Tamagotchi Babies: Metaverse’s New Man-Made Horror and the Islamic Alternative
What has the Metaverse got to do with Muslims, 7th Century Madinah and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ?
Back in the time of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ on the day of Friday whilst he was delivering the Khutbah, Friday Sermon, a caravan equipped with music, festivities, entertainment and merchandise soon entered the city of Madinah. It was an enticing and alluring sight and as such many of the companions soon got up and left the Prophet ﷺ to continue the sermon alone on the pulpit.
It’s a striking incident that’s captured in the Quran.
وَإِذَا رَأَوْا۟ تِجَـٰرَةً أَوْ لَهْوًا ٱنفَضُّوٓا۟ إِلَيْهَا وَتَرَكُوكَ قَآئِمًا ۚ
When they saw the fanfare along with the caravan, they ˹almost all˺ flocked to it, leaving you ˹O Prophet˺ standing ˹on the pulpit˺.
62:11
Now, where am I going with all this? Well, it’s because this caravan of distraction is pretty much still around today, just in a different form. You see with the advent of the television, the computer and soon after the internet, we pretty much saw this caravan make its way into our homes. And over the last 15 years, following the release of the smartphone and mobile internet, we literally have had this caravan following us everywhere we go. Add social media into the mix – and you get the picture – this caravan isn’t leaving us alone.
And what makes this caravan even more distracting, is the fact that it’s not just generic entertainment. Rather, thanks to algorithms and artificial intelligence, it is strategically engineered to present content that appeals to you. It knows your individual preferences, interests and wants. Whether it be sports, comedy or even cat videos, these algorithms have reached a point where they know you, better than you know yourself.
They’ve pretty much hacked our impulses and they know how to keep us addicted. It’s science. Every time they present you with a new notification, a new post, a new video that they know you will enjoy, dopamine is released through your brain. And your motivation to keep scrolling only intensifies. We are no longer interested in the natural real world because quite frankly, it can’t reward us with the same levels of dopamine we receive online artificially. They’ve hijacked our senses.
It’s a repetitive vicious cycle that keeps us addicted while making social media giants billions of dollars. It’s a proven formula that works and they aren’t planning on stopping at all. In fact, they are only planning on taking this further.
You see, this caravan that has been following us around from the outside will soon become our home, our walls and the roof above our heads.
Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and what he has dubbed ‘The Metaverse’. It’s said to be the next iteration of the internet, whereby the physical world and the digital screen will converge. A virtual world where you will socialise, work, play games and pretty much live your own virtual life. You’ll have your own virtual home, your own friends and even your own realistic avatar version of yourself. And thanks to headsets like these, we will be completely and totally immersed.
And I know a lot has been said about this and many criticisms have been raised. I mean we have already seen enough damage from social media as it exists today, whether that’s the rise of anxiety, depression, addiction, pornography, loneliness and the rapid decline of society, we can only imagine how worse it will become. Yet despite all that has been said, there’s something else I want to hone in on.
One of the greatest consequences these distractions have on our lives is their ability to make us forget Allah and forget the Quran. And it’s not because anyone is actively stopping us from remembering Allah or reading the Quran and connecting with its verses, but we are so distracted we are no longer receptive.
Metaverse is in the early stages of introducing yet another man-made horror, AI (artificial intelligence) babies:
According to an expert on artificial intelligence, would-be parents will soon be able to opt for cheap and cuddle-able digital offspring.
This is absolutely insane. Every time I think that Mark Zuckerburg is done with the Metaverse, something else pops up, even more outrageous than ever before. This new gimmick is another obvious push in favor of transhumanism. But instead of the usual sinister scheme of merging humans with technology, Catriona Campbell, the artificial intelligence ‘expert,’ decided to take it up a notch. She advocated for entirely artificial human babies, eerily dubbing them the ‘Tamagotchi generation.’
But, how would these abominations even work?
Campbell says virtual children will look like you, and you will be able to play with and cuddle them. They will be capable of simulated emotional responses as well as speech, which will range from “googoo gaga” to backchat, as they grow older.
Apart from this, there is a plan to throw haptic feedback into the mix. Haptic feedback in this case refers to the use of gloves that will deliver specific vibrations to a user’s hands in order to simulate different kinds of situations. For example, if someone is climbing a mountain in the metaverse (with none of the actual scenic or health benefits of climbing an actual mountain), these gloves would create a sensation of rocks being grabbed by the user through controlled vibrations. This is supposed to make the experience feel more ‘real’:
Ms Campbell believes that people will one day be able to use high-tech gloves that are able to deliver tactile feedback to replicate physical sensations.
