Well, the WEF's Yuval Harari says it'll likely be a combination of drugs and video games that will be used to placate the "useless people" once the utopian dream of owning nothing, having no privacy, and nonetheless being happy is realized. I guess the powers that be will turn their attention to developing newer and better narcotics and video games once they get done dismantling everything in our civilization that they can't fully control. Looking forward to your followup pieces on this subject!
On a different note, old school arcades were a different variety of, rather than a replacement for, in-person socializing. I guess they're not what Harari has in mind, though, for all us "useless people."
"On a different note, old school arcades were a different variety of, rather than a replacement for, in-person socializing. I guess they're not what Harari has in mind, though, for all us "useless people."
This is an excellent point. I remember flirting with girls there, swapping jokes and stories, making plans to hang out, etc.
I guess we'll get to flirt with computer-generated women in the metaverse, the VR realm where Mark Zuckerberg (or some such tech oligarch) is god. What fun that will be!
This is sounding more and more like Guantanamo Bay on acid. What you're describing is effectively the Matrix, which I feel is the goal of the transhumanist bio-digital convergence, or at least part of their goal.
Yes, but it will be even more insidious. Unlike the Matrix, it will be not be Morpheus offering you the pill, but Agent Smith (and, in some sense, the devil himself). And the blue pill won't make you forget the compact you made. You will be like Cypher and his steak, but without the memory wipe.
It is, although I suspect that this VR Matrix, with all its baubles and promises of self-fulfilment, is going to be just a motel break on the way to a full-fledged hive mind. That, in my opinion, is the transhumanists’ true destination/destiny/end goal, whether they fully even realise it themselves at present or not.
After all, if meatspace becomes increasingly irrelevant, and is ultimately made obsolete so that you can spend each day in a reality where you literally cannot tell player from NPC; if you can reinvent/respawn yourself and you reality at will; if anything at all that anchors you to a sense of self - body image, relationships, memories, experiences - can be infinitely customised and retconned - then the obvious question is “who _are_ you?”Does ‘you’ even exist in any meaningful sense in such a context?
"It is, although I suspect that this VR Matrix, with all its baubles and promises of self-fulfilment, is going to be just a motel break on the way to a full-fledged hive mind."
This.
I explore it a bit in my follow-up "Nightmare" piece, but the implications for mind control techniques could fill several books. It would make MK Ultra look like some hacky stage hypnotist swinging a pocket watch.
Terrifying thought! Hive-mind describes it well. Maybe that’s how they view us, worth no more than an ant they may unthinkingly trod upon.
Why do these people want to lead us down a garden path that ends in a hellscape so badly? Is it a sociopathic trait I wonder? They seem to lack all ability to appreciate and value things that are real and exist now without having to plug into something. A sunny day, the beauty of a flower, the power of a hug shared with one who loves you, laughing with a friend, a perfectly cooked steak, the smell of babies, a good cathartic cry, playing a game with your kids or grandkids…I could go on and on.
Their thinking is fundamentally gnostic in nature - they see the world (and humans) as inherently flawed. None of the beauty of meatspace means anything to them; it’s all wheels within wheels, pieces of a jigsaw to be shuffled and reshaped in their need to ‘improve’ on what’s pictured on the box.
Thanks for the response. To be so disconnected from the blessings of the here now is very tragic to me. I believe anyone who wants to live like that is free to do so, but forcing the rest of us into it is not at all acceptable.
Very astute. Having spent time in India and made navel gazing an important part of my life, I can attest that 'you' don't exist. And of course, yet you do in the structural form you take to experience the contrast and lessons of human experience. It's that attachment to form we tend to take for granted and associate as 'you'. Removing human experience and having a disembodied self creating and recreating in a seamless virtual world - which they may not even realize is virtual - is definitely going to be carbon neutral, devoid of organic life. And the shock at 'waking up' to it, like Neo realizing he's in a construct reality... Which then begs the question, What is real? Isn't this life here now, as the Bard put it, but a dream?
Thank you - of course it's turtles all the way down if one decides to take it to its logical consequences, but you see what I was getting at. We do exist in physical bodies operating in a physical world, in a web of physical interactions, however illusory/arbitrary it may all be from the point of view of Godhead - the Buddha blissfully meditating on a mountaintop still has his fingers firmly stuck in the mud of this world even as he strives to transcend it.
