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Contemplating how quickly the present is catching up with these depictions, one has to wonder what kind of people we will be once machines wait on us, construct our imitation realities and offer us whatever we desire, in genuine or simulated form, without delay in gratification? We will be very comfortable, of that there is no doubt. But, as science fiction also tells us, who we become, in response to these challenges will depend on the kind of moral beings we are. It will depend on whether our wisdom keeps pace with our power.

Simulation and technology offer us, individually and collectively, both new opportunities for freedom and traps we can use to refashion our neuroses with more interesting symptoms. How we handle these alternatives is a matter of choice. No machine and no sales pitch should be allowed to make the choice for us.

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This culture is obviously an expression of deep yearnings and a fulfillment of deep fantasies inside us. Each of us has, as part of our mental make-up, what might be termed a simulation complex and a reality complex, expressing our desire to control fictional worlds and the actual world, to create a realm of constant satisfaction and humane values, organized around ourselves.

Our conscious and unconscious thoughts about controlling real and virtual worlds are only a part of what is inside us that is relevant to these changes. Our minds also include an acute awareness of the various possibilities for good and bad as they relate to ourselves, society and nature. They include an awareness that we are fallen selves, trapped in our own psychodynamics and narcissism; that we live in fallen societies, permeated by the misuse of power and by deception, which is a product of our fallen nature as it is caught up in the world of scarcity and necessity we find in nature. And our minds include the awareness that we live amid a fallen world of nature that limits us at every turn, and that we have turned into a product of our own fallen selves. Of course, we are also aware of the good we have achieved — our fallen selves and societies have still managed to build civilization; we live lives with considerable fulfillment; we bring up new generations; and have turned nature into a source of material riches, for many.

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One might say that humanity is involved in a game of catch-up: Every year simulations are becoming more convincing, and every year we are getting better at not being fooled.

One of the more brilliant metaphors for the way simulations are being used to manipulate the public was devised by Stanislaw Lem, a Polish science fiction writer, in his novel The Futurological Congress.

Lem’s novel points to one of the central principles of contemporary life: The ability to manipulate simulations is a form of power and the inability to see through simulations is a form of powerlessness. Those who manipulate appearances, today, exercise power over those who are taken in by appearances.

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