Original subtitles

NARRATOR: In the future, you and everyone around you

will exist solely in a digital universe.

You will open your eyes and live whatever fantasy you've selected

from an infinite menu of options.

You will be the hero of your own story.

Every experience will be razor-sharp and gorgeous,

like the best smart drug ever invented.

Say goodbye to all that brain chemistry

trapping you in the darkness of your mind.

No more PTSD, no more pain, no more loss.

Remember that daughter you lost in a terrible car accident?

Rewind the clock and imagine a new outcome.

You can have the equivalent of a digital lobotomy.

Not feeling well?

Just reboot yourself.

This is the future of your digital existence.

♪

It's the deep future.

Your body, gone.

You're all computer, all the time.

Your brain is way more powerful

than even a billion supercomputers.

Jobs, food, language, water, even traditional thought,

all of humanity's building blocks, all that's done.

And you are immortal.

Squirming in your chair yet?

You should be.

This isn't science fiction.

Today's visionary thinkers say it's a strong probability

that this is what your world is going to look like.

Tonight, they'll guide you toward that spectacular future,

and we'll see how one family navigates it,

one invention at a time.

This is the story of your future.

This is the road to Year Million.

♪

You might not know it yet, but pay attention,

because we are on a crash course to Year Million,

an epoch somewhere in the deep future

where you can't even begin to imagine

how technology will utterly and completely alter

our notion of what it means to be human.

NEGIN FARSAD: The idea behind the Year Million

is like a time in the future

where, like, everything is different.

It's a total paradigm shift.

An idea of this future time,

otherworldly from what we understand right now.

NARRATOR: I've shown you how artificial intelligence

is the root of all future technology.

It will elevate the human race to a dazzling level

of super-intelligence, and it will make us all immortal.

Now, we'll launch you out into the waters

of the largest paradigm shift for mankind,

where we will live completely and totally online.

MICHIO KAKU: After a hard day's work

a lot of people turn on the TV and they see these worlds,

these imaginary worlds coming at you like that.

But then afterwards you turn off the TV

and say, well, that was nice.

It was just a TV program.

Hundreds of years from now,

you will literally leap into a cyberworld.

You'll be able to touch and feel the emotions, the fear.

They'll be beamed right into your brain.

Where you cannot just play video games,

but all of a sudden,

you are the hero of your, of your story.

You are the captain of the ship.

NARRATOR: And why does being the captain of your ship matter?

Allow me a moment to digress.

Perhaps one of the greatest talents

that we human beings have

is the ability to tell stories, to dream.

Ever since we invented fire and huddled around it,

it's how we left the daily grind behind,

from Shakespeare's stage to 'Leave it to Beaver.'

The media may change, but it's still a window on fantasy.

We escape our day, our families, our fears, even love.

But we need it.

And one day, we'll have a new choice,

the ultimate chance to escape.

PETER DIAMANDIS: We can digitize our brain, digitize our persona,

and upload it to the cloud,

where we forget about our physical body,

but it's really our consciousness,

our memories, who we are,

and that is resident on a computational platform

that has infinite growth potential.

KAKU: We would become the gods

that we once feared and worshipped.

FARSAD: I mean, could my avatar just be me

but without all of the anxiety and insecurity?

Like, I think that would be great.

She could, like, lose a few pounds and all that stuff,

you know, typical lady crap.

But I mostly just want her to, like, sleep better at night

and, like, not worry

that she like offended the guy at the deli

by like ordering her coffee weird, you know?

NARRATOR: That choice to play God,

or just someone who doesn't tick off a barista,

in some futuristic microprocessor

is hurtling toward us faster than you can imagine.

And we are already smack in the middle

of a soul-rattling, mind-bending revolution,

where the ultimate destination

will be plugging in and dropping out.

We're talking about a future where we are no longer shackled

by all of the fickle quirks of brain chemistry.

It will be an escape from reality so pure,

I can't see anyone not jumping on board

that speeding digital train.

But let me take you through it, step by digital step.

The first step is already under way.

