A prediction of the future:
I came up with this future prediction today. If it is unrealistic somehow, or similar to an 80’s sci-fi movie, please say so.
As video and voice editing techniques get more advanced, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish crafted “quotes” from people from the real thing, finally leading to a competition between programmers making computers that can detect the difference, and programmers making computers that can mimic the real thing perfectly.
This will be brought into games, but those nerdy Xbox 360 games end up increasingly unpopular: they’re all very expensive, and that doesn’t work in a bad economy. The real money is to be made in simple, fun games that women and old people can play without feeling like geeks that make little attempt to mimic reality perfectly, because trying to separate yourself from reality is inherently a geek thing. For examples of this, look at Wii, FarmVille, Angry Birds, and Temple Run. Then look at the plethora of first-person shooters. Now imagine what a fully-immersive game is going to look like: a first person shooter.
Anyway, when the singularity does happen, and an alternate reality of your own design is buyable, it won’t be socially acceptable to pay lots of money to go to another world. That’s nerdy, again, as you’re supposed to be happy in this world. It will probably be popular in Japan, and parts of America, and we’ll probably have stories of how someone has abandoned their real life for a simulated one, all that, and maybe even a religious cult. But human society can’t support those people, who produce nothing, so it won’t be popular in most senses.
People play games to escape to a world where things are simple. To create a whole new reality in a game, and try to live in it, is really complicated. Thus, more unpopularity.
As virtual reality systems are increasingly able to impersonate human beings accurately, movies will be made about romances between gamers and virtual people. The gamer will be a girl and the virtual person a guy, to attract a female audience and shake things up a bit. It will be called into question whether something that reacts like a person really thinks like one. Sooner or later, these expensive artificial constructs, made entirely to mimic the increasingly understood human brain, will be fully capable of emotions, and with a couple billion dollars thrown in, will maybe even be self-aware.
The answer as for what to do with these people trapped inside machines could be found in the military, who, this entire time, has been building remote-controlled soldier drone tanks to spearhead assaults and be in difficult situations, human faces only present increasingly to create a connection with the occupied populace and to create jobs to be and support those people. The virtuals are given robotic arms to control and interact with the world by good-intentioned people, but the plan for robotic bodies is scrapped due to difficulty of replicating sensory organs and walking, along with being too similar to some dystopian sci-fi movie.
A news story surfaces about someone creating virtual minds over and over again, torturing and killing each one. In a landmark case, he is imprisoned for life. Laws are made mandating responsibility for created virtuals.
Virtual-reality-creating machines are mandated to have internet, so that the virtuals can interact with people other than their owner. Online communities are formed, and many of them get jobs doing tech work (as of course each virtual is capable of doing the equivalent of typing on a computer and moving a mouse). A few even manage to support the machine that makes them exist, especially as they become cheaper.
The virtuals, through lots of effort and funding, finally make a communal reality capable of supporting them all with relative cheapness and efficiency, after new tech enables virtual brains to cost just a little more energy than organic ones.
And thus, the singularity gradually occurs in the developed world, with a particularly large number of adherents in Japan, and then across the first world, with small numbers of adherents across the rest.
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Originally Posted by Adar
