I suppose most of us remember The Matrix . How did you perceive this movie? as just another sci-fi or horrifying warning for the human race? Does this scenario sounds too fictional for you? Theoretically there is no problems to realize something like "Matrix ", moreover, today we see, that we are close technologically too. Actually one day we can create virtual reality almost like our reality. "Matrix" hasn't went too far, they left us in real world with just "connection" to virtual reality. But! Imagine virtual reality without any connection to outer world. Actually we do not need imagination, we touch such virtual world all the time playing strategic games. We just need to improve resolution, timing, model logic, etc, just don't want to waste time deepening in technical details. So we can suppose that sometimes we'll be able to create virtual reality with human like beings and our world like environment inside.
Can we suppose that human race someday will migrate to virtual reality? Does it sound too horrible? But we already realized that someday we should live Earth, at least part of humanity due to overcrowding and lack of resources. Maybe some of us will jump in spaceship to find another world like Cooper, but maybe some of us will choose VR? Right now I'm not discussing this possibility. Just want you to imagine, some people build isolated autonomous and safe system of VR and migrated in it (somehow, doesn't matter).
But before that let's return to our reality and analyze present time. What we have now? Computers and digital networks are icon of modernity. Present world based on networks as ability of information exchange. Our digital world produces terabytes information and digests it. Information becomes more and more important part of our civilisation. So we can suppose that there in the VR, information would be the most valuable thing. I mean all kind of information, including human race knowledge, history, present time events, rumors, etc... As our ancestors used to hunt and fight for food, virtual identities would be hunt for information. Imagine some chief of tribe accepting information donations from the tribe members. The more information you eat, the bigger and fatter you are. That wouldn't equal society like we aim to build. I suppose that world would be mostly like our ancient world and information wouldn't be shared fair enough. Information as the most valuable thing, would be part of power, like oil in present world. Now imagine all other things according this assumption, hunting, stealing, saving, gifing, selling, eating, digesting, etc.. information. Imagine and think what would be that world like?
btw, can you imagine information as power in our world? it is today already, without any imagination, and it'll probably become more valuable power tool in the feature.