What baffles me about transhumanism is that for all its harping on about "freedom" it basically boils down to little more than trading in the tried and tested limitations of the biological for the limitations of the technological, which come with whole, barely imaginable hierarchies of dependence attached. But of course "freedom" was never really the end goal. I think Dan Simmons nailed what an actual transhuman society could be like in its Ilium/Olympos books - for the 0.01 percenters, bona fide superhuman powers; for everyone else, atomisation, comfort, conformity and cheap entertainment on tap. Then again, Simmons wrote the books before Clown World really emerged so I assume he abstracted his vision from a relatively saner time. As things are now, if They win, the endgame is going to turn out more fake and ghey than anyone can possibly imagine.
Incidentally, it's also interesting how throughout history, the religions that obsess over the illusory nature of the self and reality have invariably laid the foundation for extremely conformist, top-down societies where the rulers rule because reasons, the abbots have an absolute blast going over the finer details of the Eight-petaled Tripartite Blossom of Eternal Wisdom (TM), and for the serfs the wisdom distils down to "tough luck pal, but hey, at least you're not a cockroach. Obey your betters and try again".
"Incidentally, it's also interesting how throughout history, the religions that obsess over the illusory nature of the self and reality have invariably laid the foundation for extremely conformist, top-down societies where the rulers rule because reasons..."
Spot on. And I think it's due to the revival of a certain meta-religion (begins with an S), which has worn various secular masks for the past three hundred years or so. In it's latest formulation, postmodernism has been subsumed into a broader transhumanism which abnegates the Self in favor of the Hive/Machine model of reality.
The "you" that supposedly does not exist doesn't reside in the structure of the flesh or even in the gestalt of its organizational processes and inclinations, but rather in the observer/agent who makes choices and tells stories about their outcomes. "We are spirits in the material world," as a certain English poet once noted, before he fell down an infinite shaft of Buddhist meta-delusions. Still, that's quite a bit more sound (or, at least, less broadly destructive) than the brain-as-Self model that has infested and corrupted authoritarian Scientism for at least five generations now. Even the "you are a communal ecosystems" model isn't is spiritually and physically dangerous.
Yes, and then there’s taking it further. Transgender prep for transhuman is itself prep for posthuman. I think there’s a deep subsumed drive to extinction, where only the superpowered elite remain.
This is a lovely vision of the gaming future. I mean, it's a nightmare for game developers, graphic artists, voice actors and so on. But it'll be boon for indie game creators.
I will say that the full immersive Matrix/Cyberpunk tech isn't there yet. I have multiple friends who've worked with VR and the hardware is just too uncomfortable to wear for long, and the altered perception makes a lot of people react poorly (vertigo, nausea, etc). Those might get fixed given enough time and money. Of course, they've been promising fixes for that since the 80's....
Me, I'm mostly still playing older (and indie) titles. Turn-based strategy or puzzle games that aren't as dependant on twitch reflexes or dealing with annoying players online. Heck, I still play Master of Orion 1, which is the gold standard for gaming AI, for me.
But, as I'm sure you're aware, if they do fix the hardware + meatsuit interface issue, things are going to dystopia fast. And the Amish will inherit the Earth. Which is fine, I guess.
"This is a lovely vision of the gaming future. I mean, it's a nightmare for game developers, graphic artists, voice actors and so on. But it'll be boon for indie game creator."
Yes and no. As I mention in my follow-up, ML is and will continue to be a powerful tool when used narrowly. But I don't think it will be a good tool for story-driven game dev, indie or AAA, for all the reasons I mention and more. In fact, I think it will be very destuctive.
"But, as I'm sure you're aware, if they do fix the hardware + meatsuit interface issue, things are going to dystopia fast. And the Amish will inherit the Earth. Which is fine, I guess."
Gee Mark, your imagination is on fire here, in the best possible way. An astonishing and vivid and probably accurate vision of a possible future. Dream or nightmare? Well that's a different question.
