The philosopher David Chalmers believes we may be on the cusp of a great migration, one likely to overshadow every wave of human migration in history: the move to a virtual world or worlds, as the real one continues to degrade. In centuries to come, instead of asking: “Should we move to a new country to start a new life?” we may ask: “Should we shift our lives to a virtual world?” As with emigration, often the reasonable answer may be yes.
Reality+ could not be timelier. In October last year, when Chalmers had already finished the manuscript, Facebook announced it would be changing its name to Meta and altering its mission to the elusive pursuit of the metaverse, a new virtual reality platform that will play host to ever more of our future lives. With sufficient computing power, virtual reality will no longer consist of pre-packaged individual experiences. It will become a concurrent and real-time platform where billions of people can meet to conduct business, shop and have fun. The respected journalist Dean Takahashi calls the metaverse “the most difficult and important thing humanity will ever build”. It is hard to disagree. In the most ambitious version of the project, going far beyond what Meta has in mind, the metaverse is not only a new world – like a colony on Mars – but one that exists in a parallel reality, or perhaps a parallel unreality.
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