Lets assume we develop the capacity to create virtual worlds that are near indistinguishable from the real world. We hook you up into a machine and you now find yourself in what effectively is a paraller reality where you get to be the king of your own universe (if you so desire). Nothing is off limits - everything you’ve ever dreamt of is possible. You can be the only person there, you can populate it with unconscious AI that appears consciouss or you can have other people visit your world and you can visit theirs aswell as spend time in “public worlds” with millions of other real people.
Would you try it and do you think you’d prefer it over real world? Do you see it as a negative from individual perspective if significant part of the population basically spend their entire lives there?
Yes, I would want to resist it. Life is about ups and downs, and I think the better idea would be to have an open-source augmented reality, maybe through glasses that you wear or contacts on your eyes, that can project shared images, like virtual props that everyone else can see, or just act as a VR HMD and replace all your vision with a virtual world for a while.
But bodily autonomy is very important, give people a choice and let them be informed by publishing the source code, PCB diagrams and all that kinda stuff so they know how it works and that they’re not being controlled.