u/Punished-Maruki

I am not sure that there exists games that talk about FDVR other than existing as a side thing (Death Stranding when going to the shooting range) or as a background lore (The Finals is set in a virtual reality realm) but that is about it. Does anybody else know of any other games that include or talk about FDVR? Just looking to see what is out there in the video game world and what do they have to say about FDVR

It seems to me that the discussion and propagation of FDVR, even in tech circles, is basically non-existent, and worse - those who are aware of it seemingly are apathetic to it. I have a worry that even when people at large become aware of FDVR, few give it serious thought on its capabilities and impact it would have on their own lives and society beyond treating it as a novelty.

Do you see it in the same way - that people are either unaware of FDVR or, if they are aware, don't care about it much beyond its novelty appeal? If so, what do we do about this problem? I think it is reasonable to think that an obstacle for bringing FDVR sooner is this. If no one cares to have it, then there is little incentive to bring it about by companies that have the capabilities or funding to invest, say, R&D to something like FDVR.

Does anybody know any Pro FDVR writers / journalists in Substack (or any platform for that matter) that exist and recommend? Looking for sources that publish or have published FDVR related info

I feel the online space is now dominated by two voices in particular:

1. The AI slop that we usually see i.e. YouTube Shorts, online written text, LinkedIn posts, even Reddit posts. I consider such people extremely lazy. They have delegated their critical thinking, and whatever little thinking they did previously, to these LLMs.
2. The anti-AI crowd that's still living in 2022 and believes that AI is good for nothing. There are many logical fallacies at play in their arguments. These critics have reduced LLMs to mere predictive machines, and their understanding of hallucination or their focus on these models hallucinating is more pronounced than the actual state of the models. They often display moral superiority about not using AI, even at the cost of their time. In reality, I believe it’s not about being genuinely competent, but about showing that they are competent.

The two voices above are so dominating that people who are cautiously curious about these LLMs, or who want to actually build, try out, and test their limits, have their voices completely diminished.

It's also ironic that subreddits like r/technology are so opposed to anything related to technology that even a neutral voice about the performance of these LLMs and how they can be embedded in people's workflows gets canceled out, leaving a narrative that anything related to AI is trash.

There are genuinely so few spaces left where people are curious about these technologies, not from a marketing or sales perspective, but to understand how they can transform lives and help with daily tasks. Even in tech spaces focused on AI, you quickly find them filling up with a crowd that only wants to sell you something, market products that are supposedly "life-changing," and it’s incredibly annoying.

These models have actually transformed the way in which all of us work. They've been helpful, and there are obvious issues every now and then, the responses may not be perfect. But when you think about the past three years, we've come so far.

However, all we have in this space now is AI slop or pure negativity.

Being rich can effectively be boiled down to having a lot of influence or power. Of course, there are people who have a lot of power but are not very rich, but those people are either few and far between or at the immediate beck and call of the rich. Though there have been times where the rich have held more power and less power, it seems that we are now trending towards the rich having extremely consolidated power over workers because of the coming automation wave.

When the automation wave arrives, many businesses will often no longer have to interact at all with everyday people because jobs will become scarce, and even if people receive UBI, the increased efficiency of automation will make their buying power significantly more limited when compared to other companies. Instead, most of these transactions will simply be between businesses, decoupling the profit motive from its original aim of producing the best product for the consumer.

This problem will only continue to worsen until either the profit motive is done away with, or the average person becomes so powerless that they are deemed useless eaters and discarded.

However, I do not think that AI and automation are in any way bad things. In fact, I want these two technologies to be accelerated. However, if they are to be accelerated, then our end goal must be FDVR. FDVR is the ultimate logical terminus of the profit motive. Within FDVR, you are able to do whatever you want and infinitely maximize your level of influence and power, going beyond any level of influence that you would be able to have in the real world. With the implementation of the decoupling of money from what has hitherto been seen as its tautology, power, we are able to move society away from this dystopian end and towards one where FDVR might be universalized, allowing everyone to live their optimum life.

If you have spent any time doing any introspective work, you would have realised the unfortunate reality that having a sense of self is not a given. Though you may exist, make decisions, and manifest yourself in all the ways that constitute a "self," it is still possible for you to completely lack a sense of self, for you have frighteningly little knowledge of who, as a person, you actually are.

However, if we take that as a given, that having a sense of self is not a prerequisite for human existence, that leaves us in an interesting situation in relation to attempts towards contentment.

Let’s say we have someone with a fairly weak sense of self that lets the opinions of society and others dictate to them who they are and what they are. If this person were to ever reach a point of contentment, a point where they feel truly satisfied with their lives, how would they ever be able to know such contentment is authentic? If they have, in all effect, externalised their sense of self to others, then will that same feeling of contentment not also be an internalisation of their feelings and opinions towards him?

In such an example, you have someone that thinks they have reached the pinnacle, that they have made it, but in reality, due to them having a weak sense of self, they are still far from their apotheosis. It is my opinion, however, that this is the highest point we can ever get to. No matter who we are or where we come from, we are always going to, at least in part, offload our sense of self onto others, precluding us from ever reaching our highest state.

However, with FDVR this is not the case. With FDVR, there is no longer any need for us to externalise our sense of self onto others, because the others within said simulation can align with our own true selves (or sense of self). In such an example, the malforming force of externalisation becomes an impossibility, and the contentment that we feel will be the true highest form of existence.

When you ask men and women to pick the ideal traits that they'd want in a partner, you often get fairly typical answers. Height, weight, personality, economic situation, and other characteristics all fall in the predictable range. However, when you ask people about their actual dating history, you will find that people go for drastically different partners than what they stated were their ideal. It's logical to think that this is because people settle for less than perfect partners. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. What is actually happening here is an example of the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences, and there is no better example of the difference between these two than our treatment of the idea of resistance.

Resistance can be thought of as the effort, or lack thereof, that we have to employ in order to achieve a desired goal. When it comes to everyday life, it seems like we are explicitly asking for more resistance: setting time limits on apps, trying to reduce screen time, being against short, quick dopamine hits in favour of longer, more arduous ones, ect. ect. However, when we look at many people's revealed preferences, we see a stark inversion. People are using short form apps more, spending more time doom scrolling, and doing small things that (by their own account) are just wasting their time or, in the worst examples, actively damaging them (with rage bait content, for example.)

We say that we want more resistance in day to day life, but we keep on opting for more and more "slippery" activities (here I'm just using slippery as the opposite of resistant.) The reason why this is the case is obvious: we're animals, it's only natural for us to look for the quickest and easiest way to get to a given goal. However, as time goes on, things are getting more and more slippery. The amount of effort needed to engage with the world is becoming less and less, and eventually we will be in an a-resistant world, or close enough to one. Whether you are pro or anti billionaire, this is the world that they want. Logically, they want things to be as slippery as possible. They want you to not even click a button to check out, just liking something hard enough should bring it to your door. This is the logical endpoint of capitalism. This is the contradiction of capitalism brought about by its founders' inability to differentiate between stated and revealed preferences, and it's something that we will all pay the price for.

Slipperiness cannot be banned in a capitalistic economy because it is the core of capitalism, and, since it already exists, banning it will just create other markets for it. The solution to this problem then becomes FDVR.

As I have stated prior, FDVR ought to be an experience of perfectly tailored resistance, where one is able to be completely in the ideal state of existence, that being the flow state. If this is not done, and FDVR is not implemented, then we will all slip down the slope into full, unadulterated slop, becoming slippery shells of our former selves. Weak in every sense of the word, like a tree that had never had to endure the wind, breaking and buckling at the lightest breeze.