Lets assume we develop the capacity to create virtual worlds that are near indistinguishable from the real world. We hook you up into a machine and you now find yourself in what effectively is a paraller reality where you get to be the king of your own universe (if you so desire). Nothing is off limits - everything you’ve ever dreamt of is possible. You can be the only person there, you can populate it with unconscious AI that appears consciouss or you can have other people visit your world and you can visit theirs aswell as spend time in “public worlds” with millions of other real people.
Would you try it and do you think you’d prefer it over real world? Do you see it as a negative from individual perspective if significant part of the population basically spend their entire lives there?
I think it would be great to try out things that are impossible in the real world without any risks. Not necessarily crazy things, but things that are just not available to me irl. Like designing stuff without any limits of ressources or money. That way we could improve the real world by testing things in the virtual.
It quickly turns into a philosophical question of what you really want to do in the real world and why. It doesn’t make much sense to better your real world for things that could be easily done in the virtual. However, since your life even in the virtual world depends on your real survival, there would still be things to do.
Then there’s also the thing that your virtual world would be limited to your own imagination. At some point, that will get boring even with virtual people around. It would still make sense to exchange ideas with actual people in order to expand your own virtual world.