On top of this, they plan to use advanced CGI and animation techniques to render graphics that would make these digital creatures visibly indistinct from real babies. However, will this endeavor, even with all the advanced technology the world will have to offer 50 years from now, be successful in accomplishing what it sets out to accomplish, i.e., replace real life? The answer, unsurprisingly, is no.
Why Muslims Should Be Concerned By the Metaverse
No matter how much technology improves, any ‘life-like’ AI machines they come up with will always be lifeless. This is simply because they lack a soul. A lifeless fetus in the mother’s womb comes alive only when a soul is breathed into it. And when that same soul is extracted at its fated time of death, that same body returns to being lifeless once again. These virtual babies don’t have this. They will always be the transhumanist’s attempt at mimicking and mocking the Power of Allah. However they’ll never be able to even come close to replicating it.
While real Muslim parents show gratitude to Allah for the children they have been blessed with, these Metaverse parents will always be complaining about bugs in their digital kids. They’ll always want and pay for more features and more updates, because of course nothing can truly substitute a real child. And also because these parents will have the mind of a consumer.
This is one of the penultimate goals of the transhumanist agenda: To turn humans into isolated mindless wage slave consumers. No wife or husband. No children or family. Just the product.
And look at just how addictive these things can become. Here’s a horrifying case from way back in 2010:
South Korean police have arrested a couple for starving their three-month-old daughter to death while they devoted hours to playing a computer game that involved raising a virtual character of a young girl.
If this kind of technology could be so addictive back then, imagine what it could do now, or 50 years from now.
But another concern that needs to be raised here is that this technology won’t only be restricted to babies. They can start making entire digital adult humans, of any size and proportions. Consider how much the pornography industry would thrive in such a scenario. They could end up making 3D-CGI based digital women for young men, and perhaps even supplement this with haptic feedback devices that go onto their genitals, for maximum stimulation. All in the name of making it more ‘real’ and ‘authentic.’ Of course, this would be nothing more than glorified masturbation, but one can imagine just how dangerously addictive it could get. And the target wouldn’t just be restricted to the brothers, but sisters as well. It would be just as easy to make virtual male characters with their own haptic devices. The doors of Fitnah that could be opened up by such technology is something truly dreadful and frightening. And Allah’s refuge is sought.
And again, I cannot stress this point enough. No matter how ‘realistic’ it gets, no matter how many features and devices they add, it will never be anything close to reality. It will always leave the user empty and depressed. Think about how much depression prevails already due to such online addictions. This would be multiplied a thousandfold in the Metaverse.
But if one simply takes away all the illusions and all the opinions of these transhumanist ‘experts,’ it’s very easy to make a comparison between a child born through natural means and a program. Take these two scenarios for instance.
A Muslim man and a woman decide to get married. Through hard work, responsibility, and devotion, they both carry out the duties designated to them by Allah based on their genders. This fosters real authentic love between the two, and a desire to have a child. They conceive through Halal intimacy, the woman becomes pregnant, and after forty days (or 120 days according to another narration), a soul is breathed into the baby, giving it REAL life.
In the end, this baby is born naturally, while being welcomed into the world by loving parents. The child will gradually learn about the world around him, interact with his parents, and grow. He will develop a real consciousness and awareness of his surroundings. As they age, his Fitrah (innate nature) will make him incline towards pondering over this life, and ask his parents interesting questions. Will this require hard work on the part of the parents? Yes, raising children is no easy feat. Those who have children already know this, and those who don’t can simply look to the work their own parents put in as a testament to this fact. Is this hard work worth it though? Yes, absolutely. It’s what our Fitrah truly wants.
Contrast the above scenario with a Muslim that has turned into lonely dejected degenerate living in the Metaverse, seeking only to please himself. Every second outside the Metaverse feels like an eternity of boredom, and they can’t wait to plug back in. To escape from reality and their responsibilities. The lonely out-of-shape man now wants a kid. Or alternatively, the lonely middle-aged feminist is finally tired of her virtual cats – her real cats died because she forgot to feed them, as the Metaverse is just oh-so immersive. Either or both biologically crave a child and a family. So, what do these lonely Muslims do? Pay for an all-new limited edition discounted monthly subscription for their very own Tamagotchi kid, of course! Nothing better than soulless digital lines of code to replace that emptiness in their hearts.
Irresponsible world of fantasy which reaps nothing but misery.
