In a year in the future sooner than we think, Josh walks to a skyscraper, takes an elevator to the thirtieth floor, enters a familiar room, lies down in a special bed, pays a fee, enters a password, and attaches a thick cable to a bioport—one surgically implanted behind his ear. His wetware connects to Virtual Life, an artificial world far better than any we know today and where Josh enjoys simulated experiences. For the next few hours, Josh's body will be monitored by attendants who are supervised by an on-site physician.
Josh soon starts to hike up the Himalayas in Nepal. His hike there feels so life-like, so interactive, and so tactile that for Josh, his experience feels as good as actual hiking. Sometimes it is even better, because these hikes lack freezing rain or slippery rocks.
On this day, Josh starts at the Buddhist monastery at Kathmandu and inhales cool, clean air, then feels a little altitude sickness. He crosses a stream of ice-fed water and feels the cold. Turning back, he sees a stunning view of the valley, revealing a great river below. Josh travels here for four hours. His trip concluded, Josh remembers his exhilarating adventure and can’t wait for the next. Despite a substantial deposit, he instantly books another.
In a cubicle near him, Erica lies in a similar bed, but she chooses simulated sex. For multiple reasons, including a demanding job, an off-putting personality, and a body that does not conform to cultural ideals of femininity, Erica’s real-life experiences have failed to satisfy her. In Virtual Life, she finds what she wants.
We need not trouble ourselves about what kind of fantasy Erica has. We know that people have fantasies about sex and that such fantasies differ because of gender, sexual orientation, upbringing, random associations, and culture.
It is important that Erica's experience is a simulacrum, not reality. Everyone in Virtual Life does what Erica wants. That, of course, is false in reality. Virtual Life is not a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) where Erica would interact with virtual personas of real people. In Virtual Life, Erica only interacts with virtual people.
For our discussion, the premises about Virtual Life that matter are that (1) fantasies can be satisfied, and (2) because no other real people are involved, no one (other than Josh or Erica) can be directly harmed. It is also important for Josh and Erica that, no matter which fantasy each explores, he or she is completely safe.
Is Virtual Life farfetched? Not at all. In a recent issue of New York Magazine devoted to pornography and the Internet, many people admitted to frequenting high-quality Internet pornographic sites, some several times a day. Some also visited interactive sites where actors were paid to act sexually. Some people liked on-line sex more than sex with real people.
The article in New York described the billions of dollars in revenue that the Internet-based pornography industry generates, how demand for such services historically drives innovation for better forms of broadcast, and how owners anticipate future enhancements.
In the ethics of human enhancement, the topic of enhanced virtual experiences is a toddler among adults. Scholars in the literature typically discuss the effects of Cyborgian links to the Internet or brain-boosting drugs (both discussed later), but here we discuss enhanced virtual experience—the Internet version of the opium den.
The ethical issues raised by such experiences will be upon us sooner than we expect. In 1979, futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke used a special satellite-linked phone from Sri Lanka to talk to a reporter in America. Similarly in 1980, physician-writer Michael Crichton had explorers in Congo phone home from the jungles of Africa to America via a satellite-linked phone. At the time, such devices so exceeded expectations that these writers could mention them to impress their readers.
Now they are dated. Today, anybody can use a cell phone to call anywhere on the planet. Similarly, high-definition television, once the purchase of the rich, has become the norm in developed countries.
Technology moves fast, especially technology that people desire. How might it do so with Virtual Life? Consider the creation of dialysis machines around 1960.
At its inception, physicians had to connect new catheters to the patient’s veins and arteries each time he or she underwent dialysis. Because of bruising and infection, the catheters wouldn’t stay in place, and after a few weeks, the patient looked like Frankenstein’s monster, with stitches and bruises over his body.
Around 1962, Seattle physician Belding Scribner created a permanent, indwelling Teflon shunt, similar to a spigot, so nurses could connect and reconnect the same catheters for withdrawing and returning blood, making viable long-term kidney dialysis. (In so doing, Scribner created a classic problem in bioethics: Who shall live when not all can?) The Teflon surface prevented surface antigens from causing the patient’s immune system to reject the shunt. Over the years, surgeons created better, longer-lasting shunts and today, patients may live on dialysis for decades.
The effectiveness of synthetic connections to veins today may be as high as 50 percent, compared to 85 percent for using veins from a patient’s own body. The major problem is formation of clots on synthetic connections.
Surgeons overcame these problems with a technique called endothelial seeding. The endothelium refers to the layer of flat cells lining the closed spaces of the body, such as the inside of blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, and the heart. In contrast, the epithelium, the outside layer of cells, covers all the free, open surfaces of the body, including the skin and mucous membranes.
