Could AI be used for torture soon?

By: Jake Rajala

With the rapid development of virtual reality and MetaVerse over the past several years, the VR world has certainly positively touched millions of people. VR has made a bang with headsets, games, and even movies (such as Ready Player One). It was beautifully recently shown in a podcast between Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman that they could put the headset on and they could look at each other (face to face) in the same room — despite being hundreds of miles apart!

With that said, less-optimistic people certainly care about personal gain more than the vision of VR. Overly power-hungry, piggish, and ignorant souls could even use VR to harm POW. Hopefully, the VR world can garner more praise from billionaires. The filthy rich people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos seem to be focused on space and Artificial Intelligence (with Neuralink and OpenAI) instead.

As the VR graphics improve, people will enjoy their life so much, that they could honestly have a family in the game. At the same time, they could be a hero! People may not want to take off the headset — apart from eating, sleeping, and changing clothes. In the film, Inception, there is a group of people who prefer sleeping because they have everything they desire, so they only “rarely wake up in the real world”. Could VR really maintain our feelings to a state of bliss for us? How could it not be hyper-competitive? Will we get bored in a game?

I love the idea that people can see each other in physical space. I believe this is a much better idea than FaceTime for teaching a class or giving a speech in a meeting! Dating apps would also really benefit from two people seeing each other right away.

Steve Jobs is likely shedding a tear by looking down below at the progression of “Facebook” and the outlook by Mark Zuckerberg, who once sought advice from Jobs in the last days of Jobs’s life. The former Apple founder recommended Mark to travel to India!

In the show, “Black Mirrors”, there is a scene where there is a hologram of a person. However, it’s a conscious hologram! People pay money to shock/torture the hologram. Thankfully, an altruistic teenager put an end to the person going through hell. With VR or AI, we have to make sure that we don’t only create a magical product, but we make something that can’t be simply tweaked into a dangerous weapon.

Ultimately, I believe that VR will rarely be used as a method of torture. I actually believe that VR can be the big break for prisoners. I believe they will adapt better to a sleeky VR headset than the Bible or a box TV. I wholeheartedly anticipate VR to improve the way we learn and make a positive impact in the way we socialize. We will have a lot more ambiverts in the world with VR!