Virtual reality is in its infancy,

but it will soon be so developed

that your sensory nervous system

will believe every touch, smell, and taste

in the simulated environments you choose to live in.

That's when you'll be able to do everything

plugged into a VR universe, from work to school to play.

That virtual universe is a new environment on Earth

called the metaverse, version 1.0.

A new and infinite reality where you, or your avatar,

can do whatever your heart desires.

Next there's the metaverse 2.0.

That's when we'll discard our bodies,

scan our brains into a computer,

and live as a digital signal in an online cloud collective.

Now don't worry, you'll probably still have your own identity.

But in metaverse 2.0, there is no escape hatch.

It's all paradise until someone's avatar gets deleted.

With a new world comes new dangers,

and we'll need to control and police the digital sphere

from a whole host of new crimes.

And here's the thing that'll really rock your world:

some futurists believe, in fact, they think the odds prove,

that we are already living in that simulation.

You heard right.

These are people with PhDs who are saying this.

Before we begin the adventure, let's step back in time

and role play the first time you plug in.

Our future family is taking

a walk in the woods together, right?

Well, they are, except their bodies are here

in their living room.

Mom and daughter are big fans of living in that digital world;

now, if they can just convince Dad.

OSCAR: So your designers can recreate anything.

Yet they recreate Earth?

EVA: They create all kinds of things.

OSCAR: Right. But...

EVA: I thought you'd like to start with something familiar.

JESS: What do you want to see, Dad?

NARRATOR: It seems crazy to believe

we'd ever get a simulation to look this good.

But remember where we were nearly 40 years ago

when Atari first transformed the living room experience.

♪

Well, now think about how realistic

a PlayStation VR is today.

CHUCK NICE: I was in fear of my life

that these robot zombies were going to kill me!

NARRATOR: Exactly.

So, tack on another 40 years

and imagine how much more amazing it'll look

if you want to digitally hike the Himalayas

or parachute out of a virtual airplane

into the Amazon Rain Forest.

Or--and this isn't even in the future--you could be Batman.

MATT MIRA: I played the Batman virtual reality game

where you wake up in Wayne Manor,

you go down to the bat cave,

you put on the bat suit, and it's great.

It, you feel like you're Batman.

You'll be on the top of a rooftop in Gotham,

and you look down, and I swear to God,

sometimes I would feel a breeze go by me.

Even though I was in my living room,

like the rest of my body was being tricked into thinking

I was outside at night in the rain.

I love it.

NARRATOR: Man, that sounds cool.

But right now, it's still just a game.

You know you're pretending.

It'd be impossible to sustain for, say, a lifetime.

But that's only because VR is in the dark ages

compared to where it will go.

PAUL BETTNER: Today, virtual reality is a big headset,

it's bulky,

but it will eventually become an invisible technology.

PHILIP ROSENDALE: We can definitely get closer

to the retina with contact lenses.

We should be able to make ourselves able to see things

we don't see.

Hallucinate visually, basically.

ANDERS SANDBERG: In the long run,

we want to splice the signal

straight into our nervous system.

MIRA: You know, all you have to do is trick five senses.

You don't have to do anything great.

You just have to trick your eyes, trick your ears,

trick your nose, and trick your touch,

and you will be tricked.

NARRATOR: So once VR tricks you, you won't know the difference

between walking to the bus stop for real,

or doing it while plugged into a totally digital landscape.

DAVID BYRNE: It's surprising to experience things

that aren't there, that are not real.

You know they're not real, but you still experience them.

NARRATOR: Our brains are pretty much

the most sophisticated instruments on Planet Earth,

so is it possible that some fancy contact lens

or even a neural implant are going to make you believe

with every fiber of your being

that you are a Dark Ages knight or a Mars astronaut?

The question is how will you go from playing Batman

to being Batman?

This little doll has your answer.

Visionary artist and musician David Byrne

is captivated by the potential of VR.

He's interested in looking at just how much the technology

can trick our brains.

Can these folks truly believe

that they are this ugly little doll?

BYRNE: Everybody comes in,

we have this kind of semicircle of chairs.