Endothelial seeding exemplifies the field of tissue engineering, in which inorganic and biological materials fuse to replace, repair, and aid parts of the human body. Tissue engineering differs from regenerative medicine, where the body’s own adult or embryonic stem cells are grown to generate new cells as replacements for dysfunctional cells.
Endothelial cells of the patient grown in culture can be seeded onto a variety of surfaces to produce an intervening layer. Special techniques in biotechnology can seed endothelial cells onto filters, grafts, tubes, as well as other artificial biomaterials and prostheses.[1] Scientists get good results by growing such cells under glass from fatty tissue and transferring them to grow on some artificial material. In Phase III clinical trials, where benefit to patients is expected, surgeons use vascular endothelial growth factor 2 (VEGF-2) to facilitate the connections.[2]
In the near future, a new Belding Scribner will create an indwelling bioport, perhaps with endothelial seeding, through which the brain can connect wirelessly to an external personal computer and the Internet. That connection will be a quantum leap in the brain’s history. At once, almost every human will radically increase his available knowledge, memory, and ability to calculate. It will enable each human to cooperate, communicate, and socialize with any other group of humans on a military team, in a family, on an inspection team, or in a university class. It will open the door to Virtual Life.
Farfetched? Consider that scientists recently implanted a freckle-sized grid containing one hundred tiny electrodes over a patch of cells in a monkey’s brain. Researchers tied down the monkey’s arms and wired the electrodes to a mechanical arm that could bring food to the monkey's mouth.
Previous experiments demonstrated that human spinal cord patients could move a cursor on a computer screen with brain waves and that monkeys could use brain waves to move a robotic hand. Solely with their thoughts, the monkeys quickly learned to adjust the prosthesis for size and stickiness of bits of food. Amazingly, after being taught with biofeedback, each monkey mastered his new arm in just a few days. The New York Times called this “the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology.”[3]
The problems of this interface resemble those before Scribner perfected his shunt: after a few months, the electrodes degrade and the equipment needed to transmit the wireless signal needs improvement, but these are solvable problems. It takes no great genius to see that future researchers will improve the wireless connections that allow monkeys to act with external prostheses.
If this happens, the ethical transition from therapy to enhancement will be quick. Who would deny quadriplegic patients implanted electrodes that signal wirelessly to a laptop? So many patients retain active minds even after lungs, kidneys, or hearts give out and limit physical activities. Even if medicine cannot restore their ability to walk, new wetware connections could give them another twenty years of mental life. Can you say Avatar?
It’s plausible to imagine wetware connections to parts of the brain that control appendages, genitals, elimination, and eating. It’s plausible that we will soon enter a virtual, 3-D world in high-definition color that allows any fantasy to come true: not only simulated travel or sex, but also simulated acting in MacBeth or quarterbacking for the Dallas Cowboys.
The question of such a Virtual Life recalls one raised by philosopher Robert Nozick and his famous Experience Machine.[4] Nozick premised that you had to make a devil’s bargain—once you entered the fantasy, you believed it was your real life and you forgot your original bargain. You opted for an upbeat version of the Matrix, but before you downloaded into it, you had to drink the waters of forgetfulness.
Nozick’s premise should be rejected for two reasons: first, the technology to fool yourself totally and forever seems too far-off to be practical; second, why opt out forever? What if your body got appendicitis or a high fever? You want to be around to decide what to do for it, lest it die.
Let us assume more practically that we can enter Virtual Life, but we can exit it at any time. In other words, at some level we are conscious that we’re in Virtual Life.
So let’s assume that it’s a great world, far superior to anything yet conceived, and for most people, far better than their real lives. Suppose that in real life you work on an assembly line cutting up chickens in a cold factory. But in Virtual Life, you are a sorcerer-baker and your superb pies attract satisfied centaurs, dwarves, and kings. This makes you quite happy and you have great interactions, especially with the male dwarves.
Which brings us to some philosophical questions about Virtual Life: does it exhibit bad values to live in it? Is it immoral to live in it? Moreover, should public policy encourage life there, e.g., for the unemployed or disabled?
A basic criticism is that what’s bad about Virtual Life is that it’s not real, that all your conquests, victories, self-esteem, prizes are fake. Your experiences exist only in your head and in the program of the computer.
In reply, to argue, “Real experiences are better than simulated experiences because they’re real,” is to beg the question of what makes reality so great, anyway.
Accept the premise that Virtual Life delivers experiences of travel, sex, eating, and competition as good as their real-life counterparts. Given that premise, consider a crucial philosophical question: are you cheating yourself of something valuable by spending your free time in Virtual Life?
