Nick Green

Category: Long form thoughts

Things that take more than a few lines to express.

  • Social VR is weird. Really weird. And probably the future.

    Social VR is weird. Really weird. And probably the future.

    I got nauseated for the first time in VR today, and I’m still not sure if it was from losing my VR legs for a minute, or if it was because chat rooms in VR can get super weird. And there was a baby.

    When Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 and declared social VR to be the future, there were many that were dismayed by the idea, as if the dark overlord had just revealed his plans to control, and therefore ruin, their VR dreams. Mark Zuckerberg has reiterated on numerous occasions that “VR is going to be the most social platform,” and though I agree with him, it is unfathomable to me that people think that he came up with this idea, or will be in any way able to dominate the space.

    Snowcrash (1992)
    Snowcrash (1992)

    The dream of social VR really goes back to Snow Crash (Stephenson, 1992), where the “Metaverse,” a virtual alternate reality that is reached by using one’s computer to interact with others using your avatar, is laid out in great world-building detail. I know that Gibson started pulling at a similar thread in Neuromancer (1984), but I don’t think he fully realized the extent to which social interaction would act as VR’s raison d’être. Like many others, I consumed the book within a few years of its release not quite grokking that VR would someday soon be realized.

    The dream resurfaced in 2003 when Second Life launched, a massively multiplayer online, and ultimately clunky and disappointing, video game aimed at providing a user-created, persistent virtual world. I was fascinated by the idea behind it, and spent far too many hours suspending disbelief in the primitive graphics and low frame rates.

    Though the technical challenges of relatively low internet speeds and the game’s way of delivering graphics (the server would generate the image and send the image to the user) proved to be too much for the success of the game, it was at least a successful step in the direction of the dream of the social virtual world. Yes, there was a lot of weird stuff in Second Life too, from sex dungeons to griefers, but it still felt enough like a video game – 2d screen, clunky controls – that it never really impacted me in a negative way.

    Fast forward to today, when technology is finally starting to catch up with the VR dreams of 25 years ago, there are multiple social VR platforms, and I entered one with no reservations. After a couple of false starts getting things set up, I finally found myself in a room with about 15 other floating avatars hanging around a huge screen showing YouTube videos. There was an interface where anyone can search for and add videos to the list, vote on which one they want to see next, and vote to skip the one currently playing.

    I was immediately hit with a wave of anxiety, which is weird, since I’ve been comfortable with every other VR game I own and have played for a couple of months, and spent countless hours in my 20’s playing social games on 2d screens. This time it felt more real, more immediate. More weird. A video of someone in a wheel chair sloppily eating a chili dog was quickly followed by real footage of Hitler giving a speech, and one of the avatars immediately stood in front of the screen and started shooting ‘applause’ emoji out of his head. After retreating to the back of the room and asking a few questions about how the video interface worked, and about halfway through the subsequent borderline softcore porn Nicki Minaj video, the baby appeared.

    BABY_GettyImages_86481433

    Well, child, I guess. Their avatar was about half as tall as the other avatars, which makes sense in retrospect, since the headsets are tracked in space, and the kid was actually closer to the ground in real life; it was actually a toddler on the other end, donning a VR headseat and fully engrossed. The short avatar was waving their Vive controllers at other people, saying “hi!” and mumbling lots of nonsense, as toddlers tend to do. I was both hit with a jolt of cuteness because, well, toddler mumbling is cute, and a wave of dread, since there are so many potential ramifications of a tiny child wandering around unsupervised in a VR social space. When a death metal video came on the screen and someone said suggestively next to the child, “this song makes me want to kill my parents,” a couple of us went in search of a mod to try and kick the pint-sized orphan out for their own good.

    Social VR has a lot of potential – the immediacy of VR can convey emotion in highly concentrated doses – but much like Reddit or other social platforms, it will only truly shine when heavily moderated, and therefore is perceived as safe. A VR version of 4chan’s /b would be truly terrifying. Call me old and stodgy, but if you’ve never felt the impact of social VR then you don’t yet know how much it starts to feel like real life, and we have established social and legal rules in real life.

