[kafkaesq]

Glaciers are melting; forests are burning; coral reefs are blanching; ocean levels are rising, water tables are dropping. The ecosystems that sustain our food supply chains are collapsing; those that aren't collapsing, are being poisoned; and the tiny niches relatively immune from these threats are being bought by hedge funds and private equity firms. Our education system is being gutted; so are our retirement plans. Our healthcare system seems to resiliently resist nearly all efforts at meaningful reform. Every movement we make, physical or virtual, is being relentlessly tracked, recorded, indexed and archived by an exponentially growing number of surveillance systems, private and governmental, for perpetuity.

And these guys are getting $1.4b so we can... shoot imaginary robots at the office?

[race2tb]

Augmented reality may actually be the solution. Think about it, virtual items replace real ones this is huge on its own for the planet.You no longer need a phone , laptop, tv,random toys, etc. No more driving to work, offices are no longer required and replaced by virtual ones you can be in from anywhere with all office equipment and staff virtualized. The list keeps going on and for everything you add to it less of the planets resources are being used.

I think AR and VR along with lab grown animal protein of multiple varieties will reverse a tremendous amount of our planetary fleecing. This vision is at least 20+ years away ,but it is definitely a good answer to many of our problems.

[deftnerd]

Don't underestimate the positive environmental impact that replacing monitors and mobile phone screens might have. If this is successful and high-quality enough, we there would be less stuff manufactured that requires nasty chemicals, less to recycle, and less energy consumption.

[kafkaesq]

Compared to... headsets?

Not sure there's a positive tradeoff in terms of resources. And in terms of chronic physical strain (vision, neck muscles) there may be a negative tradeoff.

[fricken4]

If we all lived in huts, subsisted on rice and beans, and travelled by bicycle, humanity wouldn't be threatening the stability of the biosphere; but of course, we're wired to crave richer experiences, we hoard, and we seek to acquire status which is demonstrated by how much excess cargo we have to waste.

The more aspects of the human experience we can ephemeralize, the less we need to go out and muck up the physical world to get what we want.

A just released Pew research study has shown that 1 in 5 are online almost constantly. Which is to say, their experience of the world is already largely virtual, and the role that their physical presence plays is, by extension, diminished.

[meta_pseudo]

In that case I would also like to hear your opinions about stock market :D, in all seriousness there are people and companies who are trying to tackle some of the problems you mentioned and getting funded. Look on the positive side, tools and research by these guys can be used in education and medicine!

I understand most of focus in on the entertainment market but we can't blame particular set of people for that happening, magic leap is essentially promising something we have been looking forward to from so many years(since we saw stuff in sci-fi movies)!

[kafkaesq]

I'm sure the technology will find practical uses, eventually. It's just that if immersive shoot-em-up games are to be understood as it's main selling point for the foreseeable future (which going by the video, is apparently the takeaway they'd like us to have), then you can count me as decidedly... unenthralled.

[joelg]

You could have said the same thing about the black plague and the printing press in the 14th century...

[kafkaesq]

Except that all of those problems I mentioned are basically man-made, and the solutions are manifestly available to us... if only we'd care to get our act together.

In the face of the Black Death, our species was basically helpless (and there doesn't seem to be any scientific consensus yet as to how, exactly, it "ended.")

[hrnnnnnn]

Here's an album I think you would like, it's called "The Anthropocene Extinction" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF-W8Dbtacs