Since Zuck first mentioned about Metaverse, lot of folks have been questioning why he is planning to spend billions of dollars when it is clearly not going to work. It's not that virtual reality hasn't been tried in the past but they hardly made in main stream. On the hardware side the whole VR experience is quite bulky not easy to use.
I too had similar doubts about it until recently I realized that Metaverse isn't about a virtual world with real friends, its main goal is to create a virtual world with virtual friends. These virtual friends will be AI bots personalized to give you the relationship & meaning in your life that one couldn't get in the real world. And once these bots win your trust as a friend, they will be the ultimate tools to psychologically manipulate you whether it is manipulating you to buy a new product or even elections.
This dystopian future isn't science fiction either. We already have bits & pieces of technology which can do this. First is the astronomical advances in AI based chat bots. In the last 5 years OpenAI has released its AI demo each of which is trained on 10x more powerful than its predecessor. In fact the very latest AI bot demo Google is nearly turing complete. It is nearly impossible to tell whether that conversation was with a bot or human.
Next piece of technology is deep fake. This is made amazing progress as well, even today we can edit any video of any famous person to make them say anything we like. Couple this with latest 3d image capture technology, one can create a 3d virtual friend based of a real person and communicate with them leveraging AI bot technology.
Last piece of technology is the hardware. Sure Oculus is clunky right now but in a decade they will be able to miniaturize is . The very latest demo from Zuck hint at just that.
So there it is, a virtual world in which you can have perfect friends and perfect relationship personalized just for you. Think social media is addictive, this will be another level of addiction.
The only barrier I see to this future is not on the technology front but more on policy & regulations.
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