Metaverse : Its Advantages and Consequences

You've probably seen the news just a few weeks ago Facebook announced that they're changing their company name to Meta because they're planning on building something called the ‘Metaverse’. I don't think enough people are talking about this the metaverse is going to change my life as well as your life so we need to understand what it is. Why people are excited about it but then also how it has the potential to end society as we know it. The concept of the metaverse is this throughout history, we have constantly been moving towards more and more engaging mediums we've gone from text to photo to video. We've gone from reading books and papers to now spending most of our spare time watching tick-tocks on the internet and the metaverse is what comes next. It is an Internet that you're not just looking at through a screen but that you're inside of.

Take anything you could think of doing right now: shopping, chatting with friends, meditating, watching videos on youtube, and now imagine that in the time it takes you to just snap your fingers you could be doing that thing in a way that feels real with other people who feel present in a setting that's whatever you want it to be a living shared everlasting virtual universe. That's meta's vision of the metaverse achieved through a combination of augmented reality and virtual reality which they've said that they will subsidize the cost of to get as many people on this planet to be a part of the metaverse and in case I wasn't clear this is pretty damn cool.

Then there are some undeniable positives like just to get obvious out the way the metaverse will allow you to live out your fantasies: in one single evening you could be slaying enemies in handheld combat, you could be playing a quiet game of chess on the streets of new york and surfboarding across the tropics of the Bahamas all with incredible realism but at the same time the reassurance that you are safe at home and on a similar note there is also a comfort to the idea that you'll also be able to express yourself.

You know-how now you have a profile picture for your social media accounts the kind of image that represents you to other people, well in the metaverse you won't just have an image you will have an avatar a fully three-dimensional living depiction of you but you in the way that you would want to be. Did you ever wish you were, three inches taller now you can be, did you ever wish you had a bigger forehead now you can have one, you can be any gender you want, you can be any race you want, you could be any creature you want?

                      

I've always dreamed about the idea of teleportation because I'm always trying to be as efficient as possible with my time being stuck in traffic jams kind of horrifies me but in the metaverse, there's going to be a relic of the past each person will have their own home space you create the aesthetic that you want others to see and then you can invite people to just appear within it. Teleportation will be the equivalent of just clicking a link in your browser now practically instant and if you compare that to the concept of real teleportation of literally deconstructing every atom in a person's body at one point in time and then recreating them somewhere else I think one of those two options is more likely to be the future of transport and it's not the real one besides if we are moving towards the metaverse and if all interactions are gonna happen virtually anyways we wouldn't even want to physically teleport we want to be at home with our headsets. In this, you'll be able to travel not just to any place but also to any time the industrial revolution ancient rome, dinosaurs being able to actually experience living with the dinosaurs, can you imagine? And hey if you can learn faster you can also do things faster i think the metaverse is going to make us even more productive take the current situation a lot of us now are working from home. Well in the metaverse we'd still be doing that but it could also mean that you could always be in your most optimal environment whether that's surrounded by others or completely alone whether that's in an office in outer space or sitting in a magical jungle plus the tech will allow us to input faster a lot of us have grown up writing everything with pens nowadays people are shifting to tapping things on keyboards in the metaverse we'll be using voices gestures and even making things happen by just thinking about them I'm not joking meta is working now on electromyographic or EMG input devices which can detect and intercept the impulses in your nerves the signals from when your brain is telling.

For example: what your fingers what they should be doing and translate those signals to the corresponding actions in a virtual space or other words you will be able to send a message to someone by just thinking about moving your fingers you won't even need to physically move them and this metaverse hardware it's not as far off as you think fun fact next year meta is coming out with a headset currently being code-named project Cambria which in one fell swoop will solve two of the biggest current barriers to the metaverse one that it will be comfortable enough and the display will be sufficiently close to the resolution of your eyes but you won't feel like you're wearing a headset and two it'll be able to track your facial expressions in real-time which if pulled off correctly will mean you'll be able to have conversations with realistic body language in a virtual space so these are the obvious benefits from the metaverse.