Hey, but you could tell your grandkids all about that time you led the Assyrian army across the Mississippi to storm the fortress of the six-breasted Amazons from Beta Draconis, one of whom would fall in love with you after you bested her in single combat and eventually become their grandma.
If you had any grandkids, that is. Which you won’t.
Great read. Took me back to the arcades, and then forward to the nightmare, extending what we have already seen with deep fakes, dali, and chat gpt to games.....
"Obviously I have more to say. But I’m trying to keep these posts to a reasonable length".
This isn't anything more than a bit of reader feedback: I'd rather have unreasonable length posts dealing with a subject in its entirery, in stead of series about it.
That's fair. My answer is that it's been hard to do that, because I don't get paid much for it. The longer a piece gets, the more mistakes I will make (I can't afford editors).
But here is the concluding half of the article, if you're interested:
It reads to me like a marketing spiel from someone who wants you to invest in their "guaranteed profit" scheme of "the future of gaming". What happens when someone finds the magic words that will bluescreen the game's AI like ChatGPT?
(Which reminds me of the trolls in game chat who type things like, "Press Alt-F4 to activate your character's dance animation!")
Haha. In fact, when reading it I had a sudden thought of your other fiction writing and went: "This is painting an imaginary world, but just because it says it's describing the future doesn't actually make it real, rather than science-fiction." Thence the thought-train to "marketing brochure".
I actually think this sort of idea in general could be cool if it can be made to work (more realistic NPCs that actually have a "conversation" with you? Nice...) - but looking at this from the technical side, it would be a nightmare to debug for anyone who still wanted some control over the flow of the game. Complex systems in general (not just AI) are notorious for giving bizarre and unexpected outputs for certain innocuous-seeming combinations of inputs. Putting more of the game in the control of an unpredictable system is a recipe for disaster.
I would guess that it's most likely that some indie/small-shop games would come out with something like the "chatGPT NPCs", and would end up being at best regarded as "really cool concept, that's fun enough to let you overlook the flaws and weaknesses", but too risky for AAA games to take on (unless someone sold them on your brochure, in which case maybe they'll lose a bit of money on it).
(On the other hand, regarding the AI-assisted game development, I could see some movement in this direction; where we now have frameworks like Unity that let you insert your assets and script your game without writing the whole engine framework, it might in future include tools that let you generate the assets as well from prompts... but I predict similar limits based on the "complex system -> unpredictable/uncontrollable output" problem.)
You're continuing to read my mind, TB. Agree with most of this. Been working on a followup piece about "The Nightmare" version of soup-pot, and it indeed talks about the QA testing dilemma, unpredictable story damage and more.
Shades of The Matrix and Tad Williams’ OtherWorld! I’m assuming this is what Zuckerberg is busy scheming away on with his META?
I do enjoy a good immersive RPG game (I’ve played Mass Effect, BioHazard and The Elder Scrolls, to name a few) so I can see how on the surface this landscape you painted of what is basically a new and improved gaming world sounds fun. That’s the trap mechanism.
Can’t wait to read the shop drop part in your next installment!
"The world is a strange enough place, I think, that those who escape into dreams as a more exciting alternative are missing the point. And they miss out, as well. Human interaction is a gift."
x1000
Excellently put. When the stakes are all illusory (i.e. "I'll just revert to the last save-state"), even a trashy Hollywood movie becomes more exciting.
Right. It might be different if respawning actually taught you something useful, instead of just squeezing more time-juice out of you. In life, there are no save states, 1-Ups or Extra Men.
Well, the WEF's Yuval Harari says it'll likely be a combination of drugs and video games that will be used to placate the "useless people" once the utopian dream of owning nothing, having no privacy, and nonetheless being happy is realized. I guess the powers that be will turn their attention to developing newer and better narcotics and video games once they get done dismantling everything in our civilization that they can't fully control. Looking forward to your followup pieces on this subject!
On a different note, old school arcades were a different variety of, rather than a replacement for, in-person socializing. I guess they're not what Harari has in mind, though, for all us "useless people."
"On a different note, old school arcades were a different variety of, rather than a replacement for, in-person socializing. I guess they're not what Harari has in mind, though, for all us "useless people."
This is an excellent point. I remember flirting with girls there, swapping jokes and stories, making plans to hang out, etc.