A curtain parts in, in the middle,

and they see a little doll in a chair.

MAN: Welcome to your new body.

NARRATOR: Yes, I know you'd rather be a superhero.

But today, you're the doll.

It's all about baby steps, people.

MAN: We're going to perform

something called an embodiment.

Go ahead and put on the virtual reality headsets or goggles.

Now I need you to look down at your legs.

And you should be seeing your new doll legs.

MAN: Uh, what do you feel when I touch your knee?

[laughter]

So your eyes tell you that you are Brita.

Now your sense of touch is reinforcing this reality.

[laughter]

BYRNE: What you see is the doll's knee being touched.

But what you feel is your own knee being touched.

That's when they really feel

like their body is the doll's body.

Then we kind of culminate by... [laughs]

by threatening the doll's body a little bit.

MAN: If you just hold still, this won't hurt a bit.

Just a little pin prick.

So I'm just gonna go ahead with that.

Okay. [laughs]

BETTNER: With the right audio

and the right visual stimulation,

your brain is willing to fill in all the rest of the sensations.

The saying 'if you could walk a mile in someone's shoes,'

that's actually what you can do now.

NARRATOR: So, yes, it turns out VR can be extremely persuasive

when it comes to showing you a simulated world.

ROSEDALE: I would say that we, as humans,

have already had a great deal of experience

creating and entering other worlds.

Our books, shows, our role-playing,

our everything we do has to some extent been a creative exercise

in trying to expand the limits of where we live.

I think that the idea of using computers to simulate the world

is just kind of the next logical step in that.

And maybe, as some people have said, the last one.

NARRATOR: That's right, the last one.

That's because once we step into that digital world,

we might never want to leave it.

That could be our future.

It'll be totally normal to live online all the time,

in a massive planet-wide digital network known as the metaverse,

where the sky's the limit,

and you can choose your own adventure every single day.

Better than a cubicle, right?

♪

NARRATOR: The next technological boom propelling us forward

from virtual reality will mark an event horizon so dramatic,

that it very well may be the beginning of the end

of human life as we've defined it.

I'm not talking end of days;

it's more an evolution of the human form.

Once we get a taste of this escapism,

we may never want to come back.

And if you're like me, you're probably wondering,

can I really be seduced?

And if so, what will it feel like

to escape into this shared online world?

Well, try this on for size.

ROSEDALE: If we have 100 billion brain cells,

we have about 100 million or so of those

that are leading out to our nerves--

touch, our vision, smell, everything.

What would it be like to have 100 times more nerves

that were connecting you to the world around you?

What would it be like to, to touch someone

with 100 more times the nerve endings

than you have in your skin today?

And in a computer, you could do this.

NARRATOR: The metaverse, a limitless digital refuge

from our less-than-perfect world.

Driven by an artificially intelligent engine.

Once we hook in, we will access recesses in our brain

we never knew existed, connect with minds all over the planet,

and collectively rebuild the world as we envision it,

digital brick by digital brick.

EBBE ALTBERG: The metaverse connects all humans

in one shared media space.

You can interact with other people,

like we do in the physical world.

You can interact with the environment,

move things, touch things.

SANDBERG: A shared, joint virtual reality,

that you can move around in,

that most of society have access to.

KAKU: In the future, we'll be able to create

an imaginary world the size of a planet.

BETTNER: I mean, there will be virtual construction companies

and architects and all these sorts of crazy jobs,

that would sound ridiculous now but are completely inevitable.

ROSENDALE: Even in a completely digital form,

we'll form into tribes and groups,

and find our people and fall in love,

and, and do all these things.

But I bet we'll still have very rich decisions going on

around, you know, how we choose to live with each other.

And that is still going to be a very fundamental conflict

that is going to be just as real inside a digital matter

as it would be in the real world.

NARRATOR: Ah, yes, the ever-evolving calculus

of love and relationships in a world we design.

The temptation could be unimaginable.

Say you are a woman in a really long marriage,

what do you do to add a little spice?

How about a game of role play?

♪

WOMAN: Hey, stranger.

