Are you scared of the Metaverse

You are not alone if you feel this way, I think everybody who is scared of the metaverse has already watched the movie “The Matrix” or something quite similar and that has really biased our thinking negatively against such ideas. I don’t think those movies go too far from reality but they tend to exaggerate things, quite frankly there is no telling what will happen if robots can think for themselves, if the metaverse becomes a reality or even if aliens come down to earth, all we can do is speculate based on previous information, except for the fact that we don’t have previous information about these. All what we can do now are inferences and speculations while tip-toeing into everything we do, without even mentioning how divided the scientific community is on such issues, some think AI is useful while others think its going to lead to our demise, some think there are no aliens out there while others feel like there are aliens out there just too evolved for us to see.

The metaverse on the other hand is quite a new experience we haven’t dabbled alot into but from the movies we already have an idea about what it could look like. Lets just reflect on the idea of the metaverse just from the premise and see why it is so scary.

Imagination to Reality

Imagine all your wildest dreams coming to reality all in an instant, imagine being a superhero and always getting the girl at the end of the movie or being a billionaire with legions of people worshiping you, imagine being able to fly or even able to transform into a dinosaur. I can’t even imagine enough of things that people could possibly want to do out there, but one thing is sure is that we all have a very creative imagination and there are definitely things we would want to change about our current lives. Even the millionaires and the billionaires out there would want to change one or two things about their current lives. The idea behind all this is “the quest for happiness”, we are all seeking to be happy all the time, so we are only going to imagine the things which we think will make us happier. Of course the very first days you are going to be happy but trust me, after those first few hours, you are going to return to be even sadder than you were before, the way the brain works, it has to be in a state of balance where you are happy and sad at sustainable levels, too much of any will make you crave for the other so much that it might even kill you.

That is why drug addicts feel so bad when they are off drugs, they feel so bad that they rush back to the drugs to make them feel good again, except that its the same drugs which makes them feel so bad. Just imagine happiness like water, if you drink too much you will drown and if you don’t drink enough, you will be dehydrated and eventually die too. The problem with the metaverse is that, it basically gives us a world of happiness which is totally unrestricted, imagine your kids who could play video games all night without eating nor drinking water to the extent you are forced to take them off the game, those games have levels and an end, now imagine a metaverse where you create whatever you want and do whatever you like, as long as your real body doesn’t die, there is no reason why you would unplug.

The Utility

I think most people feel like the metaverse is dangerous because we can imagine anything we like and do it, but there is a bigger danger, which is that of the metaverse being so useful that we can’t imagine living without it. Just consider your smartphone, before we had all these appliances like; radios, tvs, calculators, watches etc we used for the information we wanted but now all those have been reduced to this box we carry around, now imagine the metaverse taking this even further, it could literally make even computers obsolete. Let me take the example of the software products we use, if you could design a software with your imagination and get it to work in a certain way, then I see a lot of programs becoming obsolete. For example; photoshop — if you can import a picture into the metaverse and edit it using just your imagination, then photoshop will be useless.

In the same way as smartphones became so much useful in this decade, I fear that the metaverse might become even more useful with the main difference being that we would not be using our fingers to do the work but rather using our consciousness and maybe our eyeballs.

Reality

The scariest part is what will become of reality then? All those millennia of construction and building a livable society, all those traditions and values humanity has upheld for so long. Can we even call ourselves human beings anymore? The metaverse will make everything obsolete; democracy, law, money, social norms, love etc. Literally everything you can think about will become just a thing of the past, our lives will just be reduced to some bytes in a server somewhere. Reality has never had to compete with anyone, we knew that whatever happens to us was just life and we accepted it like that, but this time around whether for good or bad, we’ll have more reasons to plunge ourselves into a virtual reality where life can be whatever we want than to just accept reality for whatever it is. We can literally craft the reality we want for ourselves, so the only thing which will hold us back will be our mortal bodies and maybe the electricity bills we have to pay.

Mortality

What's also scary is how far we could possibly take this, in the movie “The Matrix” people live in a simulation and their original bodies are in these tubes where they are kept alive in some cryogenic fluid, they receive nutrients through some tubes just to keep themselves alive but all of their consciousness is somewhere else. For all of their lives they have never even seen reality, they have lived in a simulation since birth and that's all they’ve known. The metaverse just makes the future look even more realistic because once we are inside a simulation which gives us all we want, the only thing holding us back from being there would be our mortal bodies, so we might possibly look for ways in which we can maintain our bodies alive while remaining inside the metaverse. I see that happening in two ways, either we go by the matrix style kind of nutrient feed tubes or we design a way to transfer our consciousness into machines, either ways, we’ll lose our mortal bodies.

Evolution Breakpoint

As human beings and living things we are constantly subjected to evolution, which is influenced by our actions, environment and interactions. The metaverse poses a threat to evolution because most if not all of our actions are going to be transferred into a virtual world, there would be less incentive for people to explore the earth or even other planets, there will be no need for new buildings or even businesses, the food industry might crash leading to an overpopulation of certain species and humans might simply slow down their own evolution. In the advent of a new disease, the incentive might not be to find a cure but rather to protect our bodies, if covid comes back around, we wouldn’t be looking for a cure, people will already be indoors all the time, so there will be no point to that. Unfortunately, slowing down our evolution like that might mean that other species might evolve past us and make us the prey instead of the predator. Evolution happens when man discovers new things, explores the universe, studies his surroundings and adapts to the adversity all around him, deals with the problems he faces and finds solutions to the challenges in front of him but if we are stuck in a virtual world then there would be no need for us to face difficulties, the only problems we would care to solve are the ones stopping us from getting into this virtual world.

The Good news

Unfortunately! the good news is also the bad news, virtual reality is going to be very useful. We would be able to do things at faster speeds than ever before, forget about going to school by leaving your house, you would have access to world-class material in an instant. Businesses all around the world will be able to work fully remotely without having to ever shake hands, communication will be the best, forget about group chats on WhatsApp and messenger, you will be able to see the person and even hug them, you could even simulate the feeling in reality. You will be able to explore the world and do things you never imagined you could do, feel things you never imagined you could feel, since emotions are all just brain impulses, we just need to record the impulses in one person’s brain and trigger the same impulses in everybody else. There are so many advantages to the metaverse that I could go on and on about, but I think the bigger takeaway is that, it is about to change reality as we know it (….maybe).

Thanks for reading!

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