Elon Musk, You’ve Finally Made it into Our Headline
Congratulations, Elon, you’ve finally made it into our subject line. But you didn’t do it because of how you may soon spend 4,400,000,000,000 pennies on a tech purchase.
You made it because of something you said:
“If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality. We’re most likely in a simulation.”
To some of us, a simulation means we watched The Matrix, remember hearing about David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, or read William Gibson’s The Neuromancer where we got our first taste of the significance of “cyberspace.” Or maybe, just maybe, the world around us has been pre-designed by some future generation that created our experience, left the switch on, and abandoned us to drift aimlessly through the folly and absurdity of human life.
“The game is a lot more fun to play when it starts to feel realer than real.”
—Allegra Geller from eXistenZ
But besides the consumption of science fiction content, we now have access to more and more simulation-like resources. There are things like the growing wave of psychedelics therapy allowing our inner worlds outside ourselves (no Morpheus-sponsored red and blue pills yet), active communities of common-thinking “simulants,” and the living science that tells us that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation:
“If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe, and if they run computer simulations, there must be a huge number of simulated realities complete with artificial-intelligence inhabitants who may have no idea they’re living inside a game—inhabitants like us, perhaps.” —Nick Bostrom
So if we’re the product of some alien civilization’s computer game, how would it affect the way we live and work?
There’s also a whole other layer opening up like some sinkhole in our consciousness: the metaverse. It’s almost here, as its harbinger, Meta, suggests, with our Facebook and Instagram lives slowly carrying us into its currents. You can already get an avatar of yourself in this new reality, or you can have multiple if you like. You can even buy a pet in there, or “scan” your real one, tokenize its 3D rendering, and take it for a walk in the metaverse. H&M has already opened its first showroom in the metaspace for virtual fast fashion. Because why gamify and watch a life progress if it isn’t for the purpose of procuring pleasure? In short, dear friends, it’s happening.
“We can lead meaningful lives inside metaverse-style virtual worlds. These worlds needn’t be illusions, hallucinations, or fictions. Our time in them needn’t be escapism. People already lead complex and meaningful lives in virtual worlds such as Second Life, and VR will make this commonplace. […] philosophically, I think it has room for the full range of the human condition.” —David J. Chalmers, author of Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy
Said another way, the metaverse could also be a simulation conjured by those who have no absolute recollection or resolve that they too, are living in a simulation. So turtles all the way down for us as our reality moves into multiple truths.
Which leads us to our next question: What does it mean to be a realist in such times of migration toward simulation? Does it mean bifurcating the conventions of syntax and pronunciation like Elon did by naming your firstborn baby “X Æ A-12”?
Our reality is already a multitude of realities
Things seem to be pointing to this: We’re about to live sandwiched within the workings of a few different “simulated” worlds. These include alternate digital realities like the metaverse and even our personal worlds of interaction—things such as family, culture, self-identity, and the world within. These could all be alternate realities for each of us. But what are these intersecting simulations doing to us? How do we navigate them? What do they mean for the future of who we think we are?
Let’s look into these a little more.
First, we could argue that individuals are not what they are, but a simulation of what they wish they were. We strive to be “our better selves,” which basically means we come in a variety of “selves,” not just one. Our ability to change, to aspire, to go through various experiences in life can mean we are a forever-fluctuating entity. If we put it this way, can we be sure of anything? Can we be sure of ourselves, our partners, our families? Are we us when we’re with these people? Are the routines and rituals we follow within the culture of ourselves, our circles, and within greater society the result of social hand-me-downs or pre-selected for us in the dropdown options of a game menu? It’s a little horrifying to consider, isn’t it?
Some say putting things in this perspective may be helpful. Psychology researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara are uploading our personalities and relationship decisions into simulated characters and letting them play those decisions out in a virtual world. What are they hoping for with this research? Later on, these experiences could be used to help people build happier relationships in the “real” world—or at least the one we agree to currently and collectively identify with.