OSCAR: What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?

WOMAN: Exploring my options.

OSCAR: I'm sorry, but I'm married.

WOMAN: I won't tell if you won't.

NARRATOR: Now, if this world makes you uneasy,

you'll still have an escape hatch--

simply unplug.

But it may not be that simple.

You may feel, well, more at home in the metaverse.

In fact, there are some in today's world

who are already spending a lot of quality time in that bar,

or rather, in this bar.

In virtual clubs on a massive multiplayer online program

called Second Life.

Second Life attracts nearly a million patrons

to a digital world, even without VR.

NICK LOIZIDES: My full name is Nick Loizides,

and my avatar name is Loz Hyde.

I've been in Second Life just over 10 years.

NARRATOR: This is a prototype for the metaverse.

Players live whatever life they choose.

Living as whatever avatar they design.

LOIZIDES: When you first log in,

you go through this metamorphosis

of recreating yourself into either your likeness

or into something else.

I've seen people as mermaids or dragons.

Whatever you want to be, you can be.

NARRATOR: For people like Nick,

Second Life may be just as rich and nuanced as real life.

LOIZIDES: The people that stick around and stay in for years

have that moment,

possibly spiritually, I guess, in some way.

You do something like dance at the same time,

and that drives another emotion.

And of course, as you're dancing,

you're not operating anything.

Your avatar is literally just doing the moves,

and it's very graceful.

NARRATOR: And how can you blame Nick

when this computer program can make your average dude,

well, a graceful dancer?

Second Life is a new world

full of experiences and possibilities.

And that's exactly what Second Life's creator,

Philip Rosedale, was looking to do

when he dreamed up the program

as a first step toward building the metaverse.

Rosedale believes that the metaverse

could set humanity free.

ROSENDALE: When Second Life took off,

we saw people are a good deal more free

about being able to be themselves.

The dynamics between women and men inside Second Life

were different than they are in the real world.

Women took over,

dominated a lot of the economy and manufacturing,

and I think some of that comes from the fact

that we had finally removed all bias.

LOIZIDES: I have a manager in there, Samantha is her name.

She's amazing.

We have a club called Core, she basically runs that for me.

Core, the nightclub, is underwater,

so you have glass around, you can see fish.

NARRATOR: So the future bar where Oscar and Eva meet up

for a digital tryst, those kinds of connections are being forged

right now, even in today's digital bars.

And those relationships inspire real emotions, even love.

LOIZIDES: The way I met Sam, my manager,

I was dancing with somebody else,

but I was flirting with her.

[laughs]

Whether we meet in real life or not,

whether I know what she looks like in real life or not,

it doesn't matter.

I totally trust her and love her to death.

ANNALEE NEWITZ: Virtual reality could enhance

a lot of the experiences that we're already having now

through the Internet

and make them feel a lot more real,

and give us much more emotional and visceral reactions.

NARRATOR: Programs like Second Life

are laying the groundwork for a metaverse

that will attract more and more users

until it is as omnipresent as smart phones.

But Second Life is about to take a giant step forward.

It's about to morph into something else,

something that uses 3D virtual reality,

and makes the program far more immersive,

meaning that we are getting closer

to being able to experience the metaverse,

just like our future family does.

Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life,

is hard at work on developing a program called Sansar.

It's Second Life, but on steroids.

You'll be able to roam around a digital world,

but now it will be fully 3D, interactive,

and virtual reality-accessible.

Instead of punching keys on a keyboard,

it will mimic your movement.

It's realer.

ALTBERG: I put on my headset,

and then I meet other people there.

And I can have really natural social interaction with them,

because I can use my body language.

As my head moves, my avatar's head moves,

and as I speak, my mouth moves.

Which then makes the way you communicate with people,

and especially when you're a group of people,

it sort of becomes a very natural way

of communicating with each other.

LOIZIDES: Hey, Bjorn.

BJORN LAURIN: Hey, Nick, how are you, man?

LOIZIDES: Good to meet you finally.

NARRATOR: Sansar's VR world could make the online landscape

even more appealing

for dedicated Second Life players, like Nick.

