An addict, that's who. And this is exactly what this technology will eventually enable - seeing the world through an influencer's eyes while sitting on a ratty couch in a dilapidated apartment. William Gibson painted this picture beautifully in Count Zero.
CTRL-F Gibson, the tech and root parent comment eerily reminded me of Fragments of A Hologram Rose. We're closing the gap between fiction and reality. The short story was written in 1977! Gibson was prescient about so many things.
"He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sold purpose of taking a nap and his morning's exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible."
I suppose (and Gibson is great), but I've always felt that this sort of addiction doesn't require VR? Like, to whatever extent people are going to do this, it's ALREADY HERE.
With UBI and simstim soaps we can have people plug themselves into the Matrix voluntarily, no scary robotic creepers required!
And yes, addicts exist today, but we keep inventing better and better drugs. What would be available to a peasant? Crappy beer? Now a denizen of the SF underbelly can be permanently in an alternate universe thanks to fentanyl.
Have you noticed another trend? We keep making real experiences, real food, real exercise harder to obtain and more expensive while pushing cheap imitations on the masses. VR is not going to be a happy thing that will help disabled people. It will mostly be a source of worsening inequality and a lot of suffering. The "have-nots" will be able to vicariously live the lives of the "haves", but only a fake version.
