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The Coming Age of Next Realities

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more. —Morpheus

In this scene from “The Matrix” movie, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) explains to Neo his reality is actually only a VR simulation, which was created by machines to prevent humans from discovering their enslavement. As illustrated in Fig. 2.3, Morpheus holds a capsule on each of his palms providing Neo with the above-mentioned option to escape this VR simulation. Interestingly, Morpheus refers to the real world as “Wonderland” whereas Sutherland refers to the VR using this term. In recent years, the VR industry has make a remarkable upward trajectory. This is the time when the early adapters began to embrace VR as the headsets hit the consumer market. The focus of many developments in the area of VR is on games. VR games provide a novel form of entertainment, which is already enjoyed by a worldwide consumer base that demonstrates immense energy and enthusiasm for VR and games. With the exciting new generation of VR technology, and unbelievable and creative content, our industry will continue to thrive in the following years. As described in Chap. 3, humanity has been thriving, in large part as a consequence of technological innovation. These technological innovation enabled humans to make extraordinary progress in particular in terms of lifespan and economic well being. Finally, we have seen that the trajectory of these advances heavily depends on the trajectory of digital technologies that fuel and shape all the rest. The question remains for how long this positive trajectory will continue, and if so, will it lead to further human thriving, or to something else?

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 F. Steinicke, Being Really Virtual, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43078-2_10

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10 The Coming Age of Next Realities

10.1 The Singularity Emerging technologies have the potential to allow humans to overcome their fundamental limitations and to develop physical and intellectual capacities beyond those which are available to humans today. Furthermore, is it likely that Computer Science and Engineering will eventually develop programs installed on corresponding hardware that has the capacity to outperform humans on every test of intelligence. Some computers are already capable of outperforming humans in a wide array of activities such as chess games,1 quiz games2 or Go playing.3 While intelligent, interactive computers are common in fiction, it may not take too long for such computers to be able to pass the “Turing Test” as well [1]. We are moving quickly in the direction of producing smarter computers, but what happens when we build computer programs that are smarter than their creator? The philosophical direction of thought associated with