Ethical Reflection on Ready Player One


I think that those two quotes extracted from the book represent most of the moral dilemma that the author wanted to depict in Ready Player One, which in my opinion is the question of whether creating a virtual world where everything is better and more fun, where most any dream can come true is a would be a good or bad idea. Part of it is reflected on the first quote from morrow, that talks about the most visible part of the dilemma on Ready Player One’s world, the fact that reality is just so awful that everyone that’s able rushes to the OASIS to forget about it and live a better life in there. Because of that the real world that was already very damaged and ravaged would only evolve for the worse due to neglect and lack of a sense of importance: if you can just escape the horrible reality there is no point on trying to make it better through effort, anything that you can’t solve easily you probably won’t because it’s just not worth it. The other quotation, from Halliday is a bit more difficult to dissect because it is inherently abstract, and much more debatable, what I mean by that is that it’s much more difficult to say with complete certainty that happiness attained from a simulated world is not real, because it feels real much like the way we feel happy or sad when watching movies, the emotion is real even if the circumstances that created it aren’t. I’d say that I do agree with both to a certain extent although I do think that both are a bit exaggerated to sustain certain point the author wanted to get across. I do think there are virtues to a system like that, being even more connected than how we are now would make a lot of new things possible or old things easier which I think has merit, for example the school system might be a huge improvement on how it is right now, especially for public education, so yeah, I think there would be a lot of good things on a system like the OASIS. However I don’t think it would be possible to create a system like that in the near future, the amount of data that it would generate and need to run would probably be several orders of magnitude bigger than what I could imagine for the year 2050 and the processing power and infrastructure needed for it would probably be out of reach. The only way I could sort of see it come true would be if it was sponsored by one or more big companies and nation states with a high priority so that a lot of research and infrastructural work would be done for that objective.

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