Metaverse: a social dilemma
Metaverse has been the talk of the town both in the real (and virtual) world in the past few months. In my attempt to get the grasp of this new cool tech trend, I have been reading about it and so far, interestingly all roads led to virtual reality, digital life, or a parallel digital universe.
Neal Stephenson, who coined the term Metaverse in his 1992 novel Snow crash, gives a glimpse of the fictional world he created where actors use digital avatars to explore a digital world or interact with each other. It was Stephenson’s 1990s vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future. Today, after 3 decades, what exactly does Metaverse mean? As per Gartner, Metaverse is a persistent and immersive digital environment of independent, yet interconnected networks that will use yet-to-be-determined protocols for communications. It enables persistent, decentralized, collaborative, interoperable digital content that intersects with the physical world’s real-time, spatially oriented, and indexed content.
Referring to the examples floating around to demystify this — virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, MMORPGs like Minecraft, NFTs, Digital twins, second life kind social media, and so on, it appears more like science fiction meets real-world technology and creating together something which is somewhere in limbo between real and fictional world.
The technologist in me is super excited and curious about this new tech trend but the human in me is skeptical or say worried. The question is not “what is metaverse”, the real question is “what is the purpose of metaverse”!
The basic purpose of technology is to make the world a better place for coming generations and for all living beings. As I understood, metaverse’s world will be an extension of the physical world wherein disguise of their digital avatars people can connect with friends, trade digital assets, NFTs, travel to the digital locations, etc., if this is what it is then are we creating a virtual universe where one can live a virtual life as his/her digital avatar in a perfectly curated world without any real-life issues?
Social media is already creating a level of complexity in today’s world and interpersonal relationships, as also highlighted in the movie ‘The Social Dilemma’. Now, in the context of Metaverse, think about what will happen when everyone is living an entire life in the virtual world as an avatar disassociated from some of the basic aspects that make us humans — feelings, emotions, love, etc.
As Shaan Puri described in his tweeter thread, as the idea of Singularity (It’s a moment in time where AI becomes smarter than humans), the metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life. I am not too sure about the idea of Singularity in AI but I am quite sure that if it happens with Metaverse, then that will be the downfall of real human — who has emotions, who make real relationships, who fall in love, go through heartbreaks but continues to believe in love and experience real events like birth and death.
It is on us, as it has always been, to bring purpose to technology to find real use cases to harness the energy from this big tech tornado coming our way and leverage it to make the real world a better place for generations to come.
