You know those maths/logic problems you used to get involving farmers, foxes, chickens, grain & rivers? You know, the kind they don’t do any more because such reasoning tasks are regarded as too taxing & hard to assess in SATs (and because modern kids don’t know what farmers, foxes, chickens, grain or rivers are)? Yeah, well that was how I spent my Sunday. My maths problem involved tomato plants, bikes, troughs, garden waste, cars, Homebase, B&Q, two houses, a pub, and a rubbish dump. It took half a day to resolve.
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| Of course by the time I'd done all this the chicken was long gone. Crafty fox. |
Last weekend I missed a friend's birthday and next week I'm passing on a different one. Is it because I'm ill or indifferent? No. It's because they happen to be at the same time as two other friends' birthdays, but at opposite ends of London. Right now I'm typing this on a train to Edinburgh. The ticket cost nearly £100, yet I'm writing this in the last half hour of the journey, having just got my seat back from the elderly couple who I lent it to because they'd missed their train and ours was standing-room only.
So what's my point? Do I hate travel? Do I resent going to see people or do stuff? No. It's just that I resent having to travel and I resent it necessarily taking time. I want to enjoy it.
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| Poor Anansi paid the price of trying to be in too many places at once Image & Story: http://www.africa.mrdonn.org/anansi.html |
On Sunday, as I wheezed up yet another hill on my bike, or sat breathing fumes in another traffic jam, I bemoaned being born in a century that promised me jet-packs and hoverboards but delivered me congestion charging and fuel that costs more than mermaids' tears. "In Star Trek they can bloody teleport," I huffed. I recalled a dream I had long ago in which people climbed into "Stuff Sacks" that enabled them to climb out of an identical sack at a destination of their choice. In Harry Potter kids jump into and out of far-flung fireplaces with glee (or urgency, depending on the state of evil-wizard-ascendancy at the time). "Why can't any of that be real?" I mused. And then something occurred to me:
Why can't reality, instead, be more like that?
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| Where we're going, we don't need roads. Image: Back to the Future 2 (via: Alamy) |
What if there was a way to see both friends at both parties, to get to Edinburgh without having to stand up for four hours or squeeze past three hundred other irritable sods crammed into the aisles just to hang on to a handle for dear life while I tried to do a wee on what felt like the piss-swept deck of a pirate ship in a storm. What if I could go to my mate Roy's wedding in Hong Kong next year rather than putting it off so that I can afford to eat in the meantime. The solution is surprisingly simple: I could just stay at home. We could all just stay at home!
Bear with me.
Last week I was trying to explain telepresence to my mum. I was trying to explain about sending a robot or a hologram to represent you in the real world that you couldn't (or couldn't be bothered to) get to.
"What? Like Second Life?" she asked.
"No," I replied, "That's different because in Second Life and stuff like that nobody's there. In fact the world isn't real either."
"But, don't people make Second Life seem like the real world? I've heard about people having jobs and organising rock concerts and music festivals in there [my mum's cool]. Mind you, they're all still sat in front of their computers in the dark, aren't they?"
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| We don't want to end up like this. Gross. Image: South Park (via Otakugoddess.com) |
For now, maybe. But as I went on to ramble into her patient ears about increasing graphical power, video feeds that jack into your visual cortex and thought-controlled computers, I found that I was gradually talking myself around to arguing that most of the world's problems could be solved by everyone plugging themselves into computers en masse. The virtual world need not be your Second Life - it could be your Actual Life.
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| Yeah, that's more like it! Image: The Matrix (via: Hidden Lighthouse) |
Arthur C. Clarke said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A virtual world would render all travel instantaneous (barring a bit of loading-judder) and entirely optional. Want to go to your mate Roy's wedding in Hong Kong? Now? You're there. Want to fly there (plane optional)? Go for it. But there's more than that. A sufficiently advanced virtual world would be indistinguishable from the real world, but could, at a stroke, solve most of its problems:
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| Well that's the morning taken care of. Now lunch in Paris & dinner on Mars. Image: Michael Dunning / Getty (via The Guardian) |
Poverty, unemployment, disability and discrimination (of most kinds) could become things of the past once money, geography and even body shape become largely a matter of choice. Hunger could be largely eliminated as soon as most of the world was fed on efficient soy protein piped directly into our gullets while we chowed down on virtual steaks the size of our own heads (which, of course, would be scalable). The natural world, with its collapsing ecosystems, would begin to recover and tourism could flourish once again in places currently ravaged by it. The conquest of space, a pipe dream for some and a pointless waste of time to others, would become something that we could all do in an afternoon, with realistic details provided by the robots & satellites that are likely to be our only way of exploring anywhere in the foreseeable future. Even the global population should begin to level out as people who didn't want or couldn't look after real kids could opt for virtual kids that could, Simpsons-like, remain the same age forever (or for as long as their parents wanted them to).
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| Looking pretty good for a 33 year-old Image: Matt Groening (via: Simpsons Wiki) |
Sound like a nightmare? To be fair, it sounds a little nightmarish to me too, but that's a generational thing. A few thousand years ago the idea that everyone might leave their family farms to live in huge, faceless cities, reliant on complex economic & governmental systems for support at the same time as their bonds with family, tribe, the seasons and nature in general steadily broke down would have seemed equally distasteful and ultimately far-fetched. Yet cities arose, grew and spread and it is now a minority (and a small one at that in most "developed" nations) who still tend the earth in the increasingly empty open spaces in between. So perhaps it's more civilisational than generational, but the point is that we can, and perhaps must, get there.
In his short story The Defenders, Philip K. Dick imagined a world abandoned by humans as they fled below the surface, leaving robots to autonomously fight a supposedly never-ending nuclear war. After many years a group of humans, eager to see how the war is progressing, sneak up to the surface against the protestations of their robot soldiers, only to find a world restored to a paradise by machines that didn't see the point of fighting. Trapped on the surface to prevent them going back down to start the war anew, the humans ultimately decide to make the best of things and settle down to start up a farm with those of their "enemies" who have taken the same one-way trip.
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| They'd look after it better than us anyway. Image: Matt Brown |
Would everyone in my brave new world embrace their new largely-virtual existence? Of course not. For them the earth would remain, if perhaps one in which the majority of their peers would be robots farming soya. In the film The Matrix, evil robots have enslaved humanity and trapped them all in little pods to use as living batteries (I know; don't ask), with a virtual world indistinguishable from reality piped into their brains to stop them from rebelling (despite brain-death being a lot easier to engineer). Laurence Fishburn's character tells a confused Keanu Reeves "The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."
But who wants the truth anyway? Sure, most of us are happy enough living in a world in which we commute for hours every day, pass up on our dreams, or even seeing our friends & family, because we're too broke, too busy or too damned tired, and go to bed each night trying not to think about war, famine and the other horsemen of our modern apocalypse that we can't or won't do anything about. And at the moment we don't have much of a choice anyway. But you know what? When the Matrix comes along I won't be the only one thinking about pulling on that blindfold myself.
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| I'll take the blue pill thanks. Image: The Matrix (via: Nassim Teleb) |