LAURIN: Nick, personally I've only known him for a short time,

basically, but I've kind of seen him around Second Life.

He applied for Sansar

when we opened up what we call a creator preview.

We selected him based on his previous work,

to be part of us now,

basically, one of the early creators in Sansar,

to work with us.

Let's do some fun and switch avatars now, basically.

Follow me up here, up these stairs.

I will show you something fun.

There you go! And then try to throw it like this.

See, I missed, I'm really bad apparently.

Nice!

NARRATOR: Once VR makes a bar that looks real,

is filled with beautiful people,

and always has your favorite microbrew on tap,

that's when that online world may just be irresistible.

KAKU: We don't have that computational power today.

We're not going to have it 100 years from now.

But with quantum computers, it's a game-changer.

It means that things that are preposterous today

become possible.

NARRATOR: When we choose to be hooked up to it all the time,

that will be the birth of the metaverse 1.0.

BETTNER: But by the time we get there,

what those experiences will give us will be so compelling

that, you know, and then it's there,

and there we're using it, and there's no going back.

BARATUNDE THURSTON: The Matrix is coming for all of us.

I don't know that any of us has a choice.

NARRATOR: That's right, Baratunde.

We probably don't.

The seductive escape of the metaverse

is ensnaring us in its web as we speak,

and you are more vulnerable to it

every single time you pick up that smart phone of yours.

But if that makes you want to throw

every single one of your screens away,

wait until you hear about the next incarnation

of the metaverse,

where your body won't even exist

and you'll have transformed into a post-human,

living entirely inside the machine.

NARRATOR: It's no secret that we humans

are pretty obsessed with how we look.

Look at how many billions we spend every year

on beauty, fashion, and exercise.

But what if you didn't have to be limited

by whatever biology you had the stupid luck to be born with?

Well, in the future,

we'll be able to escape the jail of our bodies.

It sounds trippy,

but the metaverse will eventually graduate

to version 2.0, where we will abandon our bodies,

upload our minds, and live permanently on a hard drive.

We're talking about the ultimate escape.

MIRA: If you're able to digitize your consciousness

and send it to a cloud or a body,

we're talking about us all being able to leave our bodies behind.

NARRATOR: Sci-fi has recently imagined

one version of this metaverse

where humans upload to a server farm

and choose, for whatever reason,

a hip '80s dance club to hang out in.

THURSTON: There's an episode of 'Black Mirror'

that had a version of this

where you uploaded your consciousness to the cloud.

And you could, you could choose where you wanted to hang out.

sort of what theme.

And there were nightclubs and beaches,

and it was like a resort style of life.

NARRATOR: But bar culture aside,

not having a physical body will bring the human race

to a whole new and super-advanced level.

We'll live as long as the computers keep working away.

So when we get old and wise,

we'll be able to keep on getting older and wiser.

MICHAEL GRAZIANO: People accumulate incredible amounts

of experience over a lifetime, and then it goes away.

If you upload brains, essentially what you're doing,

you're preserving wisdom, you're preserving knowledge.

CHARLES SOULE: Digital consciousness

is going to drastically change the way

human beings think about their lives

and what they're supposed to achieve with them.

We'll become a very, very different species.

MIRA: I'll leave my body behind for another body,

but I don't want to like be put into a car

or like, you know, I don't want to be KITT.

That wouldn't be fun for me.

NARRATOR: I'm going to have to disagree with you, Matt.

Being able to go 100 miles an hour on the Autobahn

doesn't sound too shabby.

That's why there are some intrepid explorers

who will welcome that chance to upload.

OSCAR: There are boundaries, Eva.

There are lines you can't cross, even for us.

EVA: But why, why should there be?

There is a whole universe of new places and new ideas.

Why keep getting pulled back into a physical body?

OSCAR: We don't even know all the risks.

What's to stop me from being copied or hacked?

EVA: Oscar, I want to live in the digital world permanently.

I want to upload for good.

Why worry about pain and death if we can live forever there?

OSCAR: Does it even count as living

if your physical body's dead?

