Experts remain split on nature and effects of the metaverse, Pew study finds

• Published in: Shoe Intelligence Vol. 33; no. 31+32
• Format: Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• Published: Munich EDM Publications 01.07.2022
• Subjects: Augmented reality; Cybernetics; Democracy; Digital twins
• ISSN: 1291-6269

Pew Research Center has released a report titled “The Metaverse in 2040,” detailing the American polling company’s recent unscientific survey of a non-random sample of experts in the field. The quest for profits is driving investment, which should lead to the rapid development of extended reality, or XR (computer-altered reality in the most general sense) XR will, in turn, lead many more people to find the metaverse useful The tech necessary for immersion (interfaces, bandwidth, etc.) will have been developed by 2040 The lockdowns boosted demand for XR XR will prove useful (learning, remote medicine, disaster response, etc.) and delightful (arts, fashion, games, etc.) The second group grounds its pessimism in five other arguments and predictions: The metaverse will turn people from “free-thinking individuals” into data mines for deep analysis (Avi Bar-Zeev, co-creator of Google Earth and HoloLens) There will be virtual trips into space (Glynn Rogers, researcher in complex systems and networks and expert in information security and privacy) and into humans, animals and machines (Gary Arlen, principal at Arlen Communications) People will use ever more exact “digital twins” both as alter egos (Jim Spohrer, longtime executive at IBM) and as subjects for medical examination and prediction (Melissa Sassi, head of IBM’s Hyper Protect Accelerator) Virtual mirror worlds will give rise to a psychological woe called multiple-self syndrome (Barry Chudakov, founder and principal at Sertain Research) The Turing test (for a machine’s ability to exhibit human behavior) will become an everyday thing, as an avatar controlled by a human being will be indistinguishable from one controlled by a computer (Stephen Downes, expert at the National Research Council of Canada’s Digital Technologies Research Centre) Demand for physical objects will diminish (Jonathan Kolber, author of A Celebration Society) Gaming and other “life experiences” will become more immersive (Marc Rotenberg, founder and president of the Center for AI and Digital Policy) “Immersive reality” will change intimacy and provide “new opportunities for global unity and tribal discord, for totalizing control and individual freedoms, and for the effective expression of love and hate” (David Porush, professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and author of The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction) A “Super-Metaverse” will augment people’s work (e.g. surgery through imaging and actuators), and a “Fantasy-Metaverse” will develop for people who prefer “gullible consumption” to “critical thinking” (Rahul Saxena, CEO of CoBot Systems) Anonymity through XR will increase trust in transactions with unknown entities, undermining the norms of reputation and branding and enabling parties of “bad reputation” (drug syndicates, mafias, terrorists) to conduct legitimate business easily (Sam Adams, artificial general intelligence researcher at Metacognitive Technology and former engineer at IBM) People will be dealing everywhere with layers of augmented reality (annotations and glyphs left by others, information pulled up by background systems, etc.), and authoritarians will likely keep billions of people in “silicon prisons ringed by invisible barbed wire, governed by opaque algorithmic regulation and vast artificial intelligence” (Alexander B. Howard, director of the Digital Democracy Project) We will need to rewrite the social contracts of trust and democracy, as “narratives in the metaverse” will lead to “new forms of ‘trustless trust’” (Gina Neff, professor and director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge) Cyborgs (combinations of human being and machine) along with genetic engineering, AI and cryptocurrency, might lead to the “evolution” of new species (Jaak Tepandi, professor at Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology) The metaverse will be something we take sitting down, like a refined Zoom call (Glenn Edens, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Global Management) Instead of a prediction, Warren Yoder (director at the Public Policy Center of Mississippi) made an observation: “Postmodernity interrogated modern power and knowledge.