It's an imaginative theory... but hear me out. Virtual reality is giving us experiences that mimic the real world. It has come a long way. Microsoft's real-time satellite generated Flight Simulator 2020 is even allowing players to fly into hurricanes in real time (yeah, really). With the potential of AI combined, as Elon Musk's recently demoed Neuralink promised, there will come a point when it will even allow us to feel the wind by pulsing artificial electrical signals into our brain to simulate the experience.
Now, in this virtual reality utopia, very well also depicted by the movie 'Ready Player One', people will live in virtually created worlds, and Neuralink will soon be able to store our cortex data in the cloud. Combining these two, there won't be a need for physical interactions because virtual reality will be exactly like... reality. We will be in a simulated world, but it'll feel like normal to us. Everything will happen in the cloud. The physical requirements to make this happen will come down to creating huge servers naturally cooled by storing under water. We won't need cars to travel because AI will already be virtualizing interactions for us. I mean it already 'kinda' is with Zoom, FaceTime, and WhatsApp, isn't it? Physical activity will reduce vastly. Theoretically, this will make Earth free of human bodies, because our brains will be backed up online.
What if... this is a simulation and we've already f*cked the world up to a point where we can't turn back? Like, the data has just been... deleted from the cloud. Did you feel it? Did I do well in explaining it? Should I repeat?
This is giving me an existential crisis.