Personal Articles

The inhabitants of this planet may one day gather together in an artificial reality from which no man, woman nor child will escape it’s addictive grip. A race of humans so vulnerable & yet so naive will have no choice but to be led by a temptation greater than we could ever imagine. With technology growing at such a rapid rate, the microchip expanding it’s capacity by double every year & computers now beginning to learn on their own.

It is inevitable that our perception of high tech today in the year 2008, will be far outdated & old fashioned in lets say twenty to thirty years from now. It is my concern that as a witness to the human experience, that we as a race are driven more by our emotional desires than by our real necessities. History has proven to this day that people’s wanting for something greater than ourselves has allowed their lives to be ruled by dictators & religious leaders.

One only needs to search on the Internet by asking how many religions exist in the world at present & you will see that there are literally tens of thousands. So many people easily influenced by false hope. One only has to think how television has also influenced a generation of people with the way we interact with each other, the way we dress, the way we talk, the way we judge society & the way in which we interpret the societies values, have been one way or another taught to us by Television. Television with all it’s advancements has been a powerful tool for shaping our human personal developments, it also has slightly destroyed society by numbing us with realistic movies & news of destruction giving human tragedy less relevance.

A new world was created I feel when the Internet began to expand throughout the world, now in just about every home in the developed countries. Soon every child in every school will have access to the Internet. The Internet has been a very powerful & useful tool for many reasons but it also has been responsible for many temptations & marriage break ups & has led to some hideous shameful human examples of indecencies. We all need to be made aware of or curious nature & so that we control technology, not vice versa. Is it any wonder why so many people are more & more in financial debt, which in turn also breaks apart relationships, marriages & families? Technology is continuously developing more & more rapidly & as it does the experiences for our senses continue to increase to the point that many new addictions begin to crop up. Think of how many types of addictions the Internet has created for many users. Or rather how many addictions people have created with their freewill to choose but are weakened when they are faced with such powerful temptations.

New technologies are constantly being developed because people are spending the money to purchase them, & no wonder economies are crashing. Everyone wants it all today & their contentment’s are short lived because we compensate what we really need for what we perceive to make us happy. Companionship, family, good health, shelter & food are the bare essentials, though they seem to be pushed aside for short lived pleasures. Families suffer, health deteriorates, shelter becomes unsatisfactory unless it is luxurious & food is indulged & wasted as we take it all for granted.

Everything else like the new vehicles coming out with all the latest addon’s & homes with five bedrooms & six bathrooms & powder rooms & so on are just short lived forms of gratification. Yet we still are suckers for punishment & only think of today without realizing the long term consequences. Remember, with a steady average two income couple, you can have it all, just consolidate it onto your home mortgage & all your hearts desires will be granted courtesy of the banks. All for the taking if you want it but don’t forget the monthly statements & reminders to pay & in three years everything will be outdated & you will feel unsatisfied.

It is at this point in my article that I make a prediction for our future, no hocus pocus or psychic abilities just good old logical common sense. With the microchip doubling its capacity every year & computers beginning to learn on their own & beginning to develop their own algorithms & calculations, it won’t be long before the next biggest thing to hit us hard will be virtual reality. Many scientific documentaries, books & magazines are claiming that at the rate computers are developing, it will only take about twenty to thirty years before you cannot distinguish a difference between reality & virtual reality.

In fact the military & pilots are already using virtual reality to train their soldiers. Pilots & doctors are also performing their training using some form or another of virtual reality to create realistic complex training operations.

Computer games are also becoming extremely realistic & interactive. The Japanese are investing a huge amount of money in virtual reality & I recall a documentary that had a Japanese computer scientist claiming that the only thing stopping virtual reality from becoming more like reality is the lack of speed from micro processing chips, but with microchips doubling in capacity every year according to all the technology journals, it won’t be long before micro processing speeds catch up with virtual reality. So what does all this mean & why the article name Virtual Heroin Of The Future? If in twenty to thirty years time we develop extremely rich high tech virtual reality, what do you think will be the next drug?

Think for a moment about some of the other simple examples earlier in this article about the powerful effect Television & the Internet has on society.

Now imagine for a moment a machine in your home that will allow you to lay down in, close your eyes & be put into a trance like state that will alter you consciousness with electromagnetic energy. A machine that will be able to give you experiences of flying like a bird in the sky, a machine that will be able to create for you a holiday of your choice, A machine that will create for you every fantasy & desire imaginable & unimaginable. Imagine a device that will be able to create for you a romantic partner that will give you companionship & sexual gratification unlike anyone else & if you get bored with your partner, a choice of downloads will be available for purchase to change its character. Think of the movie Total Recall & Star Trek with the Holodek, virtual worlds that are just so real. Fiction or non fiction?

It is inevitable that we will go down this track of virtual addiction, who can deny it? Therefore if our evolution allows us to create such technology, would this not turn humanity into introverts?.

There would not be any reason to leave the house, other than to go to work. Work places might have rooms built so staff can connect to the virtual grid & catch up where one left off. What about marriages? Statistics tell of higher than usual divorce rates within developing countries, some up to fifty percent divorce rates.

What then if we could create our own ideal virtual partners that you could also download updates for & that will make your partner more argumentative & harder to please for the sake of creating a more realistic partnership? What if computers one day become self aware in the long term future & begin to interact with us also in the virtual grid?

Would computers then have access to our deepest levels of consciousness? Who will the computers tell about our most secret thoughts? We Human beings are only limited by our imaginations & it is safe to assume that we always some how get what we want at any cost therefore a virtual reality future will be the ultimate expansion of our limitless creativeness. Although such a future to some degree may sound somewhat exciting, it will also have to have some very negative effects when it comes to family & social interactions.

On the other hand, it may also allow some doctor to use his virtual reality operating training skills to give a chance for us older ones to live long enough to witness such a turn in humanities history. Perhaps we will all be able to meet up in the virtual grid & just like MySpace & Facebook, be able to create our own little nook hidden away in some virtual corner of cyber space. See you all there in the future.

Remember. Just don’t get hooked onto the virtual heroin of the future.

Author  Frank Morgan