I guess we'll get to flirt with computer-generated women in the metaverse, the VR realm where Mark Zuckerberg (or some such tech oligarch) is god. What fun that will be!
Well, the WEF's Yuval Harari says it'll likely be a combination of drugs and video games that will be used to placate the "useless people"...
This is a good enough reason to stay away. Whatever they say, do the opposite.
Yep. This is indeed becoming the most useful heuristic.
Bread and circuses.
That's pretty much all that late-stage empires produce!
This is sounding more and more like Guantanamo Bay on acid. What you're describing is effectively the Matrix, which I feel is the goal of the transhumanist bio-digital convergence, or at least part of their goal.
Yes, but it will be even more insidious. Unlike the Matrix, it will be not be Morpheus offering you the pill, but Agent Smith (and, in some sense, the devil himself). And the blue pill won't make you forget the compact you made. You will be like Cypher and his steak, but without the memory wipe.
It is, although I suspect that this VR Matrix, with all its baubles and promises of self-fulfilment, is going to be just a motel break on the way to a full-fledged hive mind. That, in my opinion, is the transhumanists’ true destination/destiny/end goal, whether they fully even realise it themselves at present or not.
After all, if meatspace becomes increasingly irrelevant, and is ultimately made obsolete so that you can spend each day in a reality where you literally cannot tell player from NPC; if you can reinvent/respawn yourself and you reality at will; if anything at all that anchors you to a sense of self - body image, relationships, memories, experiences - can be infinitely customised and retconned - then the obvious question is “who _are_ you?”Does ‘you’ even exist in any meaningful sense in such a context?
"It is, although I suspect that this VR Matrix, with all its baubles and promises of self-fulfilment, is going to be just a motel break on the way to a full-fledged hive mind."
This.
I explore it a bit in my follow-up "Nightmare" piece, but the implications for mind control techniques could fill several books. It would make MK Ultra look like some hacky stage hypnotist swinging a pocket watch.
Terrifying thought! Hive-mind describes it well. Maybe that’s how they view us, worth no more than an ant they may unthinkingly trod upon.
Why do these people want to lead us down a garden path that ends in a hellscape so badly? Is it a sociopathic trait I wonder? They seem to lack all ability to appreciate and value things that are real and exist now without having to plug into something. A sunny day, the beauty of a flower, the power of a hug shared with one who loves you, laughing with a friend, a perfectly cooked steak, the smell of babies, a good cathartic cry, playing a game with your kids or grandkids…I could go on and on.
Their thinking is fundamentally gnostic in nature - they see the world (and humans) as inherently flawed. None of the beauty of meatspace means anything to them; it’s all wheels within wheels, pieces of a jigsaw to be shuffled and reshaped in their need to ‘improve’ on what’s pictured on the box.
Thanks for the response. To be so disconnected from the blessings of the here now is very tragic to me. I believe anyone who wants to live like that is free to do so, but forcing the rest of us into it is not at all acceptable.
Very astute. Having spent time in India and made navel gazing an important part of my life, I can attest that 'you' don't exist. And of course, yet you do in the structural form you take to experience the contrast and lessons of human experience. It's that attachment to form we tend to take for granted and associate as 'you'. Removing human experience and having a disembodied self creating and recreating in a seamless virtual world - which they may not even realize is virtual - is definitely going to be carbon neutral, devoid of organic life. And the shock at 'waking up' to it, like Neo realizing he's in a construct reality... Which then begs the question, What is real? Isn't this life here now, as the Bard put it, but a dream?
Thank you - of course it's turtles all the way down if one decides to take it to its logical consequences, but you see what I was getting at. We do exist in physical bodies operating in a physical world, in a web of physical interactions, however illusory/arbitrary it may all be from the point of view of Godhead - the Buddha blissfully meditating on a mountaintop still has his fingers firmly stuck in the mud of this world even as he strives to transcend it.
