After thousands of years in which we were immersed in our environment, we are being lifted out and given a broader view, and we are beginning to think of the world less as a cage or container and more as a tool or media we can use to get what we want.
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On a much larger scale, humanity’s “home” — our physical environment — is similarly being automated and controlled, moving us toward a time when we will perceive and manipulate events everywhere on the earth.
Inevitably, these changes are bringing about a new kind of society, in which people have advanced abilities to manipulate both the physical world and worlds of illusion.
We end up living inside an artificial environment that caters to our desires, in which we constantly manipulate technology in ways that expand our freedom and power, and allow us to transcend many of the limits of existence. The computer scientist, manipulating images to create virtual worlds, and the physical scientist, learning how to manipulate the elements of this world, become archetypal figures of the age.
In this new environment, simulations will almost certainly be much like “reality” and reality will develop many of the qualities of a virtual environment. The material world will begin to seem less substantial, and more like an environment of images that is open to our manipulations.