I have much to say about this virtual world indocrination, but I’ll keep it short at first.
A) What will be the reaction of gamers when online games become nothing more than work?
Can you picture a day when you never leave home, and robots fight wars on battlefields–Will you then contribute to the war effort by tapping a keypad all night, to provide electric pulse energy?
Yes, your self will be removed from the physical threat, but what will you think of your self when your self owes everything to a character in simulation? At what point might you stop putting a value your birth self in relation to your natural environement? Will your identity be shattered?
Do you think there is a diffence between your grandma going at the internet hesitantly, and you being forced in your golden years to adapt quicker than you mind will allow, or perish?
The Future of Emotion vs. Logic
B) Given the likelyhood of humans matching the mood of a computer, going cold and numb, rather than the other way around, installing the robot with time honored emotions like us, do you think emotion will go the way of the dodo bird, extinct?
Is suicide bombing the last resort, the only method for the “irrational outrage?” I hope not. Is my hope now an emotion liabiltiy to be logically destroyed, or tactically dismantled?
emotions will go, one way or another. they represent a pre-cognitive level of information processing, and since they predate thinking, they are to a certain extent replaced by and rendered obsolete by thought.
thinking is more powerfully able to gain accurate information about the external environment… we are still very much more informed about our internal state, however, by our emotions. to a large extent, emotional responses to the world around us is an echo, evolutionarily useless but surviving nonetheless because of its attachment to internal emotionalism. eventually, if our perception and cognition evolve to a sufficiently large degree, emotional responses will first become unnecessary, then redundant, then detrimental.
so the “death of the emotions” in the present sense that we mean passions or feelings of sentiment will happen regardless. of course, this would probably take millenia to occur naturally. youre right that computerization and VR may bring about this deadening of emotions much faster, and not in a beneficial way (i.e. not because we are ready for it as a species).
emotions currently are very important to our lives. when we interact with false realities (TV/computer/VR) and replace active experience for a passive stasis of having data shoved uncritically into our mind (the brainwaves during sleep and while watching TV are nearly identical), our emotions dont respond or register effectively. we feel emotional when watching TV to the extent that these images/media are personalized by us; the mind THINKS its experiencing something real. to the rudimentary brain, TV images and real-life are indistinguishable.
but as we continue to depersonalize our media exchanges, due to overstimulation, mental fatigue and a complete lack of feedback stimulation or interaction, our emotions get more and more desensitized and tend to respond less. likely, each generation is, at this point, far less “emotional” in the sense of experiencing deep, meaningful and profound passionate experiences tied with their daily lives than the previous generation-- and this will probably continue to escalate at an ever-increasing pace.
as for working in VR, we do that already. most professional jobs consist of living in and interacting with an artificial reality for a large part of the time. eventually, as business and production/consumption move more and more online, youre right that a large part of people will just work at home, never needing to leave. we will ‘plug in’ to the database with our wireless devices (or perhaps brain implants by then) and work with and talk to other people without ever needing to meet face to face. of course, there will likely always need to be some minimal level of real interaction, but its lessening all the time.
the digital age is transforming man. our species hasnt met an environmental pressure so strong since the last mass extinction and the global ice ages. how we end up adapting to this new environmental pressure, especially considering we created it and we could exercize control over it, we will have to wait and see. there are many possibilities, and plenty more that we probably cant even imagine. but we can be certain that humanity in 1000 or even several hundred years will be drastically different from today, both in terms of civilization as well as our internal human nature.
unfortunately, the odds dont seem to favor this change moving in a positive direction. but in the end, who knows? negative change and hardship is the best catalyst for positive change, so there is always hope for the enlightenment and transcendence of humanity. but its certainly not a given by any means.