To Conclude …

Summary

The philosopher David Chalmers believes we may be on the cusp of a great migration, one likely to overshadow every wave of human migration in history: the move to a virtual world or worlds, as the real one continues to degrade. In centuries to come, instead of asking: ‘should we move to a new country to start a new life?’ we may ask: ‘should we shift our lives to a virtual world?’. As with emigration, often the reasonable answer may be ‘yes’.¹ With sufficient computing power, virtual reality will no longer consist of pre-packaged individual experiences. It will become a concurrent and real-time platform where billions of people can meet to conduct business, shop and have fun. In one of his online interviews, the journalist Dean Takahashi called the metaverse ‘the most difficult and important thing humanity will ever build’.