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Mortal-Region t1_j51oahw wrote

One advantage of VR is that new spaces can be created at practically zero cost. For example, a group of artists could conjure up a brand-new themed space that's as large as they like and easily accessible to anyone in the world. To create a real theme park, on the other hand, they'd have to build it on real-world land (which is in finite supply), and visitors would have to physically travel there.

Another advantage is that VR can be made practically risk-free (the many spectacular malfunctions of Enterprise's holodeck not withstanding).

In the case of fully simulated reality, where people's brains are digital constructs within the simulated world (e.g., uploading), there's the additional advantage that there'll be room for many, many orders of magnitude more people, with lives that are many, many orders of magnitude longer.

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OldWorldRevival t1_j51rjqj wrote

Can't wait to delete yourself here and copy yourself over there?

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Mortal-Region t1_j51skou wrote

I'm actually skeptical of uploading. I think what'll actually happen is digital people will come to vastly outnumber and outlive biological people, who will eventually go extinct.

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raishak t1_j525qlb wrote

Agreed as well. What comes out the other side of this will probably not resemble original humans at all, but regardless, whatever intelligent agents are digitized will have a huge advantage over biological agents in nearly all aspects. Be it artificial or some kind of derivative of human flesh scans or individual behavioral modeling.

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Mortal-Region t1_j529gix wrote

I think their biggest advantage is how well-suited they'd be for colonizing other stars. They wouldn't need to find suitable planets -- they'd only need energy from the stars. They could just send out seeds and grow new digital life at the destination. Probably the typical scenario for a galaxy is that an intelligent technological civilization arises on a single planet, and they distribute machine intelligence throughout the galaxy.

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