 

Whole metaverse thing has a pretty great sales pitch the ability to be together with anyone to be able to teleport to anywhere to be able to create and experience anything but it's also pretty scary there's four key things that i think we need to be very mindful of like data. Let's be honest facebook has had a pretty rocky relationship with how it's handled user data in the past and remember that's from an era where we were still somewhat separate from our digital selves but in the case where we become our digital selves where our profiles are not just a few holiday photos that we choose to share but literally everything we do in this metaverse we're going to have to put a whole new level of trust into a company that doesn't exactly reveal how they're using this information. We're talking about data collection on the level of measuring your brain activity you wouldn't even give your family that kind of access but this is a future where you could be giving it to meta. But something potentially even scarier than the data problem is that we are talking about how companies will be able to create virtual experiences that feel indistinguishable from real ones right. I mean on one hand that is a miracle but isn't it also a little bit alarming we are already being shown predominantly only the content we agree with and the content that we want to see but if you take that concept into the realm of the metaverse we could completely lose touch with what's actually real the power to curate not just your newsfeed but your entire world now means that if you hate: seeing homeless people well your metaverse can pretend that they don't exist if you didn't think Covid was real in your version of the metaverse it wouldn't be you if you only loved one tech brand and hated the rest in your metaverse that's all you'd need to see you won't even really know if what someone is saying to you is actually what the person behind that avatar is saying or if it's just what meta wants you to hear because it will keep you on the platform for the longest.

Let's say one of your friends accounts got hacked you could be sitting in the same room as a cyber criminal and you wouldn't even know we'd effectually be surrendering control of our entire sense of reality to other parties whose incentives are nothing to do with our best interests just making sure that i guess you see as many adverts as possible.

But there's more you might not know this but one of the biggest challenges of running a social media platform is actually in the moderation of it facebook already has entire warehouses filled with people who are just scanning for the absolute worst things people are posting hate speech terrorism exploitation and just trying to prevent as much of it as possible from spreading but it's one thing to try and police written text where you can very easily scan for potentially harmful keywords if meta want to carry on this moderation in something as complex and as open as the metaverse then they're gonna need to do it in an incredibly invasive way they're gonna have to be watching exactly what tattoos people's avatars have what the writing on their clothing is saying every single item you design or purchase for your home space every action will have to be monitored if they don't want it to turn into chaos.

Okay these are all concerns but do you wanna know what my most fundamental fear is about the metaverse it's that we talk about all the cool things it will enable for our avatar that they'll be able to do what they want to look how they want to experience anything but it all leaves a big question about what happens to us at the end of the day? Right as incredible as the technology is we're still people we still need to eat healthily we need to drink lots of water we need to work out meet a partner have a family. I'm not convinced that the metaverse is going to help us continue to do that I think the metaverse is effectively the next generation of social media with all the positives and the negatives of those platforms taken to the absolute extreme. Relative to your life in the metaverse your real life will kind of suck can you imagine every night taking off your headset and going from this handsome prince who's just won the approval of your entire clan on an intergalactic voyage to then seeing your actual self in the mirror and remembering that you're not that person: that you don't have the perfect face and body and that you can never do the things that your avatar can do the incentive won't be to start looking after our real selves because we can never get there it'll be to put our headsets back on and spend even more time in the metaverse.

Okay, the last thing I'm going to say about this is that I think could ease a lot of my concerns about it to keep the metaverse open-source i.e to make sure that all the code of how it's working remains public so that'll mean fewer concerns about your data fewer concerns about spying it'll be less about trusting us your personal information is safe more like I can see that my personal information is safe and while this will probably make developments slower because with open source projects there is much less of a profit incentive compared to keeping your secret source behind closed doors maybe that's a good thing maybe that will give us more time for the regulation.