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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

This comment[1] from a previous thread on the "metaverse" has stuck with me: there are real, living people who think that the world of Ready Player One is a valid aspirational goal, and some of those people work on projects like this.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28930355

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It is always weird to me how some people see the dystopian aspects of dystopian fiction as inspiration. They will see cautionary tales about certain technology and respond by trying to build that technology. It is even more bizarre when these people will openly admit it and name their product something like "Soylent".

The universe isn’t black and white. Hell it can’t seem to quite agree on where it’s particles are at a fundamental level (until we figure out what measurement is - see latest Sabine YouTube video). Further things are often negligible for some scale, great/useful for some scale, then outright horrible past some other scale.

Though naming something Soylent did always seem too on the nose.

It's not all "black and white". But this suggests a very superficial reading of source material this is purportedly based on. It's saying "Hey that future looks kinda cool!!!" at a very superficial level without a deeper reading of how peoples' material conditions are affected.

You can see that through Cyberpunk. People will think that if a world like that exists it’s exiting it’s full of challenges and amazing. Instead of having to leave a “boring” life in a “boring” world with all these limits.

The creator of Cyberpunk said that during the hype of the video game he was so sad to see that people really wanted to see it happen in real life because when he created this universe it was suppose to be a critic what the future with technology can bring instead of wishing it to become true.

I have to say Elon Musk and his fans doesn’t help.

You know what's worse than the world of ready player one? The world of ready player one where there is no VR.

I don't think creating fully immersive VR is inherently bad.

It's been a decade since I've read it, but my recollection is that the book tightly conjoins the success of VR to the crumbling of the world's institutions and societies: there's a positive feedback loop between VR escapism and not tackling the world's problems.

I'm not sure that "fully immersive VR" is intrinsically bad, at least not any worse than our current less immersive digital world. But it's not hard to see how VR can make a bad situation worse.

I'd argue that people would have more incentive to fix their real world if they hadn't had a fake one to escape to.

True, but you can use that argument against most forms of entertainment. Books, movies, video games, DND, sports, etc... VR is just another thing people can do in their leisure time.

Everyone here is freaking out "oh no, Facebook is going to make something so entertaining society will collapse". I would be so proud of myself if I created something so entertaining society collapsed, lol.

And why is that do you think? Is it inherently better, or is it only temporarily better? Have the social creeps, corrupt bastards and rapacious motherf*ckers arrived yet, or are they next year's customers? Because, I can guarantee you right now, unless someone's developed some kind of psych-AI to filter out those folks, there is NO WAY, your utopian VR world will stay "better than" the real world (assuming it even is "better than" in its most ideal form).

I have a belief - you can call it "phs318u's law" - There is no system, no structure, no belief, and no technology that can solve for the worst of humankind. Period. Eventually, bad humans > everything else. Kind of like a social entropy - its a one way journey.

Given the rare earth metals and countless other resources needed to run all the necessary technology, the two "real worlds" would not look the same. And that's not even factoring in the effect of having countless people checked out of real reality in the VR case, with correspondingly less desire to fix it.

The world of ready player one where there is no VR has some guillotines and maybe a future.

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