What baffles me about transhumanism is that for all its harping on about "freedom" it basically boils down to little more than trading in the tried and tested limitations of the biological for the limitations of the technological, which come with whole, barely imaginable hierarchies of dependence attached. But of course "freedom" was never really the end goal. I think Dan Simmons nailed what an actual transhuman society could be like in its Ilium/Olympos books - for the 0.01 percenters, bona fide superhuman powers; for everyone else, atomisation, comfort, conformity and cheap entertainment on tap. Then again, Simmons wrote the books before Clown World really emerged so I assume he abstracted his vision from a relatively saner time. As things are now, if They win, the endgame is going to turn out more fake and ghey than anyone can possibly imagine.
Incidentally, it's also interesting how throughout history, the religions that obsess over the illusory nature of the self and reality have invariably laid the foundation for extremely conformist, top-down societies where the rulers rule because reasons, the abbots have an absolute blast going over the finer details of the Eight-petaled Tripartite Blossom of Eternal Wisdom (TM), and for the serfs the wisdom distils down to "tough luck pal, but hey, at least you're not a cockroach. Obey your betters and try again".
"Incidentally, it's also interesting how throughout history, the religions that obsess over the illusory nature of the self and reality have invariably laid the foundation for extremely conformist, top-down societies where the rulers rule because reasons..."
Spot on. And I think it's due to the revival of a certain meta-religion (begins with an S), which has worn various secular masks for the past three hundred years or so. In it's latest formulation, postmodernism has been subsumed into a broader transhumanism which abnegates the Self in favor of the Hive/Machine model of reality.
The "you" that supposedly does not exist doesn't reside in the structure of the flesh or even in the gestalt of its organizational processes and inclinations, but rather in the observer/agent who makes choices and tells stories about their outcomes. "We are spirits in the material world," as a certain English poet once noted, before he fell down an infinite shaft of Buddhist meta-delusions. Still, that's quite a bit more sound (or, at least, less broadly destructive) than the brain-as-Self model that has infested and corrupted authoritarian Scientism for at least five generations now. Even the "you are a communal ecosystems" model isn't is spiritually and physically dangerous.
Yes, and then there’s taking it further. Transgender prep for transhuman is itself prep for posthuman. I think there’s a deep subsumed drive to extinction, where only the superpowered elite remain.
This is a lovely vision of the gaming future. I mean, it's a nightmare for game developers, graphic artists, voice actors and so on. But it'll be boon for indie game creators.
I will say that the full immersive Matrix/Cyberpunk tech isn't there yet. I have multiple friends who've worked with VR and the hardware is just too uncomfortable to wear for long, and the altered perception makes a lot of people react poorly (vertigo, nausea, etc). Those might get fixed given enough time and money. Of course, they've been promising fixes for that since the 80's....
Me, I'm mostly still playing older (and indie) titles. Turn-based strategy or puzzle games that aren't as dependant on twitch reflexes or dealing with annoying players online. Heck, I still play Master of Orion 1, which is the gold standard for gaming AI, for me.
But, as I'm sure you're aware, if they do fix the hardware + meatsuit interface issue, things are going to dystopia fast. And the Amish will inherit the Earth. Which is fine, I guess.
"This is a lovely vision of the gaming future. I mean, it's a nightmare for game developers, graphic artists, voice actors and so on. But it'll be boon for indie game creator."
Yes and no. As I mention in my follow-up, ML is and will continue to be a powerful tool when used narrowly. But I don't think it will be a good tool for story-driven game dev, indie or AAA, for all the reasons I mention and more. In fact, I think it will be very destuctive.
"But, as I'm sure you're aware, if they do fix the hardware + meatsuit interface issue, things are going to dystopia fast. And the Amish will inherit the Earth. Which is fine, I guess."
Haha!
Gee Mark, your imagination is on fire here, in the best possible way. An astonishing and vivid and probably accurate vision of a possible future. Dream or nightmare? Well that's a different question.
Oh, you're gonna get the Nightmare, soon enough. ;-)
And then you die...and you never lived....?
Hey, but you could tell your grandkids all about that time you led the Assyrian army across the Mississippi to storm the fortress of the six-breasted Amazons from Beta Draconis, one of whom would fall in love with you after you bested her in single combat and eventually become their grandma.
If you had any grandkids, that is. Which you won’t.
When I wrote the line:
"They will recast various roles with their favorite actors, or even with people from their personal lives."
I almost added:
"(if they still have one of those)."
