Herman Narula - Virtual Society: The Metaverse and the New Frontiers of Human Experience

One day this book will be read by a person without a body.

This prediction will almost certainly come true before the end of the twenty-first century, perhaps even by 2040. Consider: We already know with some confidence that the mind is a machine that processes information. Connecting it to a computerone with the capacity to simulate an entire worldis a fully plausible outcome and, I would argue, an inevitable one. Through developments in the field of quantum metrology, we are already able to create sensors that can listen to the electromagnetic whispers of the activity of clusters of neurons. Biocompatible carbon nanotubes, which are immensely strong and immensely conductive, hold promise as neural laces: the building blocks of connections to individual neurons. If a brain can connect to a computerwhatever that eventually meansand if the computers of the future can create worlds that are as detailed as or more detailed than the one we know today, then surely a life mediated by the limits of a physical body will one day seem a pale shadow of the life of the unfettered mind.

This theoretical reader without a bodywhat some would call a post-humanwill be able to access and process information in ways we cant even begin to understand today. What might it feel like to consume this text as information directly delivered to your mind in a digital reality? Maybe comprehension and integration of the books ideas will happen instantly or nonlinearly, the hundreds of concepts forming into structures in the post-human brain at the speed of an exploding firework. Perhaps these disembodied readers will ingest this book via new senses that havent yet been invented, or will revel in a synesthetic poetry of sounds, smells, and touch as they explore concepts with a fidelity and detail impossible through the bodily senses alone. The adventures we read about in history, science fiction, or fantasy could become the actual embodied reality of a post-human society. This post-human will live a thousand parallel lives in realities we can barely fathom.

As technology and its applications continue to improve and evolve, we are approaching a new epoch in human history, one in which the possibilities of our lives will diverge from the limits of our bodies. At that point, the world of ideas will generate actual worlds that we can inhabit: constructed realities that will exist in conversation with the physical world. Achieving this vision requires no new physics, only the inevitable waves of improvement and upgrade that weve become so good at as a species. The physical tools weve devised have transformed the Earth while enhancing our lives upon it. Our many cultural technologiesthe myths and stories and rituals that have grown up alongside our toolsgive form and meaning to our innovations. Reshaping our environments, for good or ill, has been key to the survival of our species since prehistory. We have always used our imaginations in tandem with our hands to explore new worlds while expanding our own. That is the human impulse, and this dynamic will persist even as our hands will increasingly become just a figure of speech.

This vision of a virtual future might strike you as dystopian. Maybe you envision humans being reduced to rows of bloodless, pulsating brains in jars, or you worry that technological change is happening too fast. Maybe you fear that our own world may devolve into waste and chaos as we escape into cyberspace. Perhaps to you the prospect of a life mediated by machines seems like one in which well be deprived of our essential humanity.

But Id challenge you to set aside your preconceptions and consider the following: Throughout the history of our species, we humans have always imagined other, better futures for ourselves, intangible worlds that we expect to be more fulfilling and experientially rich than our daily lives. Our ability to visualize and believe in these futures is itself a cultural technology, one that we use to improve our experiences of life and reality. Depictions of the afterlife, created by artists for millennia, arent just manifestations of religious devotion: They are extensions of an ongoing human impulse to instantiate the intangible, to visualize ideal worlds and thus make them real. We have always wanted to see, feel, and understand more than we do, and in pursuit of these goals we have consistently tried to transcend the limits imposed on us by biology and geology, and extend ourselves into potential worlds mediated only by our minds.

This important and necessary social transformation does not require the direct connection of the brain to a machine. While brain-computer interfaces will mark the most dramatic final stage in this progression, the next stage of this process will see us focusing our social and cultural attentions into a series of constructed digital realities. Today, these simulations are known as virtual worlds: embodied, three-dimensional digital spaces in which people interact via avatars. These complex graphical environments, previously thought to be the province of video games and entertainment alone, are now evolving into something much more. A metaverse of virtual worlds extending into every aspect of our culture is starting to emerge, presenting new economic and social opportunities that are comparable in scope to the disruption caused by the internet. Many people have characterized the metaverse and virtual worlds as a fad, or simply an evolution of video games. I believe this limited framework is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of why humans create other realities and how we seek fulfillment.

Confusion over what the metaverse is will generate broken, inconsistent models of what it is forwhich, in turn, will ultimately lead to wasteful allocation of capital, ineffective attempts at regulation, and a magnification of the negative aspects of this disruption. My aim with this book is to help prevent these outcomes. In the pages that follow I will offer a new way to understand this massive transition toward a virtual societya transition that, if we manage it carefully and learn from the mistakes of the first age of the internet, will offer humankind incomparable new dimensions of freedom.