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Imagine a technologically advanced human society (about a few centuries ahead of our time) which has scientifically moved forward in many fields . There is one specific technology however, whose research has slowed down and then stopped over the course of a few decades, due to global fear and general unease towards it.

That technology is the generation of realistic simulations of worlds through virtual reality, which can be experienced by people during long periods of time and with great immersion stimulation of senses, emotions etc...

What could cause widespread global fear of such a technology in this advanced human society?

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    $\begingroup$ I'm afraid of virtual reality. Haven't you seen the Matrix? No thanks. In other news, this is too broad. There could be as many reasons for this fear as there are people that are afraid. I'm voting to close. $\endgroup$
    – kingledion
    Commented Dec 24, 2017 at 23:46
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    $\begingroup$ Regrettably, this is pretty broad. Let's try to narrow it down a bit. Every technology has underlying technologies and if we better understand how the foundation has been affected, we can better answer your question. Is your society afraid of screen-based video games? How about 3D modeling, MRI imaging, and other tech that lead up to the statement, "Man, I wish I could pull their brain out of their head and look at it..." (Oddly, both video games and medicine tend to favor that statement....) What other techs are stunted and why? $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Dec 25, 2017 at 1:58
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    $\begingroup$ @Unlambder: Really? Including suicide bombers and people with "do not resuscitate" orders? And I think you perhaps confuse wanting to avoid something with having a fear of it. As (for a seasonal example) I'm certainly not eager to go shopping in the days before Christmas, but I'm not afraid of doing so. $\endgroup$
    – jamesqf
    Commented Dec 25, 2017 at 19:46
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    $\begingroup$ This question has been nominated for reopening, but I cannot vote to do that. The presence of answers does not mean the question is a good question meeting the expectations of WB:SE's FAQ. This question is too broad and no effort has been made to narrow it. Without the failure of foundation tech to gain traction, there is no valid reason why a widespread global fear of what was built upon that tech. Nuclear weapons are a good present-day example. The question should stay closed unless narrowed. $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Dec 25, 2017 at 21:05
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    $\begingroup$ No effort, Unlambder. We appreciate every participant, but if you don't want to understand what the issue is or do anything to fix it then we're at a loss. The only editing I've seen to that question improved its grammar, but has done nothing to reduce the scope. I've explained twice what you need to do. We are not to blame if you don't want to do it. Besides, 1 of those 7 answers is yours and 4 were by people who are only learning the rules themselves. The other two should have their hands slapped. $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Commented Dec 25, 2017 at 22:06

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In the original radio play of Red Dwarf on the BBC, there was a VR game called Better Than Life (BTL), into which some people would fall and never come back out. They would eventually die of exhaustion or starvation.

There are some documented cases even now of what appears to be people dying of dehydration while playing World of Warcraft; imagine a game where the real world is effectively replaced with a 'better' or 'nicer' world. It would be every bit as bad as a chemical drug.

The sad bit is that things like opioids have practical therapeutic benefits when administered correctly and for given reasons. Trouble is, many people abuse these medicines for recreational effects. The same may be true of VR in a future where the virtual worlds are not only indistinguishable from real life, but are so alluring that people just don't want to leave. Ever.

All it will take is a few deaths by VR, and many people will want to ban the technology as dangerous. It's sad, but we do live in a global nanny state where not only do the governments HAVE to protect a certain subset of the population from themselves by limiting the choices of the responsible, but there is a growing EXPECTATION that the governments will do this.

In such a world, the fear of VR may well be akin to the fear the general population has of things like Heroin. And in many cases, rightly so. After all, the effect that Heroin allegedly gives would have to be similar to the euphoric effect of being the hero of your own personal virtual world.

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  • $\begingroup$ Exactly. kerchika $\endgroup$
    – Will Crawford
    Commented Dec 25, 2017 at 2:35
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    $\begingroup$ It could be even more akin to recreational drugs (or contemporary video games), in that there's a spectrum: some people fear VR, others enjoy it, still others simply don't find it at all interesting. $\endgroup$
    – jamesqf
    Commented Dec 25, 2017 at 3:25
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A bad, deadly launch

This VR works by directly interfacing with the body's Central Nervous System. The prototypes looked fine and worked fine, but when it came time for mass production, something went wrong.

As a result, the big worldwide launch day was met with catastrophe. Numerous people had terrible reactions to the technology, leading to paralysis, brain damage, and/or death. The launching company also downplayed such responses until such a time that public opinion was already against it, at which time they still tried to save face but issued a recall and found/fixed the issue.