Answering this question is not easy and any good answer will have different parts and will vary according to the example. Consider sex. If someone claims that virtual sex is as good as actual sex, this forces us to think about what makes sexual relations good.
One traditional answer is that sexual relations lead to children. St. Augustine said God permitted married couples to have sex to create children, but only for this reason. Once they had the children they wanted, the permission was revoked.
Virtually no one believes this anymore, even the Catholic Church, which now teaches that loving marriages should include sexual relations even after child-bearing has passed. Moreover, scientists have separated sexual relations from reproduction from two directions: because of contraception and abortion, people can have sex without reproducing, and because of advances in assisted reproduction, people can reproduce without having sex.
If we sever the link between sex and reproduction, then the probability of good virtual sex forces us to ask the question of what makes sex with a real person good. One traditional answer is that sex with a real person involves intimacy. Intimacy includes many things: communication, friendship, and relationships.
But some people notoriously desire sex without relationships or intimacy. Are they perverts?
In his autobiographical My Own Country, Abraham Verghese, an AIDS doctor in rural Tennessee, visits a gay bar and observes the scene. He later muses that gay men act as straight men would act if they could find women willing to have anonymous, quick sex most nights. Is this what Virtual Life will give men? And for the first time in female history, will it equalize women the same way?
There is an elephant in this virtual room, and he’s the traditionalist who bellows, “What’s wrong with simulated travel or simulated sex is that IT’S NOT REAL!! IT’S FAKE.” The continuing objection here is that if your emotional center becomes living in Virtual Life, then you’ve lost your real life. You’ve cheated yourself of real experiences in a life. You’re not authentic and your experiences are no more substantial than the pleasant dreams of an opium addict.
There is some truth in this claim. If we think about ideal sexual relations, whether in a monogamous relationship or otherwise, sexual experiences with real people bring other goods that make the intrinsic desirability of (what Alvin Goldman famously called) “plain sex” better.[5] These goods include ongoing relations, knowledge of a partner, and trust.
On the other hand, some people prefer sexual variety, and Virtual Life can deliver that. More importantly, some people may decide that they are unlikely to have ideal sex, or even good sex, or perhaps, any real consensual sex at all, and therefore Virtual Sex is right for them.
Consider the paraplegic in a wheelchair, the elderly widower who is still functional, and someone whose occupation forces him to live alone (a fire ranger in an isolated tower in Montana). For such people, it is difficult to see why Virtual Sex is bad.
Suppose Erica, in real life, is attracted to men who are abusive, alcoholics, or otherwise bad for her. In Virtual Life, she can have the sort of sex she wants without the dysfunctionality and still have male friends in the real world. Is that so terrible?
Consider Elaine, a worker laboring for minimum wage, barely making enough to pay her bills. On the rare times when Elaine has a few extra dollars, she can get drunk or instead spend an hour in Virtual Life—as she likes to do—floating down the Nile River as Queen Cleopatra. Assuming Elaine is monitored for medical problems, it is hard to see why virtual floating isn’t a wiser choice than getting drunk. Indeed, if Elaine is pregnant, then Elaine is obligated to choose Virtual Life over drinking.
Objection: experiences in Virtual Life affect how one experiences the real world. If all one’s relationships are great in Virtual Life, how will one fare in reality with real relationships, which notoriously go up and down? Will Virtual Life spoil the young for real life? Also, it’s not completely true, as previously assumed, that “no one other than Josh or Erica” can be directly harmed in Virtual Life. What if their spouses or families suffer because Josh and Erica spend too much time there? Maybe it’s not a direct harm, but it could still be substantial.
Notice that in the field of enhancement ethics, virtual experiences enhance mental life in a quite different sense than brain-boosting drugs enhance scores on college tests or enhance performance at work, for virtual experiences enhance satisfaction. Satisfaction is an intensely private, personal good.
Isn’t that something a good society should foster? Is there anything wrong with doing so? After all, millions of humans have escaped into stories, movies, plays, television, novels, comics, or watching sports for centuries. Isn’t it a good to have better escapes and more satisfaction?
The ethical theory of utilitarianism has a special problem explaining why life in Virtual Life is bad. Jeremy Bentham, the originator of utilitarianism, famously held with regard to pleasure, “Pushpin is as good as poetry,” meaning that the lowbrow pleasures of bowling are just as good as the highbrow pleasures of poetry. For utilitarians such as Bentham, pleasure is pleasure and it’s good to create more pleasure in the world. But if the pleasure of winning virtual combat is just as good as winning real combat, then utilitarians seem unable to object.
How might Virtual Life grab hold of people? Answer: through the door of therapy. Therapy is the door through which all enhancements traditionally enter. Breast construction came first for women after a mastectomy, later for healthy women who wanted larger or smaller breasts. Viagra was first used for men with sexual dysfunction, later for healthy men for enhanced function.
