What’s better, Reality or Virtual Reality? My thoughts on AI and the Human Factor
A blog post inspired by both Alastair McDonald and Paul Champan’s D&T lectures.
Is everyone right to fear AI or are we just in another transition period?
There have been many significant advances in technology over the past century which have completely re-imagined the way we live. However, none have been as powerful as the introduction of AI. When washing machines replaced hand-washing clothes in a bucket, we feared that our lives would become boring and without purpose. When we replaced writing letters with sending emails, we worried our pace of life would increase too much.
Until we learned how to adapt.
Everything is scary when you don’t have a clear view of the other side. AI could be the best thing that’s ever happened to us. People have spent decades of their lives training themselves to do monotonous tasks, wasting years of their lives sitting at desks filling out spreadsheets and surveys, trading 5 days of mind-numbing work for 2 days of half-assed enjoyment. AI will do all of that for us, if not now, eventually. We should be thrilled at the thought of low-purpose, cog-in-a-machine jobs becoming a thing of the past, but we’re not, why?
The fear of unemployment, the human race being replaced by robots and needing to learn a whole new way of life are valid concerns – but one’s that will seem so insignificant in the decades to come. We can’t see what the future holds, it’s even harder to prepare for it, so we need to just adapt with the times. The current world is obsolete compared to the technology we have available. The knowledge we have and speed at which we can attain it creates limitless possibilities for our civilisations. The job market, current transport systems, farming, education etc. are all due refurbishments.
AI is changing our lives; it’s making them a lot more human. We’re removing monotony, idleness, brain-rot and replacing it with human connection, community and experience. In the early 1900’s, washing our clothes by hand didn’t provide us with purpose, it provided a distraction; slaving away on a meaningless job a robot could do doesn’t provide the modern person with purpose, again, it provides a distraction. It’s scary to think about how we’re supposed to live without these common routines we’ve all become so accustomed to, but the outcome is guaranteed to be more fruitful. We’re not going to end up working for “the robots” if they could do the job better.
Virtual reality. An oxymoron in itself, is a tool / experience which has become widely popular in recent years. Allowing people to immerse themselves into video games, simulating “real life” high-stakes scenarios. However, it begs the question when is enough, enough? A rather depressing possibility sees the basement-rotting gamer spend their life in a fantasy world where everything is exactly how they want, running away from reality. On the other hand, it’s being used as a tool to greater enhance the human experience. Researchers have been able to simulate lab environments to optimise their setups and workflows before experimenting on the real, expensive, fragile equipment. There’s an argument here for the flexibility that’s allowed – a lab technician can check up on their experiments, virtually, from the other side of the world but it still doesn’t replace the real thing.
Athletes train the mental game just as much as the physical, if not more. Virtual reality allows athletes to simulate once in a life time experiences: walking out into a stadium of 60,000 people, racing in front of a home crowd, fighting 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. There is an underlying knowledge of course when undergoing these simulations that they aren’t reel, however the heart rate still skyrockets, breathing becomes quicker. Is it useful to see these things before they actually happen to prepare us, or are we better left none the wiser?
The best moments in sport come from the human instinct. The buzzer-beating shot to win the NBA finals, the impossible try-conversion to win the 6 Nations, the 0.001s difference between 1st and 2nd place in the Olympic 100m. These are all moment’s you can’t prepare for in real life. The adrenaline, focus and expertise required to pull these moments off are what’s truly special. It’s that feeling of having never been in that situation before and knowing you’re never going to be in it again. Had you been there 1000 times before in VR, you may be familiar but unable to utilise the pressure and nerves required to get the job done.
Is there a difference in reality vs hyper-real VR?
Yes, it’s the human factor.