EVA: I've been thinking about this for a long time.

And I know what I've got to do.

But I would rather do it with your support.

OSCAR: Okay.

NARRATOR: Someday enough people like Eva will make that leap

to live digitally.

That's when a new society will form...online.

ROSENDALE: I think the digital world will form

kind of bottom-up, the same way a society like America did.

Small cities and groups that kind of fused together

and found each other over long periods of time.

NICE: The great thing about uploading your consciousness

is go to work looking any way I want.

Hey, guys, I'm not wearing any pants. Mm-hmm.

Seriously! Who truly wants to wear pants to work?

Nobody.

NARRATOR: And it is that promise of being equally free

from both oppressive leadership and pants

that could propel people like Eva

to run off and join the metaverse.

But will it actually be possible to digitize your mind?

Futurists like Elon Musk are banking on it.

He's already unveiled the Neuralink initiative,

which will link the brain with computing devices

in the next 10 years.

GEORGE DVORSKY: There are several attempts right now

around the world to map the brain in excruciating detail,

and that's what's required.

GRAZIANO: It's scanning technology.

So it's possible, it's going to happen, I'm positive of that.

NARRATOR: So you will be part of a computer.

Yes, it sounds freaky.

But here's a major upside--

we could bring our dead back to life.

One futurist is already working toward doing just that.

RAY KURZWEIL: I've had a project to gather all the information

about my father.

He died when I was 22, in 1970.

He kept all of his letters and all of his electric bills,

and every document.

The idea is to create an avatar that would represent my father.

Ultimately, I think artificial intelligence

can create a virtual person.

GRAZIANO: So your friend passes away.

So now you can text your virtual friend, and he'll answer.

It's like back in the day when people looked at a statue

and thought it had a little bit of the soul

and essence of the original person in it.

KAKU: Why not have a holographic image

with all the memories and mannerisms of Winston Churchill?

In the future,

your descendants may go to the library and talk to you.

NARRATOR: Now here is where

things get philosophically sticky.

When we are all bodiless computer signals,

is that still humanity?

KAKU: Now, of course, it all goes back to the question of

how do you define you?

Is that really you that's been digitalized

and uploaded in a computer?

Well, it depends on how you define you,

and how you define soul.

BRIAN GREENE: I'd like to think that what makes us who we are

transcends our physical form.

And if we evolve to a digital form, a simulated form,

the essence of who we are will stay with us.

MIRA: I think we are our consciousness.

I think we are our experiences.

NARRATOR: Okay, so in a digitally rendered metaverse,

what about our flaws?

Is that digital world utterly perfect,

with no parking tickets or getting fired or messy breakups?

How do you have something as awesome as blues music

if there's no heartache?

Well, I, for one, am hoping the programmers think of that

before I plug in.

BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS: There's that great line in The Matrix

where they describe that they had created a different matrix

that was perfect, it was like heaven.

And the humans rejected it.

Like they needed a crappy life to, to see as reality.

NARRATOR: Even if the metaverse 2.0 has a few warts

to keep us interesting,

I'm thinking the perk of cheating death is awesome enough

that the lines on day one

are going to be like the ones you stood on

for your Nintendo Switch.

But there is a truly terrifying aspect of metaverse 2.0--

you open yourself up to getting hacked.

But it's not your computer getting hacked here,

it's your brain.

♪

NARRATOR: In the first incarnation of the metaverse,

version 1.0, the digital world will be an escape

from the real world.

But in metaverse 2.0, when we leave our bodies behind,

that's the point of no return.

JESS: Dad.

♪

NARRATOR: It's like volunteering

to go on that first long flight to Mars.

It's probably a one-way ticket.

It will be the end of humanity.

But even for those with the best intentions like Eva here,

there are stakes that we cannot ignore.

FARSAD: There's the kind of rosy possibility

that the metaverse would bring us together,

that we'd all be able to convene in this place,

and we'd all look gorgeous 'cause of our avatars.

