The promise
Restoration.
People living with a disability or going through an injury can fully participate in a dreamed world, even if it's temporary. People separated by distance, illness, or circumstance can be present with each other. Partners who have lost loved ones can fully experience their physical presence once again. For many, Dream Weaver doesn't replace something human; it returns something that was taken.
Learning.
Dream Weaver lets people learn — a language, a subject, a skill, anything — while sleeping, without the effort of waking study, and retain it with significantly better efficacy than real-world learning. If that result holds at scale, the implications for education, for workers retraining mid-career, and for people whose circumstances never allowed them schooling are enormous.
Understanding the mind.
Project Morpheus is the most direct and comprehensive interface to human cognition ever built. The same research that powers Dream Weaver has and will continue to deepen our understanding of memory, emotion, sensation, and consciousness itself.
The risks
Isolation, The Loneliness Epidemic, and declining birth rates.
We are deploying this technology into a world already experiencing declining human-to-human interaction and physical intimacy, a documented loneliness epidemic, and declining birth rates. A customizable dream world equally as vivid as waking life, drawing upon the same level of sensations, could cause a shift towards dreamed connections, therefore deepening real-world withdrawal and potentially accelerating the birth rate decline.
Technology displacement.
In a dream world with immediate access to unlimited entertainment, where literally the only limitation is your imagination, what happens to the real-world workers, the social hubs that exist in today's society? What happens to actors, artists, entertainers creating unique content in-person, online, or on the big screen? Technological displacement is real even when the technology is worth building, and the people that could potentially be displaced deserve better than being a footnote in someone's launch post.
