hesitation.

We're not jacking in and penetrating black ice with tech stolen from a corporation-state, but I still think the Internet is mysterious and, if not "sexy", at least endlessly fascinating. Both because you usually never know what device you're actually accessing and where it is, and because it's not uncommon to have no idea who put it there or why.

>We're not jacking in and penetrating black ice with tech stolen from a corporation-state

I'm not so sure about that. Stuxnet, the Shadow Brokers leaks, and who knows what is being sold on the black market; this continuity seems very close to the plot of a cyberpunk novel.

I'm with you there. I think as long as we keep up the old visions and cherish them, somebody will make it real. For me it looks like logical way forward but it may not to everyone. The popularity of AR may break VR in the future.

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