But I didn't want to blow the gaff. Giving the devil his due, as they say.
This is a good argument for why we're probably already in such a simulation.
An innocuous vision of Really Terrible Orchestra makes rounds in my mind 😇
🗨 truly to appreciate skill, you must appreciate the absence of it.
Best wishes for copy editor to get well soon, in time for part two 🙂
Great read. Took me back to the arcades, and then forward to the nightmare, extending what we have already seen with deep fakes, dali, and chat gpt to games.....
Yeah, Gary. It's gonna get real weird, real fast. Which is why we need to strengthen are spirits as well as our tools and techniques.
"Obviously I have more to say. But I’m trying to keep these posts to a reasonable length".
This isn't anything more than a bit of reader feedback: I'd rather have unreasonable length posts dealing with a subject in its entirery, in stead of series about it.
That's fair. My answer is that it's been hard to do that, because I don't get paid much for it. The longer a piece gets, the more mistakes I will make (I can't afford editors).
But here is the concluding half of the article, if you're interested:
https://markbisone.substack.com/p/the-games-that-will-play-you
The Soup Pot reads like Choronzon and it’s underlying technology not unlike that of the actual Demiurge.
It reads to me like a marketing spiel from someone who wants you to invest in their "guaranteed profit" scheme of "the future of gaming". What happens when someone finds the magic words that will bluescreen the game's AI like ChatGPT?
(Which reminds me of the trolls in game chat who type things like, "Press Alt-F4 to activate your character's dance animation!")
As a matter of fact, instead of "The Dream", I called it "The Brochure Version" in an earlier draft. Maybe I should have stuck with that.
Haha. In fact, when reading it I had a sudden thought of your other fiction writing and went: "This is painting an imaginary world, but just because it says it's describing the future doesn't actually make it real, rather than science-fiction." Thence the thought-train to "marketing brochure".
I actually think this sort of idea in general could be cool if it can be made to work (more realistic NPCs that actually have a "conversation" with you? Nice...) - but looking at this from the technical side, it would be a nightmare to debug for anyone who still wanted some control over the flow of the game. Complex systems in general (not just AI) are notorious for giving bizarre and unexpected outputs for certain innocuous-seeming combinations of inputs. Putting more of the game in the control of an unpredictable system is a recipe for disaster.
I would guess that it's most likely that some indie/small-shop games would come out with something like the "chatGPT NPCs", and would end up being at best regarded as "really cool concept, that's fun enough to let you overlook the flaws and weaknesses", but too risky for AAA games to take on (unless someone sold them on your brochure, in which case maybe they'll lose a bit of money on it).
(On the other hand, regarding the AI-assisted game development, I could see some movement in this direction; where we now have frameworks like Unity that let you insert your assets and script your game without writing the whole engine framework, it might in future include tools that let you generate the assets as well from prompts... but I predict similar limits based on the "complex system -> unpredictable/uncontrollable output" problem.)
You're continuing to read my mind, TB. Agree with most of this. Been working on a followup piece about "The Nightmare" version of soup-pot, and it indeed talks about the QA testing dilemma, unpredictable story damage and more.
Exactly.
Wow
Shades of The Matrix and Tad Williams’ OtherWorld! I’m assuming this is what Zuckerberg is busy scheming away on with his META?
I do enjoy a good immersive RPG game (I’ve played Mass Effect, BioHazard and The Elder Scrolls, to name a few) so I can see how on the surface this landscape you painted of what is basically a new and improved gaming world sounds fun. That’s the trap mechanism.
Can’t wait to read the shop drop part in your next installment!
https://meowwolf.com/visit/denver
"The world is a strange enough place, I think, that those who escape into dreams as a more exciting alternative are missing the point. And they miss out, as well. Human interaction is a gift."
x1000
Excellently put. When the stakes are all illusory (i.e. "I'll just revert to the last save-state"), even a trashy Hollywood movie becomes more exciting.
Most people spend a ton of energy upgrading their virtual life but almost none on their real life. Maybe it's because you can't respawn if you fail.
Right. It might be different if respawning actually taught you something useful, instead of just squeezing more time-juice out of you. In life, there are no save states, 1-Ups or Extra Men.