UPDATED 05:32 EDT / MARCH 09 2015

Facebook's Oculus Rift NEWS

The side effects of mind control: Living with Avatars (Part One)

avatarThere has been hype for many years concerning world-changing virtual world (VR) technology, but that technology has so far always fallen short of our sci-fi-honed, high expectations, or misgivings. Over the last year, people have started to take the hype more seriously, as one tech critic put it, “this time it actually seems to be on the cusp of something big.”

The apparatus of communication in the future may demand we spend much of our time in virtual worlds, just as we do now in proto-virtual worlds like Facebook or Twitter. Facebook, Inc. is already banking on a future form of communication in which we regularly access virtual environments. Virtual reality, says Cory Ondrejka, VP of engineering at Facebook, will be in every American home “just as soon as we can get it there.”

How soon, no one knows, but recent advances tell us this is not an empty statement.

When it was announced that virtual reality Facebook apps are coming to VR headset Oculus Rift, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “Virtual reality was once the dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream, and so were computers and smartphones. The future is coming and we have a chance to build it together.” Zuckerberg stated that one day billions of people will spend part of their daily lives in immersive, augmented realities.

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The side effects of virtual reality

A question a great proportion of the public often asks, and one which this article will explore, is what might be the consequences of spending much of our time in virtual or augmented worlds?

VR technology could lead to a, “renaissance in health and education,” as Skip Rizzo, a virtual reality researcher put it, and perhaps provide us with better abilities to deal with and analyze real world problems. But if virtual reality becomes attached to sponsored social media, or games that provide less education than they do exercises in dalliance and manipulation, could being plugged-in lead to being phased-out, in terms of our social bonds, or empathy with real world problems? Could the technology be too good to turn away from, or come out of?

There was much talk about Zynga Games’ Farmville  – a social network farming simulation game – addiction a few years ago, and how the game manipulated its users, and Blizzard Entertainment’s online role-playing game World of Warcraft now has a stream of begrudged Wowaholics. Are we in danger of taking the most potent of all technology’s drugs when we decide to don the VR headset, while at the same time if we turn away from this technology will we become the Luddite that decries what turns out to be a great human accomplishment?

In an article published last month in The Atlantic the writer asks about the good and bad effects of “escaping” to virtual worlds. But does virtual reality have to be escapism? One advocate of the technology in this article says VR is not escapism, but inclusion, an advanced form of communication. We, the consumer, perhaps are only at risk when we consume what is bad for our health. But how will we know what is a form of panacea – as some people see the future of VR – and how do we know what is poison?

The Verge published The Rise and Fall of Virtual Reality, an article predicated on Facebook’s 2014 $2billion purchase of Oculus Rift. The in-depth story delineates the “enormous possibility” of virtual reality, now, compared to how it was treated in the past. “Imagine 10 years ago trying to envision the way we use cellphones today. It’s impossible. That’s the promise VR has today…If you can dream it, VR can make it. It’s a medium for progress, not the progress itself,” said The Verge.

Ray Kurzweil, author, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google, known for his “accurate predictions”, wrote in 2003, “By the end of this decade, we will have full-immersion visual-auditory environments, populated by realistic-looking virtual humans. These technologies are evolving today at an accelerating pace… By the 2030s, virtual reality will be totally realistic and compelling and we will spend most of our time in virtual environments…We will all become virtual humans.”

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Can your mind be programmed in the future’s virtual reality?

The dystopian’s angle on virtual realities consists mostly of discordance with the real world, becoming apathetic to our friends, global issues, the vicissitudes of daily life. But also how easily we might be manipulated by those who create these worlds, or more importantly, sponsor them. As Jaron Lanier put it in his book Who Owns the Future, “It’s all too easy to forget that ‘free’ inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.” Undoubtedly there will be free passes into the future virtual worlds, and perhaps in those worlds our opinions and consumer decisions may be profoundly affected by some form of advertising, or propaganda.

In an interview with The Verge Lanier said, “We have to evolve out of what we’re calling the advertising business model. If you extend the idea of advertising to total surveillance in the way that we’re doing it, it doesn’t result in a stable, serviceable way to build a society. We have to all come to that recognition, find an alternative, and it’s never more true than with the VR stuff.”

Deciding not just what we consume, but how we think. Controversial documentarian Adam Curtis, whose oeuvre has focused mainly on the engineering of consent via the media and public relations, said in a blog for the BBC last year that in political terms reward systems driven by technology could prove to create a society-sized Skinner Box, in which our beliefs, our politics, could more easily be manipulated.

Psychologist B.F. Skinner believed that positive reinforcement, such as how he rewarded rats inside his famous box, could be applied in the real world with people and lead to some kind of Utopia. In a virtual world, motivated and kept happy, or at least passive, by constant rewards, Skinner thought human behavior could be controlled for the better of mankind.

A critique of this Utopia comes from Lewis Mumford, a sociologist and philosopher of technology, saying it “turns people into sleepwalkers.” Mumford explains, “This is the most dangerous of all systems of compulsion. That’s why I regard Skinner’s utopia as another name for Hell. And it would be a worse hell because we wouldn’t realize we were there. We would imagine we were still in Heaven.”

In Part Two we’ll be talking to some of the people creating VR technologies, and looking further at ‘reward systems’

Photo credit: foto_morgana via Flickr


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