And what about work, where we enter yet another reality with roles, rules, and rewards that feed into everything else we interact with? Do we remain the same person when we enter our office (or log on to our computer from home)? Do we put on a different face, assume a different intonation, adopt a separate set of values? Maybe we’re creating yet another avatar fueled by a more desirable form of self to better play the game of business? And what does this say about the brands we work for? Those carefully-crafted ghosts with “brand personalities,” “brand identities,” and social responsibilities they have come to care about. Can we at least be aware that we play that same simulation every day at 9 a.m.?
Among the 5,000 people who have taken the free online test on emotional intelligence at work, 51% replied that they “always” or “frequently” need to put on a show. Furthermore, a study showed that “the 51% who have to ‘put on a show’ are 32% less likely to love their job,” and that “when new hires fail, 89% of the time it’s for attitudinal reasons and only 11% for having insufficient technical skills. In fact, out of that 89% that failed for attitude, 23% of new hires failed for issues related to emotional intelligence, and another 15% failed for having the wrong temperament (i.e. having the wrong attitude and personality for a particular job and work environment).”
Both lack of emotional intelligence and “wrong temperament” can be attributed to insufficient attention to emotions at work. The pace of business today makes it nearly impossible to provide space for emotions and show them at work, much less let go of them. Yaara Dolev, award-winning choreographer and Gaga movement language teacher, who participated in our Beautiful Business Trip on emotions at work last week, said: “At work we feel the need to keep ourselves put together. It’s like hiding a monster inside a paper box.” Movement is one way to feel the flow and transformation of emotions through the body. Some of them have become taboo at the workplace, like sadness and anger, though they are inevitable feelings. We tend to stifle them in a simulation of friendly emotions, but it only makes them aggravated. There are ways to learn how to show and manage them positively, and actively.
Oftentimes, we also suffer from a friction of our perceptions at work. These may be triggered by anything—our backgrounds, our energy levels, the roles, even the responsibilities we assign to ourselves. Lee Ross, researcher in social psychology, came up with the term “naive realism” to designate the attitude of seeing the world “objectively” and not taking other views into account. But the truth isn’t really owned by anyone—and as hard as it is to admit, we should strive to remember it. And maybe this simple reckoning will also ease our transition into the metaverse and all of its parallel realities: remembering to allow for a multitude of divergent realities, not even in some distant digital crypto future—but right here, right now.
Simulations in business
In business, simulations are used as a tool for “creating highly engaging, hands-on and business-applicable scenarios in leadership development training.” Anyone who has participated in one knows how quickly the players adopt their gamelike personas in the name of the room’s all-consuming competitive spirit. The games combine various goals to develop skills and mindsets, and contribute to the growing need of evolving leadership development training, offering future leaders the ability to try things out and steer the company without putting it at risk. It provides the necessary realism and makes it safe to fail. Consider it a condensed and carefully distilled nectar of the bigger game of business itself. Like Morpheus training Nero for the Matrix.
Then we have the business of simulations for the purpose of safely navigating high-stake professional situations. Combat simulation exercises for soldiers (talk to any marine to know how real those feel), space simulations for astronauts to adjust to the emptiness of floating in orbit, and of course flight simulators for pilots expected to fly people-stuffed tubes across the planet on a razor-like margin of error. There’s also the lucrative business of job simulations for recreational use—people with bandwidth left over from their current simulation who’d like to try their hand at farming, clerical work, or managing a world-class football team. What do those say of our love of simulations? What do they say about our need to step outside our most-lived/familiar reality from time to time?
It seems that business simulations can even serve as a testing ground for strategic thinking for stakeholders. In fact, with more than 70% of change initiatives failing, Harvard Business Review suggests this is often due as much to misdiagnosis as it is to poor execution. A change in behavior and vision must be brought about to set clearer goals for transformation. And what better way to incite change within characters than by altering the set in which they play.
It all seems to come back to this: whether we’re planning to move our business toward a different goal or into a different reality, we should remember to stick to a few simple principles to do it organically, with the rest of our team. Simulation or not, it’s about creating intimacy from within, giving meaningful feedback, fostering empathy, and allowing the space for something real—even if we seem to be perpetually lodged in yet another simulation—our emotions.
