In “The Three-Body Problem” science fiction trilogy, there’s a constant tension between the “escapists” who want to leave the galaxy and its problems and those who want to stay. We don’t have the technology yet to escape the universe on near-lightspeed ships. But in the tech community there is increasingly a discussion about another form of escapism—solving our social and unemployment problems with a combination of universal basic income and virtual reality.
Or, as you might think of it on pop culture terms, intentionally opting to live in The Matrix.
Here’s an alternative plan: We should slow down, if not outright stop, our practical escapist movement to virtual worlds. And give ourselves more time to achieve a better future where we can more broadly leverage human abilities as a global community.
Everyone needs something to do that they feel valued for by society. Historically that has been work, although in theory it could be something other than work. As we are facing a shortage of work, we either need to make meaningful work for people or solve the bigger problem—finding something of meaning for people to be engaged with.
The Human Attention and Labor Problem
As most people now recognize, we have a clear problem with human labor on the near horizon. For starters, the economy is unlikely to grow the way it has for the last 200 years.
We have been “blessed” for several hundred years with a lot of opportunity and a lot of things to be engaged with as people. For starters, unlike earlier periods of human history, the population has been growing robustly with lower infant mortality rates, better medical care, and a lot more wealth to support children. But the population growth rate is slowing. And, even if things like longevity projects somehow rejuvenate that growth rate, we have long moved beyond the point where food, clothing and shelter production will map to more human productive engagement.
Beyond sheer population growth, we have opened up successive waves of “terra nova” to develop in the last few hundred years. The opening of physical space like the American West and the global marketplace has been one form of opportunity. Rebuilding after the two world wars was another big, if not flattering, opportunity. And, of course, we have had a few waves of virtual terra nova in the form of the global financial markets, the internet, and mobile.
Sadly, at this point, while there is plenty more innovation to come, it is arguable that there is less white space left to go occupy from scratch. Derivatives of AI—from self-driving cars to medicine—may deliver enormous boosts in efficiency. But they will be displacing existing work, not growing the pie.
On this last point, technologists will protest it always looks that way. Technology makes things more efficient and destroys jobs, but always creates a net amount of more jobs elsewhere, they will say.
I disagree. That is a delusion of the type of jobs and the type of demand that have dominated the last few tech cycles, but will not dominate future ones. As I have written about before, there is a difference between production efficiency and consumption efficiency.
What does this all mean? It means that we clearly are finding ourselves with a massive surplus of human attention and labor which we don’t have great uses for in the current setup of our society.
The Escapist Solution to Excess Attention
If we focus on the excess of attention as the main issue, there are a few possible theoretical solutions. There is the “Star Trek” solution—to look to the stars (with some encouragement from alien encounters that in “Star Trek” bind humanity together). It is hard, however, for this to be a practical solution. Our economy isn’t set up to value space in and of itself.
Most technologists would argue that the most practical—and inexpensive—solution to the attention problem is the one that already presents itself. That is, the inner space of our own personal virtual worlds. The Greeks would, of course, recognize this well and refer us back to the story of Narcissus.
In some ways we have been spending at least a bit of our time in virtual worlds for as far back as we have been telling stories to ourselves and each other. In the last few dozen years, however, the breadth of our virtual world has clearly deeply expanded. Where once there were oral stories and books, we now bask in access to a personalized, never-ending stream of content on YouTube and Netflix—not to mention porn.
We have access to online games and worlds that are eating up the attention of millions and letting each person be a practical hero of their own world. And, of course, social networks—which can be used for information and connection, are increasingly used for disconnection into a semi-real world of feed filters, stickers, edited photos and video face masks.
Moving to what people traditionally think of as VR—immersive experiences you can exist in—is perhaps not as much of a step function from where we already are as we may imagine. The games and experiences just get better, become more personalized, and need less input and collaboration from other people.
We will, of course, need to solve the problem of making the personal worlds sufficiently interesting and fun to people even if they are always the hero (as done in the wonderful HBO series “Westworld”). But barring that concern, isn’t that what people broadly tend to want?
Universal Basic Income
If virtual reality is the proposed long-term answer of many technologists to the shortage of human labor, its companion tends to be increasingly a misguided adaptation of the universal basic income narrative.
To be clear, there is a lot I like, in theory, about the discussion and some of the better-crafted experiments around UBI. (Some of the experiments, for the record, are very poorly set up.)
To the extent that UBI can drive entrepreneurship, wise investment and growth, it could be great at scale. I also fundamentally agree with those that want to use UBI as a benchmark for charitable activities—if a charitable project can’t be shown to have a greater benefit than would a direct cash transfer to the same people, then the charity is clearly ineffective.
That said, the naive adaptation of the UBI narrative to the techno-escapist VR solution to labor—where everyone gets the money they need to be able to be plugged into their own world—feels like an all-too-easy and unappealing payoff from those with means to those without.
If Not Virtual Reality and Universal Basic Income, Then What?
I think we need to figure out a project, or set of projects, we as a community of humans all believe in accomplishing, and that many people can contribute to effectively. And it shouldn’t be fighting each other and then forcing ourselves to rebuild, which admittedly was probably the most frequent historical answer.
Instead, I think of things like the cathedral project model used in the past by empires and great cities. Civilizations would choose to build enormously expensive and labor-consuming projects which the whole community could focus on for—in some cases—a century.
The challenge, which I fully acknowledge, is what project can we possibly pick that will be both agreed upon as worth doing and require the attention of an enormous number of people over a long time?
It could theoretically be space, as I’ve already mentioned. I disagree with Elon Musk on a lot of things, but I do think he is a great marketer. Putting a greenhouse on Mars might spark some mandate for humanity to invest in exploring the stars. But it is hard to see how you would need tens of millions of people engaged in a self-imposed space race, unless you were going to take on a multigenerational educational component as well. It would help if China could get in the mix.
It could more practically be massively upgrading our own national infrastructure of bridges, roads, airports and fiber or building amazing shared spaces and parks. In some ways this is the most immediately practical idea—and possible given the campaign rhetoric of the winning party. That said, it isn’t fundamentally inspiring over the long run. And while I know how far behind our infrastructure is in many ways, the question is how much better would life be really if we improved it dramatically? I hate the New York area airports as much as anyone else, but how much do I really care about fixing them?
It could be some sort of project around curing diseases or world hunger or poverty—or simply deciding that we want to have a massively well-educated population. But again, it isn’t clear how to apply human labor to the problem in a way that inspires and occupies millions of people more fully.
Let’s Slow Down the Retreat
I clearly don’t have an answer on how to occupy people, but my suggestion is nonetheless to slow down the retreat from the real world by limiting things like VR and virtual worlds.
Disconnecting into our own minds will be too simple and too appealing. And I fear that once large populations make that choice, it is a very difficult one to later come back from.
I am reminded of the Robert Frost poem “Fire and Ice”. Many people are concerned the world will end in the next few years in fire. I, however, am pretty concerned about it ending with people isolated in the equivalent of solitary ice.