Should we be afraid of virtual reality?

Prominent
authors like Susan Greenfield and Roger Scruton have raised worries about the rise of virtual worlds such as Second Life, which
they fear might have a negative impact on human relationships, as people
increasingly spend their lives hidden behind an “avatar”. The movie Surrogates, recently released, precisely pictures a future humanity that lives
as it were by proxy: the story takes place in a world where people stay at home
and send remote-controlled “surrogates” – androids that are typically younger
and better-looking versions of themselves – out in the world to do things for
them. In the same vein, American futurologist Ray Kurzweil predicts that within a quarter of a century, virtual reality (VR) will rival the real
world: “If we want to go into virtual-reality mode”, he says, “nanobots will
shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will
become commonplace”. However, far from sharing the worries of people like
Greenfield and Scruton, Kurzweil believes this is a prospect we should look
forward to.*

The
success of virtual worlds like Second Life or World of Warcraft, each of which
boasts more than 10 million users who spend on average about 20 hours a week in
alternate reality,
suggests that such anticipations are not completely far-fetched. Author Edward Castronova
has even suggested, in a book published two years ago, that the near future
will be marked by an “Exodus to the Virtual World” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007):
he foresees that some people will be spending all of their lives in such a
world and more or less disappear from reality, the question being how large
this group of people will be. Let us assume that it might turn out to be
substantial. Should that give us cause for concern? Hazards we might foresee in
such a scenario include the following:

1)    What we might describe as a loss of
authenticity in people’s lives. As Robert Nozick suggested in Anarchy, State
and Utopia and its
famous section on the “Experience Machine” (Basic Books, pp.42-45), at least
some of us want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them (p.43):
things like going out with friends, traveling to faraway places, or engaging in
a romantic relationship. People spending their lives immersed in VR would
merely experience simulacra of such activities, and their lives would arguably
be of less value than if they had really been doing such things. VR-enthusiasts
like Kurzweil seem to oppose such a distinction, maintaining that “[i]n virtual
worlds we do real romance, real learning, real business. Virtual reality is
real reality.” But clearly part of the interest of VR is that it allows people to do (virtually at least) things
that they cannot do in the real world, if only because access to such things is
difficult; and it seems plausible to think that there is an important
difference between my actually going to see the pyramids of Egypt, or having sex,
and my sitting alone in my house in an armchair with electrodes plugged into my
brain (or nanobots running around in it), believing I am doing these things –
especially if my gorgeous partner has been created by computer programmers, and
I have never set foot out of Oxford, UK.

2)    A decreased opportunity to practice
the virtues. Arguably, I am less courageous if I spend several years leading
troops of fictional soldiers to face fictional dangers in my spare time, than
if I actually go and work as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan – even if
we assume that when I plug into my VR war game I forget, as long as I am
playing, that it is just a fiction. My acts of bravery in the fictional world
might still deserve some praise, but surely the fact that I am not really in danger – and knew before plugging
in that I wasn’t going to be – when I am playing diminishes the amount of
praise that is owed to me for my courage. VR thus promises to give us the
feeling of being virtuous without the costs that virtue often imposes in the
real-world – a mere simulacrum of virtue. It would also support a selfishly hedonistic lifestyle if large numbers of people decided to spend as much time
as possible plugged into an imaginary world rather than actually doing things
and helping other, real human beings.

3)    A quick fix for life’s problems.
Castronova considers the
example of “a heavy-set girl from a small town who gets victimised just because
her body isn't the 'right' kind of body”, and “goes online to make friends
because she can't get a fair shake in the real world”. He sees this as a
legitimate way of taking “refuge” from an inhospitable world. But such a
solution might also occult alternative, more desirable options, such as
overcoming the influence of the suspect social norms that caused the girl to be
victimised, by working to change those norms (though of course this isn’t
something a person could achieve on her own) or at least by escaping their impact,
for instance by moving to a new area where she might find people who would
accept her as she is – which importantly, might also help her to accept herself
as she is. True, VR
does provide people with the opportunity to have fun experimenting with new
identities, which seems innocuous provided that they do not do this because
their actual identity makes them unhappy; in the latter case, however, VR looks
like a less than ideal solution.

4)    Social disaffiliation. What would
happen if VR became so attractive to people that they found it preferable, all
things considered, to live on benefits and spend their existence in the more
pleasant virtual world? And even if the law prohibited them from doing so, we
might still imagine large amounts of people going to work only in order to be
able to afford their “second life”, and doing their best to retire early so
that they might at last “disappear” into VR. Obviously, such a trend would
drive people further away from democratic participation, as their concerns
would shift from this world to the other one, provided that the political regime in
place allowed them to plug in for long enough.

I don’t
wish to depict VR simply as an evil. How harmful or beneficial it will turn out
to be will depend on the use we make of it. In some Western countries, the
average person already spends around 30 hours a week watching TV.
If people spent that time immersed in VR instead, it isn’t clear that things
would get worse. And assuming that spending a reasonable amount of time (maybe
less than 30 hours a week) watching TV or playing traditional video games can be beyond
reproach, VR – when used with moderation – might simply constitute a further
improvement upon these forms of entertainment. Moreover, we should not forget
that VR can also provide educational and therapeutic (in the context of
psychotherapy) benefits.

What
would be worrying, for the reasons outlined above, would be an extreme version
of Castronova’s “exodus” scenario. If it turned out that the actual world could
never be as satisfactory as the virtual one, at least for some people, then it
would be difficult to argue against the legitimacy of the exodus. But there are
reasons to believe otherwise, especially as modern technology becomes increasingly able to help
us achieve fulfillment by changing ourselves and the world around us. It would
be disappointing if it ended up being used instead to help us escape from this
world into a fiction – a new opium of the people.

* Kurzweil
also anticipates that within the same amount of time we might become immortal.
Though I’m more willing to share his enthusiasm about such a prospect, I won’t
discuss it here.