The future shouldn’t be virtual

For the past few months I have been bombarded by the Meta commercial every time I try to watch TV. 

In it, actors depict the future of education, farming, medicine and the study of history. All of it taking place in the metaverse.

I think that, while technology has its perks, it shouldn’t become our entire reality like this commercial would suggest.

While I would love to see farmers be able to correctly predict the yield they will have from each of their fields, I don’t think the metaverse is going to help it. 

There is no way that virtual reality will be able to correctly predict weather patterns or soil fertility. Those are things we have been trying to predict for centuries, and the closest thing we have to understanding it is the Farmers Almanac. 

Weather can be unpredictable, and no virtual simulation is going to change that.

Medicine is also something I think needs to stay within our reality. Simulating surgery would be an excellent educational tool for teaching anatomy and how to perform a surgery. 

But we should still use the tools that we already have at our disposal. 

People have been donating their bodies for medical students to study for a long time, and I think they provide a more in-depth view of what an actual human looks like. Our insides rarely look like the models, and surgeries sometimes have unexpected issues. If we fall back on technology, we might be putting a lot more patients at risk.

Don’t even get me started on using technology as the backbone of education. It works great until we have city-wide power outages (take Monday as an example) and we are unable to get any work done.

Technology and virtual reality simply create a disconnect from humanity that I don’t know if I can fully get on board with.

The new movie “Don’t Worry Darling” illustrates some of the harms of virtual reality perfectly. The film is a commentary on not only online groups focused on reversing time and recreating a “better” time in U.S. society, but it also touches on the effects of living in a virtual simulation. 

For a majority of the movie, the main character, Alice (Florence Pugh) can’t tell what is real and what isn’t, which is all part of the grand scheme of things. In the movie, men who are a bit insecure in their masculinity use the advanced technology to make things the way they want it, regardless of if it hurts somebody else along the way.

In virtual reality, we lose ourselves, our conscience and the beauty that the world has to offer.

Another example of this is the book “Ready Player One,” which was adapted into a movie in 2018.

In it, author Ernist Cline describes a gray world that has fallen into shambles, with people using a virtual world to replace it. 

Reality in the book has become so corrupt, that the people there would rather pretend everything is fine in VR than fix the actual problems.

I could list several more books and movies that all have the same warning signs.

Replacing the real world with a screen will only make things worse in the end. Technology is a beautiful tool that can make us so much more intelligent, but it shouldn’t become our only future.