    I’m not saying that we should try to rule the VR social space with an iron fist (we know that never works online), but that if we are going to have little kids running around, probably unable to distinguish between real worlds and virtual worlds, then we need to start putting some serious though into how all this is going to work. Because the dream is finally here, and everyone should pay attention.

    As I ripped off my headset last night and tried to recover from my persistent feeling of sweaty nausea, I questioned whether what I had experienced was good or not. I think, just like life, social VR is both good and bad, and extremely weird, and that alone is enough evidence to show that virtual worlds are finally here.

     

     

  • The Utopia of Free Time

    The Utopia of Free Time

    There is no question that technology continues to make menial jobs redundant: one journalist can now do the job of many, armed only with an email account and google, teams of bank employees that used to process checks have now been replaced with optical sensor technology, and tax accountants are increasingly becoming anachronistic as more and more sophisticated consumer software allows people to navigate doing their taxes on their own.

    Is this altogether a bad thing? It would be easy to spin the story of our fledgling post-singularity society as heading to hell in a handbasket, but it would also to be possible to view it in a positive light. Rather than threatening our survival, perhaps it is allowing us to transcend survival.

    There is a frequently repeated anecdote regarding housewives in the early 20th century and how household appliances were supposed to free up time and ease their burdens. As a plethora of appliances were shutterstock_96193475invented and became available to the average consumer, fancy new household gadgets were increasingly marketed to women as tools to make their lives easier. The conclusion of the oft-repeated story is that even though increasing automation of household tasks made women’s jobs easier in some respects, it actually tied them even further the household. They became beholden to an army of appliances.

    However, a study from 2009 by the University of Montreal suggests that the inventions of the fridge and washing machine are actually responsible for the liberation of women to join the working world. They became more free to pursue higher challenges. It is with this in mind that I wonder why so many people are scared of the increasing automation of our society at large.

    In early 2014, The Economist published what I consider to be an alarmist word of warning against the computerization of jobs.  They believe that as technology replaces more and more low-level jobs, we will have a smaller, more skilled workforce as well as rampant unemployment. Similar to the video I linked to a few weeks ago explaining the inevitable replacement of human labor with machines, it’s a little like the technological forecasts of the mid-twentieth-century, but with a dystopian rather than utopian slant.

    To economists, of course, greater unemployment is the kiss of death to a healthy society. In the short term, I agree that employment results in a more robust global economy, but I disagree with The Economist in one important way: I don’t think that capitalism is the lens through which we need to view this issue. Similar to the Canadian housewives that were able to enter the workforce because hand-washing clothes became obsolete, perhaps being free of the shackles of labor for survival will free us up to accomplish higher level tasks.

    For the last decade or so, we have been bombarded by survivalist, pessimistic science fiction. The 2004 remake of Battlestar Galactica is the perfect example of this proliferation of pop cultural warnings against our dependence on technology. The human race is nearly destroyed by our own robotic creations; the only humans that survive are the ones not connected to the internet, and therefore not susceptible to the high tech domination of the Cylons. I’m not sure exactly when this fear of technology in our culture became dominant; growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, there was always a Star Trek to balance out the Bladerunner, a Diamond Age to balance out the Neuromancer.

    replicatorIn the Star Trek version of the future, you can press a button, state what type of food or beverage you want, and it will appear. The protagonist is then free to discuss interstellar politics at his or her leisure. Are they bemoaning the loss of cafeteria jobs that inevitably succeeded the invention of such a food-creation device? No, that’s silly. They’ve surpassed survival by using technology, allowing them to spend their free time doing post-survival things, like drinking earl grey tea and discussing alien politics.

    Just as household appliances allowed many previously housebound people to enter the workforce, the technology that will make our workforce obsolete will free us to spend our time doing more important things.