All Your Friends Are Imaginary
Virtual reality technologies like Oculus Rift, which will soon be readily available, will undoubtedly create an array of opportunities beyond gaming from medical training to architectural modeling to gender swap experiments. But like any new powerful technology, virtual reality has the potential to diminish human experience, perhaps enough to outweigh its benefits.Â
Lately, I have been reading a book made up of separate articles that are collectively titled, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014. Two essays from the anthology came to mind when thinking about virtual realityâs affects on society. The Great Forgetting by Nicholas Carr, published in The Atlantic last year, argued that âautomation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on itâ with a story about Marvin Renslow, the captain who didnât know what to do when the autopilot of his Q400 disconnected before it slammed into a house in a Buffalo suburb. The belief that automation frees our time without affecting the way we behave and think, Carr noted, is a fallacy called the substitution myth.Â
One familiar example of our reliance on automation at UT is Quest, the online âteachingâ tool by the College of Natural Science that is the bane of every CNS studentâs existence. Quest is meant to be used by professors as a supplementary tool that creates problem sets for homework and tests and additionally walks students through learning material to free class time for productive work. In reality, Quest is abused by many professors who use the online system as a crutch to teach for them and write assignments so they never really have to be involved in the class at all. Many students, despite the positive statistics that Quest provides, consequently report feelings of disconnect between classroom environment and material that makes learning and succeeding more difficult. Automation with computer systems has the potential to detach us from the real world to our detriment, and I fear that a virtual disconnect from the real world in VR systems could have a similar effect.Â
[poem by Shel Silverstein]
The Social Life of Genes by David Dobbs, published in Pacific Standard, opens with a surprising study of bees whose behavior changed from the inside out depending on who they hung out with. âPeacefulâ bees introduced to killer bee colonies became more aggressive from the inside out and killer bees introduced to peaceful colonies became less aggressive as a result of change in gene expression. Several human studies from Dobbsâ essay made strong connections between social isolation and gene expression effects comparable to those from the bee study. One experiment with young, previously healthy Vancouver-area women showed imbalanced gene-expression profiles that affected immune responses in those who, after six months, reported signs of social stress in their love lives, families, or friends. Another study showed that âthe lack of a reliable [social] connection harmed [...] kids almost as much as [physical] abuse didâ by affecting the serotonin transporter geneâs impact on sensitivity toward the environment. Just as cases like these show molecular changes in disconnected social beings, virtual reality may have the potential to change our behavior via gene expression by changing our perception of our social surroundings.Â
Our bodies are like sponges that adapt, for better or for worse, to our surroundings. False senses of security and over-reliability on computer systems could fail us once we return to the real world. While virtual reality technology may have the potential to increase our perception of a social world with knock-out features that make the fake world indistinguishable from the real one, it also has the potential to isolate us from real human connection completely (especially if the extent of its reality isnât truly convincing), which could negatively affect our physical and mental health. As John Milton said, âthe mind is its own place, and in itself can make heaven of hell, a hell of heavenâ. Only time will tell how VR shapes the world as we know it.
