It sounds like the kind of technology that could:
“My next VR experience, however, took me to a place I never imagined I’d ever visit: The deck of a shipwreck. An experience on the HTC Vive headset from Wevr, theBlu: Encounter [see video above for example] teleports people to the depth of the ocean floor. There, a computer-animated whale, apparently the same scale as a real one, swims past. It’s a quick hit in a simple environment, but a stirring one. The whale looked me in the eye and seemed to grin slightly. I couldn’t help myself from smiling back. It was a beautiful moment, but an isolating one. More than anything, I wished my wife could have been there to share the undersea experience with me. I wanted her to know this awe-inspiring beauty. I also wanted her to abandon a world full of mortgages, diapers, rush hour commutes, and grocery shopping, even if just for a minute…”
However, with any advance in technology we have to ask the question, “Just because we can, should we?”
Notice, he speaks of the bliss of abandoning the responsibilities of life, like mortgages, diapers, commutes, and grocery shopping, in favor of just enjoying the dopamine. That is the cognitive mode that triggers the r-selected psychology. The pleasure and awe is so great your amygdala can’t focus on anything else.
It is kind of what those heady first days of the internet were like. Every possible piece of data seemed to be on there, if only you could find the obscure little corner of it where it was hiding. I remember digging through AltaVista looking for exactly what I wanted, and the astonishment and awe at finding it after a few pages of results. It seemed as if the entire world had just been placed at my fingertips, and I could barely turn away.
That internet experience may have produced much of our current r-slide. If Virtual Reality goes mainstream, and is as much of a sensory overload as it is described as, it could split our population even more. Rabbits will immerse themselves in the experience and go ever more r, even as K’s grow ever more K – and revolted at the Apocalypse’s approach.
Of course there is no denying reality, and the reality is we will almost certainly never be able to pay all our bills.
Things always go K in the end.
Spread r/K Theory, because we need all the K-stimuli we can get
[…] Could Virtual Reality Trigger A New Wave Of r-selection? […]
In my moments where I suspect there may be a genuine attempt and plan to thwart the worst of the apocalypse. Remember that the migrants were given cellphones and cash. It’s strange to think now, but might be able soon to instead give them a “good enough” VR headset that connects to their phone which connects to an online “chat room”…
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2017/01/10/living-wage-idiocy-and-free-money-experiments/#comment-1368228
—- “Don’t worry. The incoming wave of VR, which has finally gotten good enough to become a consumer product, is going to create a quiet and humane way to wipe out a huge portion of the population via encouraging as many people as possible to escape into childless VR existences.
People using the current technology already talk about how just a half hour makes it so when you take the device off you have trouble re-integrating with reality, including body motor skills. This is in part because due to the immersion, your brain is rewiring your body to match the “new” reality in the same way that if you put on glasses that invert your vision your brain will eventually correct this for you.
Now take your average video game player or TV/Netflix watcher and the hours spent in them. Provide those same services but in a VR world where you can be relaxing in a recliner but can control yourself with minor movements of your fingers and eventually by brain wave monitoring (already possible in other applications very well).
Spend enough time and returning to *here* will not only be difficult for most people, it will be traumatic.
This is what is going to be done with the unproductive population. They will simply be sent to die in whatever virtual heaven they want without having children. And it’s coming online just in time. Almost like… there might be… a bigger picture going on.”
Wow. Mind blowing comment.
Nothing about the early days of the internet was heady.
I read this post, and thought of Ray Bradbury’s “Dandalion Wine” Which is a collection of short stories about a boy in small town America having summer adventures/stories. Each chapter is some other little piece.
Anyhow, one of the chapters is “the Happiness Machine.” The inventor took a small room and put in it all these pictures, and sounds that he thought would make people happy. And for a time most who entered it were happy, but upon leaving and ‘returning to the real world’ they were sad again. “It would be nice to go to Paris, not just see a picture of it.”* And sadder for having entered and having to leave. *one of the pictures was of Paris
Interestingly in the story, people would return to their lives. I think in a VR future, many would try and abandon it.