But then there's also this kind of, like, darker possibility,

you know, where we learn that being in the metaverse

is actually like no substitute for actual human interaction,

and that it creates maybe more division, more seclusion,

more isolation, maybe like more bigotry,

and like maybe just like a far worse society.

NARRATOR: Chances are you've clicked 'accept'

on those privacy agreements that come up

when you download an Internet application or enter a website.

Ever read those privacy agreements?

Me neither.

If that's the gateway to the newest social media site

that everyone else is using, of course you're going to say yes.

Thing is, sometimes you're giving a giant conglomerate

access to the kind of things you'd rather not let them know,

things like your browser history or your email address.

If that sounds a little too Big Brother for you,

imagine what life will be like when you are digital,

and your world is the metaverse,

and you can't exist unless you let the metaverse access

every memory and thought in your brain.

Houston, we have a problem.

Especially since it's likely

that something as big as the metaverse

isn't going to be built by a couple of kindhearted hackers

in their spare time.

GRAZIANO: I imagine that initially, at least,

this is corporate control.

Because what other entity has the resources

to build something like this?

And so you have an incredible concentration of power

in corporate hands.

LOUIS ROSENBERG: We could ultimately create a replica

of our own world that is just giving power to third parties.

And that company has goals and aspirations.

Those goals and aspirations are probably to sell you something,

to study you, to collect data about you.

People will lose more and more of their privacy.

They will be advertised to more and more.

They will be manipulated

by these artificial intelligence bots

that are running behind the scenes.

DVORSKY: You could get a situation

where there's a kind of hydraulic despotism,

which is an old-fashioned term that basically says

that if you control a very fundamental resource,

you control everything.

ROSE EVELETH: I want to have very detailed privacy controls

on that upload.

NARRATOR: Not that I have anything to hide,

but I might have one or two secrets

I don't want the Metaverse Corporation

getting their hands on.

You'd hope we'd be smart enough to click 'decline'

on any metaverse like this.

And some believe that it's a long shot

that our new digital world

will be in the hands of one single company.

ROSEDALE: The largest-scale systems that we have today

are almost all decentralized.

They're never owned by one company except in the movies.

And so I believe that VR, and hopefully AI,

these will be the product of everyone.

I think that someone, hopefully me and my company,

will build a standard kind of open source server

that lets millions of people

start to put up little communities and meeting places

and teaching facilities.

NARRATOR: Even in that kind of best-case scenario,

we are still human.

We'll still be greedy or angry

or violent towards each other sometimes.

SANDBERG: People will always do what they do in the real world

in the virtual worlds, too.

So of course we're going to see crime,

and of course we're going to see attempts

at both preventing it and punishing it.

There are both questions of virtual theft,

but also virtual sexual harassment, virtual rape,

virtual murder, maybe, if you delete somebody's character.

ROSENDALE: Although we won't be able

to come to physical harm there,

we'll still be able to hurt each other.

People will still be able to isolate themselves from others,

or make someone more alone than they want to be, for example,

or exclude then from a group.

It means that people will still have control over each other.

DVORSKY: You as a digital copy

are going to be under constant threat.

Somebody might want to copy you against your will.

There's even potential for the corruption of your source code.

NEWITZ: I mean, I think, you know,

you're looking at future regulatory agencies,

and you're looking at something

like health regulatory agencies of today.

MIRA: I don't know who wants the metaverse.

You, you just wind up... it's like social media.

I think if the metaverse is anything like social media,

we're in for a rough ride.

NARRATOR: If you don't want to cross over,

how will you negotiate living in what's left of the real world?

Especially if your wife of several hundred years

has made the decision to upload?

[air hissing]

JESS: Hey, stranger.

OSCAR: This is a nice surprise.

Oh, could you, uh, could you, could you pass me that brush?

Yeah, thanks.

JESS: Mom's been asking after you.

You know there's no reason why you can't visit.

OSCAR: Yeah, I know, I've just, I've been busy.

JESS: You've been avoiding her.

If you want to be together forever,

the only place to do it is in the collective.

♪

NARRATOR: Well, I get how Oscar might not want to have a life

that could be ended with a delete key.