As a result, many people feared the devices even though they were statistically safer than something like paintball or karate classes. The company that built them stopped producing them since it was no longer profitable, and no other company has attempted to replicate them due to public dislike. The units exist and are used just fine, but occasionally some issue crops up - Usually due to someone misusing the devices - that drives home the issues in people's mind.

For some real-world analogies, think of the opinion vs Nuclear power. It's immensely safer than any other alternative, by pretty much any metric, but things like Cherynobyl and nuclear weapons have caused people to equate Nuclear with Bad. Additionally, take a look at Haloween candy and poison/razor blades/etc. That almost never happened, but the small amount of times that it did happen it was given huge amounts of press coverage so now everyone's paranoid about it.

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It could be that virtual reality once put the entire society in immediate danger

The massively negative effects on users of virtual reality such as addiction and negligence of real life needs would be a bad enough. But fear at this level among almost all members of society is likely to have been triggered by some sort of large scale traumatic event.

Imagine a world where almost everyone gets hooked to virtual reality and starts showing negligence to real life duties. Politicians would stop leading, researchers would turn their focus away from urgent humanity-threatenning problems (such as dangers of ecological catastrophy).

If this had happened and people came aware of it just as society was starting to fall apart, this could act as a global traumatism, incentivising people to turn away from VR.

As this was a thing they were dependent up to addiction on, the aversion generated to get away from it would only be so much bigger.

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  • $\begingroup$ This is answer for me. Modern society should develop good addiction awareness (in general). Even in current world people died because of their addiction to games and so. VR would only increase addictive nature of computer technologies. Parents this days have to take a good care about what are their kids exposed, from extensive gaming/youtubing to online bullying $\endgroup$
    – Piro
    Commented Dec 25, 2017 at 4:16
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I am interpreting VR as "cyberspace" in the sense of 80s cyberpunk and similar works. This is mostly a review of prior art.

Physical threat from the VR

In the second book of the "Labyrinth of reflections" series (yep, Russian Sci-Fi again) a threat to a quite successful cyberspace is the ability of an antagonist to kill someone in cyberspace, killing them also in the real world.

Think of an extended version of the ability to punch/stab/whatever someone into the face via internet.

Bad launch and physical threats again

A quite well-known anime (and what also not) "Sword Art Online" basically deals with a very "unfortunate launch" as someone here put it. The inventor of a blend of VR-immerion and MMO game, who also invented the cyberworld helmets, traps the players in the game. Dying the the game also fries the brains in the real world.

Simulation with bizzare goals

The must-be-mentioned "Matrix" falls into this category. But also the "Simulacron-3" novel and its changed in the adaptation (for the best, in my opinion), called "The Thirteenth Floor".

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Humankind's self esteem lowered with them becoming more and more dependent on AI systems. At the end of the 21st century, most people considered it a ridiculous thought that humans could be able to manually drive vehicles. For a majority of people, the moon landing was a hoax. How could an elaborate plan like this been developed and executed by humans without any AI planning system?

Of course in reality, humans still controlled the machines. But it was only a very small minority of experts, cyborgs actually. The general public of "regular" humans instead fell into passivity. Because the real world was now organized mainly by AI systems - and actually it was more efficiently organized than ever before - there was no place left for human ambition there. So human ambition fled to the vast virtual realities people created.

In there, they were still the masters. No AI was belittleling their capabilities. People lived long in the 22nd century, so their beliefs and disinterest in the real world lived on long. It took nearly century for a new view to emerge. By those younger people, the cyborg elites were now seen as their heros because they developed and improved the AI. At this point, many people were not longer comfortable with the AI systems taking over and staying in the VR all day. They wanted to be masters in the real world just like their ancestores were and just like their cyborg elite was every day. So they demanded to be augmented as well.

A public movement emerged which claimed that "augmentation is a basic right of every human". They saw VR as the manifestation of human debasement. The cyborg elite had always despised the elaborate simulations distracting people from the real world. After a major political struggle between cyborg elites and the general public, the "augmentists" gradually dominated the political systems. Of course in the 22nd century, even anti-VR activists used some kind of basic VR. It was much too expensive and too dangerous to actually travel to Tokio just to have a meeting with business associates there. But they called it CR for Connected Reality instead. And researchers were very keen to stress that their research would not in any way allow to replace reality, which kind of limited the possible novelties in this domain. At some point innovation in VR became unnoticable just like innovation in paving stones.

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Fear is the emotional state that emerges from a perceived threat to physical or mental well-being.

Now consider a world with a large availability of rich multi-modal high-quality virtual reality. This means having all the senses stimulated by 'artificial' means in such a way that it can be exploited as being the real world.

Why would that be a threat?

One answer: totalitarian world domination by controlling people's behavior.

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