Dr Stranger Love: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Singularity

The true future of humanity lies not just in our species bidding farewell to Earth and expanding outward into space, but also in slipping the bonds of the “real world” and expanding inward into countless strange and strangely rewarding virtual worlds of our own design. If all of reality can plausibly be designed by computers and artificial intelligence, and if a simulated mode of reality can theoretically become more real than natural reality, then we owe it to ourselves and our society to delve as deeply as possible into those digital frontiers.

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Perhaps this scenario reminds you of The Matrix, and those films’ visions of endless fields of humans kept alive in pods, unaware that their brains are connected to a computer simulation. But I would submit that the dystopian thing about this premise isn’t that trillions of humans might live their lives wholly inside cyberspace, but that they were forced there by hostile robots that had designed the simulation as a control mechanism. I believe that, in the future, plenty of people will choose to connect directly to a simulation as a means of pursuing peak fulfillment. Why does that seem like a bad thing?

Narula, H. (2022) Virtual society: The metaverse and the new frontiers of human experience. London, UK: Penguin Business.

Unerring prophecies.

So common is the pattern of the self-fulfilling prophecy that each of us has his favored specimen. Consider the case of the examination neurosis. Convinced that he is destined to fail, the anxious student devotes more time to worry than to stufy and then turns in a poor examination. The initial fallacious anxiety is transformed into an entirely justified fear. Or it is believed that war between two nations is inevitable. Actuated by this conviction, representatives of the two nations become progresively alienated, apprehensively countering each "offensive" move of the other with a "deffensive" move of their own. Stockpiles of armaments, raw materials, and armed men grow larger, and eventually the anticipation of war helps create the actuality.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.

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The initial definition of the situation which has set the circle in motion must be abandoned. Only when the original assumption is questioned and a new definition of the situation introduced, does the consequent flow of events give the lie to the assumption. Only then does the belief not father the reality.