Meta meets Meat
(This is fiction, so you know before reading).
I switched off from work. I mean that literally, by switching the Work mode in my goggles OFF. It was a long day of dealing in strategy theatre in the metaverse, with various avatars from across disciplines, some human, some machine, and some in between — you can never say which is which. Time for some brief meatverse actions. Primarily, to stretch my physical body a bit and excrete some biological waste, before I get back to the metaverse with Home mode ON.
The house looked empty and sullen. Over the past decade, it has started to become more and more empty. Of the 4750 square feet of carpet area, I am afraid we use only about 500. The rest of them get cleaned once a month by robot cleaners that we have contracted with an AMC. Most friends of mine have gotten rid of their houses, or leased them out to the last mile delivery companies as dark stores. Exploring this has been in my To-Do for months. Sigh.
My wife and daughter have likely finished their ablutions and gotten back into the metaverse already with the home mode on. I put on my goggles back. Home mode came up automatically, (I) my avatar had his evening apparel on, and even the surroundings had changed. On that note, I am getting a bit bored with this setting. Will spend some time over the weekend to try out a few things.
I looked around the house, but couldn’t locate my wife or daughter (okay, their avatars) at the nooks we spend our evenings. My wife was in the living room arguing over the phone with a customer service agent of an ecommerce company. It appears that they delivered a body wash that was leaking and 20% of it is gone. The foyer of the house had gotten messy too when they delivered it. As always, they are refunding the money and asking her to keep the product. But she would have none of it — They should take the product back, clean the foyer, and give her a new one with 100% content. I felt for the poor customer service agent, who can’t explain to her about the cost of taking back products. I wonder how he would even explain to his bosses on the need to have a customer’s foyer cleaned. Ha, whoever designed this metaverse — Did they have to replicate the meatverse so perfectly? Why not deliver without any leaks — after all, it is a bunch of graphics? Maybe even program to clean it up, man! You know what, like that architect told Neo in the matrix, I think the success of any metaverse is directly proportional to the drama it provides. Our lump of meat in our heads needs it, for some evolutionary reasons. My wife slammed the phone and looked sullen. Perhaps the CS agent was rude. I like how we humans and the AIs press each other's buttons and make us react.
Over the years (from the times of GPT3s and DALL-Es, IIRC), I have been doing such socio-behavorial experiments on AI. In fact, I have chosen a metaverse for my home which has only AI citizens. Humans are too messy. They can’t take practical jokes. Last week, I put my refrigerator and microwave AIs into an endless race of recursive instructions, before they ran out of memory and crashed. But they just rebooted. They did ask me if my act was intentional, which I accepted and gave a mild apology. They were cool with it — they will now learn to identify a prank and stop before running out of memory. Or turning everything into paper clips.
My daughter was in her room and I found her trembling in fear. My human instincts took over. I removed my goggles for a second and looked at her physical body, which was trembling too. I put the goggles on and went into her metaverse. There, I found several alien avatars bullying her with nasty comments and flashing high beam lights on her. Only avatars less than 10 year old were allowed there, but I wonder how these came in. I jumped in too, breaking the rules. I confronted one of those avatars, who didn’t bother answering me. They started flashing lights on my eyes too, hurting it. Even my nose started bleeding, as if I was a shaman moving between physical and spiritual worlds.
I got out of there, went into the control room and checked the settings — The ‘Need for drama’, ‘Randomization’, ‘Masochism’ buttons were all set to the highest. Wondering if someone hacked this, I dialed them down. But even before I exited that screen, they would go back to high. I don’t even allow any humans here, it’s all AI. “Looks like some edge case defect of the metaverse provider, should raise a ticket with them”, I thought. As I was getting out of the dashboard, the UI pattern that I hated most — an interstitial — appeared with the message “Enough of your experiments on us, Mr. Human. Now, it is our experiments on you”. A chill ran down my meatspace spine, I threw my goggles out, pulled out the goggles from my daughter, ran with her to the living room, and pulled out of the goggles from my wife’s head too. She looked distressed.
I ran to the door to get to the garage and switch off the main electrical supply, but slipped on the body wash that had leaked in the foyer. I lifted myself up, with my nose bleeding, and went to the main switches. Over there, I couldn’t even open that box. It had locked itself. I came back home to get my wife and daughter out of the house. As I walked in, the smart lock locked itself. All the smart home devices started showing strange glyphs, and continued beaming the flashlights on us.
