Virtual reality may pose real problems for our lonely planet – The San Diego Union-Tribune

After years of hype, virtual reality has entered what research and consulting firm Gartner calls the trough of disillusionment because the much-touted technology hasnt made the expected breakthrough to mass popularity envisioned by the companies that poured billions of dollars into VR research and development.

That list of companies includes Facebook. But at last weeks much-anticipated event in which founder Mark Zuckerberg outlined how Facebook will evolve in coming years, the 32-year-old multibillionaire focused instead on augmented reality digitally altered physical reality, all via the Facebook app on your smartphone, as USA Today reported. Think of AR as an insanely more ambitious version of Pokemon Go one with Minority Report-level saturation of ones surroundings, at least if thats what a user wants.

But dont count out virtual reality yet. Silicon Valley legend Roy Amara, an engineer and researcher who was one of the first serious futurists of the 20th century, had a view of how innovation often plays out thats proved so prescient its now known as Amaras Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Perhaps humankind should hope that Amaras Law doesnt hold up this time because if virtual reality does become as dazzling, hypnotic and intensely enjoyable as imagined in science fiction, it could build off trends in how technology is changing peoples lives and make the world a different and darker place.

In his acclaimed 2000 book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert Putnam used extensive research to detail how Americans were increasingly less likely to interact with others. The result was fewer constructive, community-building bonds with those with similar identities and interests as well as fewer healthy attempts to create bridges and links to those with different backgrounds:

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago silently, without warning that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

A chapter of Puttmans book is devoted to how this trend was accelerated by technology and mass media. This happened first because the arrival of television as a mass institution led people to stay home and then because the proliferation of sources of information and entertainment meant fewer people had the shared experiences seen in the era where there were only three TV networks and most adults read the hometown paper. Increasingly satisfying distractions both made people less likely to go outside their home and interact with the world and to have less in common with others when they did go outside and interact.

Seventeen years later, the availability and quality of such distractions is greater than ever, and the emergence of Facebook as a mass communications tool would seem to counter the idea that technology promotes civic disengagement. But as a 2015 article in The Atlantic laid out, scholarly research suggested Facebook was no answer for the epidemic of loneliness and disconnectedness in the Western world. Stephen Marche wrote:

Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. ...

What Facebook has revealed about human nature and this is not a minor revelation is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity.

Now imagine virtual reality technology so compelling and immersive that it could change the mess of human interaction into a simulacrum of human interaction in which an individual could have all needs communal, conversational, competitive, carnal satisfied by virtual others without any friction or awkwardness.

It is easy to see how such technology could warp societies, especially when considering the fallout from much-less advanced technology in South Korea. The governments 1995 commitment to having the worlds fastest internet helped supercharge the nations economy, as leaders hoped. But it has also had immense collateral damage on young South Koreans. Addiction to internet gaming is so common that in 2011, the South Korean government enacted a law banning children under 16 from accessing gaming websites between midnight and 6 a.m.

In 2013, the government estimated that 10 percent of those aged 10 to 19 were gaming addicts probably a statistic with parallels in other First World nations. But the number appears far too low to other observers. A 2015 VICE investigation suggested the number was closer to 50 percent. Earlier this year, after a weeklong visit to South Korea to meet with therapists and educational specialists, internationally recognized brain expert Michael Merzenich a TED talker and a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences wrote that the government figure was a gross underestimate ... the substantial majority of young Korean men live with this addiction.

The proliferation of gaming addiction rehab centers in the nation suggests Merzenich is on to something. So do other statistics such as the marrying age for South Korean men and women reaching an all-time high. But Exhibit A may be this 2014 Washington Post story:

South Korea may be doomed. A recent study, conducted by the National Assembly Research Service in Seoul, predicts that the country will reach zero inhabitants by 2750.

The report makes it clear where the countrys problem lies: A remarkably low birth rate of 1.19 children per woman. But whats really striking is the speed at which it could happen: South Koreas population (currently larger than Spain) could shrink to a level comparable to tiny Switzerland within only a few generations.

By 2136, South Korea is predicted to lose 40 million of its 50 million inhabitants, according to the research.

There are, of course, many factors at play in low birth rates. They commonly drop in times of economic distress and in nations when women become more educated and get better jobs. But as of 2014, South Korea had the lowest birth rate of any of the 35 affluent nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Hankyoreh daily newspaper reported last August that the number keeps getting worse. Its hard not to think that a factor is antisocial gaming addiction among the substantial majority of young Korean men.

Is this what awaits America should VR reach its alleged potential? Maybe, maybe not. South Korea and the United States have different cultures.

But if the history of our use of technology is a history of isolation desired and achieved, as Stephen Marche wrote in The Atlantic, be afraid. Virtual reality could warp reality.

Reed, deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section, is a Level 21 Pokemon Go player. Twitter: @chrisreed99. Email: chris.reed@sduniontribune.com.

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Virtual reality may pose real problems for our lonely planet - The San Diego Union-Tribune