Virtuality Universe

This is the background for a SF universe which could be a good setting for a lot of stories. It is closely related to the factual possibilities (eventually to be) discussed in the Cyberlife article.

Introduction

Some fairly small number of decades from now, as seems reasonably likely (or at least possible), people will be able to "upload" themselves into computers, and live there.

Life in virtual reality / cyberspace has been done before, but it's never very... practical, from my limited experience. It tends to be either punk, or superhero-ish, or else it's assumed that we'll all be at war against the machines, or we'll become soulless, or something else horrible. Stories set in cyberspace don't have just regular people.

In theory, once you're in a setting that is entirely software, you could live however you want; physical appearance would be (it's often assumed) irrelevant, as would all the physical trappings of how we live today, such as houses, streets, clothing, furniture, etc. which makes it really difficult to imagine how people will live (if indeed "people" means anything anymore), much less tell a story about it.

However, I propose (for this story-setting) that most people live in Cyberspace pretty much the way they do in "reality", with a few significant changes. (And I don't think this is just a crutch to make storytelling possible, either; it seems quite possible or even likely.)

Background Articles

• /General Flavor
• /Technical details
• /What People Will Need: explains a lot of the background reasoning

Related Stuff

• Living in a computer for fun and profit
• Cyberlife: currently just a link collection
• Virtual habitability: estimates of when computing power will be adequate to accomodate human-level intelligence

How people earn a living

Just as agriculture largely gave way to factory jobs and then factory jobs largely gave way to service jobs, most jobs in Virtuality will center around the processing of information.

Stating it that way, however, overlooks a significant change in the basic structure of day-to-day life which can be summarized thusly: People won't have to work so hard to survive, because virtual life doesn't use up as many resources as does bio-life (see Cost of Living in technical details).

Virtual people will be in demand for work that would be hazardous or uncomfortable for bio-humans (see Hostile Environments in technical details).

Keeping Up

They will, however, have to work just as hard (or harder, depending on how you look at it) in order to keep up. "Keeping up" will not be a requirement for survival, but it will be essential for those wanting to be involved in the most interesting work. Keeping up with the pace of human development will be like riding a wave -- and getting behind can be seen as "wiping out", and having to look for the next wave in order not to get stuck in one place. This will be like our current society's obsession with career, only worse... and virtual humans won't have the physical limits of their bodies to stop them from working 24/7, or even duplicating themselves and working more hours than that. If they can afford the cycles for it, however, they can make a "clone" specifically for enjoying the leisure time bought by the labor of their working selves, so this may not be much of a sacrifice as it sounds to us.

Some of the more interesting stories, however, may still be taking place in very concrete, 20th-century style work settings... like tending the solar power farms. Another setting where the pace of life will be forced to slow down to something we non-virtual humans can grasp would be deep space exploration, where small groups or individuals are largely cut off from "the grid".

Timeline

Some sketchy ideas of the VU Future History; subject to revision...

• 2008
  • The Bay Area Plague, blamed on terrorists, exacerbated by poor response from gutted FEMA and CDC
  • Neocons "win" US presidency again; GOP begins transformation into Righteous Party
• 2009 DRM (also anti-virus and firewalls) mandatory on all publicly-connected computer operating systems for "security" reasons; approved DRM schemes are all proprietary, requiring paid licenses; open source forced underground; practitioners of open-source development are called "pirates" due to their lack of DRM usage
• 2010 "underground" house-to-house wireless networking becomes popular among "pirates" as a way to bypass the DRM requirement while still having some form of access
• 2015 Revolt of the Creators
• 2020 first "plug-in", i.e. more or less complete sensory connection to a computer
• 2030 first "upload", followed shortly by the first comm-kazi (combination upload and (physical) "suicide")

needs to be revised so as to be more in line with the estimates in Cyberlife

Editing is currently in progress on this article. Although editing is incomplete, the author or editor has saved their work to prevent loss. Please check back later by reloading the page, and do not edit while this message is still showing. Thank you.

Links

• 2010-06-07 Immortal avatars: Back up your brain, never die: shows that people are thinking seriously about this, but there's still a long way to go technically
• 2006-02-23 enzyme computer
• 2006-02-18 Computer interface design starts with respecting the real world
• 2006-02-14 Virtual Reality Prepares Soldiers for Real War: simulation is already a useful test-tube for reality
• 2006-02-13 Big Brain Thinking: "Stanford neuroscientist Bill Newsome wants to implant an electrode in his brain to better understand human consciousness." – an experiment I'd volunteer for after only slight hesitation...
• 2006-02-12 Online Ajax "desktops" try to change the rules of the game: this will probably have a great deal to do with how people manage information in the future