A few years ago, while doing research for a virtual reality (VR) program at MIT that I would be running, I donned a VR headset and played a ping-pong game. The game was so realistic that it momentarily fooled my brain. When it ended, I instinctively tried to put the paddle down on the “table” and lean against it. Of course, the table didn’t exist, and I almost fell over. It was so easy to trick my senses into thinking that virtual world was real that I began to think about what would happen to humanity if we kept developing this technology. In 2019, I wrote a book called The Simulation Hypothesis, in which I laid out the 10 stages of technology development that would take us to the Simulation Point, where we won’t be able to distinguish our virtual worlds from the physical world; or AI characters that live in those virtual worlds, from real humans.
Full story : The Metaverse Is Coming; We May Already Be in It.
