Brave New World Essay

Conor O’Neill
Honors English
5/12/09
What Could Come Next?

The idea of a virtual reality world in which one can leave their physical body behind and be able to do whatever they want in another world, has long been the topic of science fiction novels. As a matter of fact, one such book, Pendragon by D.J. MacHale, directly talks about such a world. The main character of MacHale’s book, Bobby Pendragon, runs into a future race of people who live out their fantasies in a virtual world instead of living in the real world. The results of this decision are cataclysmic; instead of being around to take care of the living planet, everyone wants to be a part of this virtual reality world. Their planet slowly withers and dies as they continue to live out their fantasies and avoid actual problems. This is not something that anyone would want, but could become a reality with programs such as Second Life growing so rapidly. Today it might just be a simple computer program that someone controls an avatar in, tomorrow however, we could have technology that could mimic the real world, but will only create desirable situations. We could then be seeing a replica of what MacHale wrote about in his book.
On the other side of this argument, there are many helpful things about technology like this coming to the Arlington community. Second Life represents technological progress that Arlington has not yet made. We are a community that does not rely to heavily on technology. We could use this Second Life technology for many of the same things that the Arlington Virginia community uses it for. Instead of having to go to job fairs (1), we could set them up online and have our avatars go to it without us leaving our computer. Also, instead of having to train police officers out of a textbook, we could train them to police and deal with undesirable situations in the cyber world like they do in Arlington, VA (2). We could also connect with people all over the world in ways that were previously unprecedented. It would be like a combination of chat websites such as facebook, and video chat services such as Skype. This would be a major step up for towns such as Arlington which are not yet taking full advantage of the wide range of technology available.
The fact hat we now have technology available to us such as Second Life, speaks volumes about what we could have a couple of years from now. A new technology that could readily spawn from Second Life is even more realistic virtual reality worlds. Instead of having to sit in front of your computer and having to control a character on a screen, technology could advance to such a rate that we would only have to have a chip in our head to transport us to a world filled with all of our desires. Though this sounds completely farfetched and absolutely ridiculous, so did space travel in the 1930’s. The truth is, there is no limit to what the advancements in human technology could reach. One hundred years from now, mars could be colonized and we could be living peacefully among other alien races (admittedly Star Wars-esque). In the last fifty years, the human race has developed to a point that we can communicate with people across the globe in a matter of seconds. To say that the Second Life technology could only be used to advance in the field of virtual reality does it a disfavor; with the human race advancing at the rate it now is, there are no limits to what could be next.
Aldous Huxley would no doubt agree that the capacity for human development is endless. Though he might have been critical of technology on the whole, I know that Huxley would only have praise for this article. He would have said that the innovation that the creators of Second Life have shown with their program is revolutionary. Though Huxley did write one of the most radical books of the 50’s which shocked people of the time, I think he would say that a little conformity, in which people would participate in Second Life, is acceptable. Huxley would most defiantly agree with all of the positive things that second life has to offer. The foremost of this is teaching government officials how to do their job adequately as they have done in Arlington Virginia (3). After all, Huxley did write a book about an evil government keeping their people down and creating mass conformity; he would probably prefer if that didn’t happen in real life.