Ready Player One

Ready Player One

 After finishing Ready Player One, I must admit I really liked the book, way more than I expected to be honest. It made my geeky side quite happy and constantly bugged my anxiety and curiosity as I read through it. Now, taking on the book though an ethical point of view, I want to start by analyzing the following quotes:

Morrow wrote in his autobiography that he’d left GSS because ... he felt that the OASIS had evolved into something horrible. “It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity,” he wrote. “A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.” (p. 120) 


(Halliday speaking) “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.” (p. 364)


I agree with the main idea behind both quotes. Today we can already see how social media have strongly impacted society. It is not rare to see people that pay way more attention today to their social image in the web through sites like Instagram or Facebook, and are more likely to do whatever it takes to get more followers and "likes", to fill up their self esteem and pride, rather than focusing on themselves and truely do something with their lives. With the great increase of technology these days, it has become so easy to evade reality and our problems through the cellphone or the computer, and it is worrying and sad. It reminds me of this episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive, you should watch it in Netflix.

Having a system like OASIS in real life, that is kinda difficult to imagine nowadays. Even though the whole industry is slowly aiming towards the development of AI, machine learning, and the IoT, I do think we are still far from developing a system as complex and inclusive as OASIS. However, I would not dare to say it ain't possible in some 50 years from now, I mean, anything can happen in the future.

What I do believe, however, is that we are not ready as a species to deal with such technology. And I'm not talking about physically, emotionally or psychologically. I refer to a level of maturity as society and species. Yes, it would be awesome and it would have its virtues, as it would become the massive, ultimate datacenter of every knowledge harvested by the human race, and (if successfully developed) would encourage even more globalization and the mixing of cultures worldwide. But as long as we don't learn to control technology and ourselves, it will be technology itself what will dictate the future of the human race, as we will begin to adapt to it instead of it adapting to us, due to its increasing complexity.

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