But the thing is, we've already started our gradual transition

into living digitally.

You probably didn't even notice

just how much you were using your phone's GPS

until you were utterly dependent on it.

Well, that's how it'll be

when you can start to plug into the metaverse.

It'll gradually take over without your ever knowing it.

Unless it already has.

I am sorry to be the one to tell you this,

but the metaverse may have already been built,

and we are in it.

Can you prove that we aren't living

inside a giant digital simulation

built by an advanced civilization?

I'll answer that. No, you can't.

Which means maybe all you see, all you are, is just software.

NARRATOR: For better or worse,

humanity's future is in the cloud.

We'll plug in, abandon our mortal coil

and live eternally in the metaverse.

Just like our future family,

burning a few simulated s'mores

around a virtual campfire.

Just like life, right?

But that's what leads to our most bone-chilling idea yet.

There is a possibility that the metaverse isn't in the future,

but that we are living in it right now,

and everything around you is a simulation.

GREENE: How hard would it be to create a new universe

in the traditional sense?

That's pretty tough.

How hard is it to create a new universe in the simulated sense?

Not that tough.

You get a powerful computer, turn it on, kick back,

and let the software go and create that realm.

Which means, over time, you would think

there'd be many more simulated universes

than real universes.

The odds would suggest

that everybody should come to the conclusion

that they are in a simulated world.

That would be the natural conclusion

that any rational, logical, sentient being

would come to in this framework.

DVORSKY: We ourselves might be parked

inside of some kind of fancy super-computer

that's being run by, you know, our post-human forebears.

THURSTON: So, we're living in a simulation.

We could just be living off of feeding tubes,

hanging out in The Matrix.

HOD LIPSON: I think it's impossible to tell

by definition.

NARRATOR: The idea is that on an infinite timeline,

with infinite possible alien species out there,

and with the relative ease

of building a digital environment on a computer,

odds are that some intelligent race somewhere has built one.

And more likely than not, there are lots of these universes.

I, for one, am not finding that particularly comforting.

BETTNER: It's kind of the only thing that makes sense.

All the stuff that is happening right now,

seems it only has one inevitable conclusion,

you know what I'm saying?

[laughs]

ROSEDALE: Virtual worlds exhibit these little cracks

or flaws in them.

Well, guess what?

We see these little cracks in the simulation

when we look at the real world.

Stuff in the real world, protons and electrons,

will sometimes go right through each other

when they're not supposed to.

And so the funny hypothesis that comes from this is,

if we're seeing this problem with creating virtual worlds,

and we're seeing this problem in the real world,

doesn't this mean that because we see these little errors

in the real world,

we're probably running on somebody's computer?

MIRA: There's a theory out there

that we might already be living in a simulation,

to which I say, try harder.

This is not a great simulation.

There's still a lot of garbage happening in the world,

and I don't love the way it's being simulated.

NARRATOR: The most recent election has inspired

a new round of 'this can't be real' in the Twitterverse.

Look, it all goes back to Descartes,

'I think, therefore I am.'

It's old philosophy with really new tech.

If I'm a simulation,

should I not bother going to the gym anymore?

Or will that just mean that my avatar gets flabby?

You can go down a rabbit hole thinking about it.

THURSTON: Maybe the race of beings that controls that world

is so significantly more powerful,

creative, clever, and dominating,

that we die out of mere fear, that we wither under,

'cause we can't handle that truth.

Maybe the simulation is to protect us

from a harsher reality.

LIPSON: Did we kill ourselves in between?

Did we lose control?

Is there a battle between AI and humans?

Is the battle between the have and have-nots

with AI before that?

NARRATOR: Those are questions we just can't answer yet.

But believe you me, I'm hoping we do.

Simulated or not, in the Year Million,

we will shed our physical selves,

view the human form as something

that held our consciousness and our society back,

in the dirty old dark ages when we were enslaved to biology.

Let's look down the road,

to after we exist on some hard drive.

Communication will change drastically.

Language itself will be as obsolete as our bodies,

and we'll relate to each other in new ways

that scientists are just beginning to grasp.