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Comment by bseidensticker | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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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