Not just about the raw number of people. When your hear "the population is aging," it means the median age is increasing over time. It puts a lot of strain on an economy when the ratio of retirees to working age people gets too high. Retirees are expensive.
Perhaps it puts a lot of strain on an economy where 1% of the people get 50% of the wealth. Perhaps it is hard for current workers to send the lion's share of what they produce to the 1%, and still pay for the retirement of past workers.
The current trends are unsustainable, sure, but just unsustainable for our current economic regime.
There's no reason to think there will ever be a sustained demand for VR entertainment. The experience is novel (for a time), but it's not qualitatively better than other delivery systems. And then, of course, the transient novelty never quite justifies the expense. VR's perception simulation has an uncanny valley-like effect. It's a bit too close visually (with the inevitable nausea), but it also calls attention to the absence of other forms of sensation.
I have been playing online multiplayer VR games for years, with servers full of people who would beg to differ.
The things you report (initial novelty, nausea, uncanny valley, little justification for the expense) simply are not applicable to anyone who plays VR for longer than a few Beat Saber sessions in front of friends & family.
Of course it's a niche, but there is demand. Especially in Gen Z, many of whom received Quest HMDs over the last few years and have been rabid adopters who will grow up to be committed customers. Lobbies for basically every game on offer are full of them (for better or worse).
I disagree. 3D movies never really took off because the illusion of depth is limited to a prism around a two-dimensional screen, but VR allows for a full three-dimensional representation and a more complete illusion of depth. It’s like the difference between black-and-white and color film, or between silent film and film with sound. The only reason it seems like a novelty now is because virtually all the VR content is novelty content.
>When a talented person tries to ban the tools that make an average person able to do the same stuff the talented person can do, this is intentionally disabling people to preserve a class privilege.
And now we're back to denigrating merit again. No denominator. No distinction. Everybody gets the same gold star.
No, I don't want a gold star, I want a robot that can draw for me when I want something done.
I'm not trying to pretend AI image generation is art. I have no interest in that question right now.
What I'm saying is that it's completely unreasonable to ban a tool that ordinary people find massively useful and empowering to protect people who have training and talent.
Billions can't make the images in their heads real to protect the class privilege of a few hundred thousand professional artists worldwide?
The analogy is inapt. It's not illegal to fail at parallel parking. Even if it was, it's not the type of offense that would get you arrested. You say the standards are different, and they are, but then you conflate the two contexts by treating both consequences as punishments. Failing a test is not a punishment. Failing at parallel parking is not legally or morally blameworthy.
It’s not illegal to misattribute small portions of a sentence either. There is literally no law against it. We harshly dissuade it at the grade school, high school, and undergraduate levels (meaning, we will give you a bad grade) because we are trying to teach young students not to misuse even a fragment of text with extremely harsh punishments outside of the legal system. We don’t apply the same level of punishment in real life and certainly not through the legal system because it’s not that serious to borrow a few words in the acknowledgement of a thesis. It’s just embarrassing and bad, as long as the concepts are original.
ETA: I say this as someone who has had both scientific contributions and entire introductory sections copied verbatim into other paper. That’s plagiarism. A meaningless sentence copied from my work has as much relationship to serious plagiarism as a fart in a car has to a Sarin gas attack.
You're using a different definition of plagiarism than Harvard uses. I also think Harvard's definition is overly broad, but that's not the point. The point is that a student would be punished for engaging in the same conduct that's at issue here. The double standard is the problem. The president of Harvard has broken the same rules she has enforced against the University's students. For them, the consequences are serious.
I polled my kids. All of them down to the youngest (19) enjoyed Holy Grail a lot. My 24-year-old says his friends reference it in conversation regularly. We’re not totally out of touch yet!!
