Comment by kmeisthax

Ok. I get that The Metaverse from Snow Crash is not quite a Torment Nexus.

However, the concept still holds weight. If you want a less obnoxious motivating example, there's actually a very, very old Torment Nexus that we've been trying to build for over a hundred years: humanoid robots. The play that literally coined the term robot - R.U.R.[0] - very much made them the central problem of the story. Building humanoid robots IRL is a very bad idea, and yet people still do it, resulting in all sorts of creepy robots with awful problems that could have been built as far more useful machines had they not been forcibly anthropomorphized.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

Yes, I am aware that the robots in this story were more grown-in-a-vat than built-from-parts, but still.