The first person to use a new exoskeleton was Yangchih Tan, a paraplegic since an accident in 1990 and who, using his new exoskeleton in late 2011, took 150 steps, his first in two decades.[6] Ekso Bionics of Berkeley, California hopes to perfect this exoskeleton soon.
Consider a paralyzed veteran who can’t move his appendages, or a victim of locked-in-syndrome, a neurological condition resembling a persistent vegetative state, but in which a patient is actually aware and can blink. Virtual Life could be stupendous for them and enhance their lives. Is there anyone who could counter the gale storm of indignation of the paralyzed veteran’s sister who wants Virtual Life for her brother? Who believes the country owes it to him for his sacrifice?
Other people will feel the same way. Woe be unto the Alarmist who blocks Sarah from helping her grandfather, who can hardly walk after his heart attack, from having Virtual Life, where he can be an eighteen-year-old young buck and sports hero. Who could be so cruel?
In short, needs of patients will trump sermons. Virtual Life will help the victims of the psychiatric locked-in-syndrome, the blind and deaf, the totally paralyzed, and others with active minds but dead bodies. Once it is perfected, it will enhance experience for all of us.
The military will utilize Virtual Life in training warriors for battle. What better place to see who is courageous, who is a leader, who is a sharpshooter, than in a life-like, three-dimensional battle?
Another elephant in the room in our discussion is addiction. What if the real danger is not the soma of Brave New World, but the psyche of Virtual Life? The question is not what if Virtual Life unleashes a previously unknown form of addiction but when will it do so and how many will be addicted. Most writing about addiction focuses on drugs, but what about addiction to life-expanding experiences?
If we grant the premise that Virtual Life could be as addictive as cocaine, bioconservatives correctly endorse regulation. Some people will be so vulnerable, so mentally or emotionally weak, that their vicarious lives will quickly overpower their own. Just as opium dens were banned for the public good, so may fantasy dens need to be banned for some.
Suppose your experiences in Virtual Life as a Knight at King Arthur’s Round Table are so good that you neglect to pick up your child from school. If Virtual Life became so addictive as to cause such behaviors, especially in large numbers, then it would need to be regulated. People with obligations to children would need to prove they could handle Virtual Life or be limited to a few hours a day after their children were asleep.
Indeed, if we take the premise a little further and imagine that Virtual Life offers a life twice as satisfying as normal life, then we know people will not want to leave it. Then we know that we have Internet Soma.
One way that Virtual Life can be regulated, and which fiscal conservatives should endorse, is by cost. It will be expensive to hire the actors and actresses to do the voices and act out the scenarios that make Virtual Life feel real (this will also create employment for struggling actors). If an hour in Virtual Life costs the same as playing eighteen holes of golf, then most people could not afford to live there too much and would need to keep working to pay.
Nevertheless, I resist the idea that such a satisfying Virtual Life is intrinsically bad. Pleasure is good and a technology that allows more people to have more pleasure is good. Such technology should not be relegated in advance to the dustbin of moral condemnation.
What bothers me about continuous life in Virtual Life is that it seems dangerously close to pharmacological addiction and not having real friends, but only having friends on social networks over the Internet. (However, as one of my students objected, “Having only Facebook friends is better than having no friends at all.”)
But when Virtual Life gets really good, some will decide that it’s rational to live there as much as possible. Can this be defended?
I am not sure, but I believe it will come down to personal values. To say it’s a matter of personal values is to say it shouldn’t be made illegal to escape there. On the other hand, public policy doesn’t need to subsidize it with a tax deduction and can tax it like alcohol or cigarettes.
Personally, I am a concrete, practically oriented person. Those who are escapists by nature might find Virtual Life compelling. For me, because Virtual Life is a fake world, it will always be less valuable than the real world. But I recognize that rational people will differ: their prospects might be worse than mine or their life in their part of the world might be so abysmal that Virtual Life looks great.
As with the other topics of this book, the time to think about these new issues is now, for they will come sooner than we think.
U. S. Ryan and B. M. Olazabal, “Endothelial Seeding of Filters, Grafts, and Tubes.”
http://www.springerlink.com/content/k1hh383322022651
Holly Finn, “Meet the Real Bionic Man,” Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2011, C1.
Benedict Carey, “Monkeys Control Robotic Arm with their Thoughts,” May 29, 2008, New York Times, A1.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 45.
Alan Goldman, “Plain Sex,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6, no. 3 (Spring 1977), 267––87.
Holly Finn, “Meet the Real Bionic Man,” Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2011, C1.