What will be the implications of augmented reality on relationships?
Augmented reality technology is advancing rapidly and recently made significant breakthroughs. What will be the implications when it gets to the point where people can put on their VR goggles and project an entirely life like image of a super model over their spouses body?
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Debate Stats
Total Comments: (8)
Date Started: November 8, 2011 - 7:37 am
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Comments
I forget the person I’m quoting (it might have been Kaku, but I haven’t had my coffee and might be making it up), but here’s my general answer:
Things will get really interesting when augmented reality, whether it be virtual or in real time, becomes cheaper than regular reality. If that happens, our biological roles will come into serious question.
Guess what – I am already there.
It will be veru amusing. Why? Because the treshold for people to offer amusement to others, and have it distilled into games and apps and addons and features and animations and ……. utterly new things will be very low.
And now envision a world-wide virtual/augmented/enhance reality market with several billion consumers….. and several billion producers. All crowd-sourcing away to come up with The Next Kewl Thing.
Oh and next to amusing it will ear-splitting, annoying, petulant, predatory, trollish, offensive, degenerate, perverse, hedonistic, superficial, infantile, sophomoric, prejudiced, laggy, outdated. Envision Youtube, interactive, everywhere, all the time.
Beauty has a meaning: you are symmetrical, biologically fit, able to produce healthy babies. You can fake it only up to a degree and if you do not deliver…to ..ell with you. You pass out under the mask, a dotting elder; the “real reality” whose true ugly face even the hot facade of Kim Kardashian’s could not hide. I do not think the technology is anywhere near there to fool a person completely. You’ll step through the fake into the ugly, a nasty awakening: no babies.
Sure, there are other technologies in the making that promise to heal your tissues and restore you through and through, which would be the real thing. Again, the world would not be anywhere near perfect: imagine the petty squabbles of Olympian gods.
You invoke a metaphor from the known past to describe a human of immortal post-humans. This is only natural, since that is what you know – “things which are known”.
Now try and accept the fact there will be states (as you may affirm has happened consistently throughout history) unknown to current generations which will be common in the next. Absolutely new knowns.
You cannot impose cliché’s and stereotypes and matrices of the past on the future. It never worked.
Wow. Well, if the illusion could be maintained into the bedroom, and after, then it would be the end of adultery as we know it. Yes, there would always be irreconcilable differences in personalities, but the simple lust that leads many men (and not a few women) into the arms of strangers would be stymied. Why take the risks involved with bedding another woman when your own wife appears to be anyone from Helen of Troy to Jean Harlow to whoever is the current media heart-breaker.
One is put in mind of the Jack Black comedy, Shallow Al.
The one problem I can see is that if great beauty is universal, is it still remarkable enough to be pursued. If everyone can be a Robert Redford or Myra Loy, how does any one of us standout?
victor-storiguard.blogspot.com
that’s really all that needs to be said.
your spouse could look like other people, or always look they way they did when you married them.
Of course it is awkward unless the sensory effector technology is completely ubiquitous with the human body, otherwise everyone would be wearing glasses to bed – and that’s weird.
So when I make love to someone who looks to appear biologically hardwired to be the ultimate genetic sex success what then becomes a critical scarcity?
- an interesting conversation
- grace of movement
- imagination
- very strong morals, or
- very low scruples
- very funny
- very witty
- inexhaustible
- highly educated or erudite
- good with the interface
- quick
- highly connected
etc.
Note that when people talk about virtual realities and such things, a large percentage of people will respond with considerable hostility. Try as an experiment talk about “virtual reality games will take over everything” and just study the responses of people.
It is almost as if many (most?) people resist the new VR/AR societal paradigms of masscommunication much in the same manner as they would resist the influence of a strange religion, the habits of a foreign tribe, or a very peculiar dietary constraint.
VR/AR is a very new thing, and especially the more extreme characteristics (such as total immersion) arouses feelings of extreme recalcitrance with most members of society. It makes people feel challenged and *jealous* as if VR/AR itself is as a stranger trying to take away their loved ones.
In essence this is what people fear. And that’s why I don’t fear VR/AR myself – it can only GIVE me new loved ones, and I don’t have many to lose to these mediums.