Yesterday’s tech flavor of the month—the metaverse—has been chased from the headlines by ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to proclaim, “The Metaverse is Quickly Turning Into the Meh-taverse.”1
Far from it. Every use of the term “metaverse” should be read as “AI-enabled metaverse.” The metaverse is a creature of AI in that much of what happens in the metaverse is determined by AI algorithms. Just because the metaverse has disappeared from public consciousness does not mean it should disappear from public concern.
While our attention is focused elsewhere, the company formerly known as Facebook—now known as Meta Platforms—continues its multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to shape a good image for the metaverse. While, indeed, there will be many new and wonderful advantages it will create, the effort to establish a warm and fuzzy vision obscures the threat the metaverse holds to be the next generation of privacy-violating, competition-thwarting, and truth-killing platforms.2
The metaverse (a term combining “meta,” meaning “transcending,” and “universe”) creates a video game-like pseudo-world. This is no game, however, but personally identifiable avatars interacting with each other under the control of advanced AI systems. The internet platforms that we have experienced thus far have been an observational experience that principally harnessed text and video. The metaverse is an immersive experience in which real-world people, problems, and patterns come to life in an AI-defined and AI-driven world.
As the advertisements proclaim, the metaverse brings the promise of new tools for education, entertainment, medicine, and commerce. At the same time, it imports the problems associated with the current digital platforms, while creating a host of new issues. Since we have yet to successfully deal with the problems created by the current digital platforms, it is even more pressing to rectify the new genre of potential abuses that are arising.
We are told the metaverse is years away, giving us time to figure out how to deal with its ill effects while encouraging its positive features. Ignoring its obvious risks—or leaving them to the companies to resolve—as digital history has demonstrated, can only make those risks worse. Failure to develop meaningful policies now—on an international basis—will mean we did not learn the lesson of multiple decades of internet exploitation by a handful of companies, and how the companies write their own rules at the expense of the public interest.
The online challenges with which we wrestle today, such as privacy, competition, and misinformation, will be supercharged by the intrusive, immersive, individually identifiable, and manipulative nature of the metaverse. On top of this, the metaverse expands the problems inherent in unsupervised online communities such as harassment, bias, manipulation, and threats to personal safety and the safety of children.
The problems created by the digital platforms of today were, for the most part, a surprise. We cannot claim such innocence about the metaverse. The experience with social media is a warning about what happens when public interest expectations are not part of digital innovation, when “build it and be damned” is the rule. Policymakers need to come to grips with—and preferably get ahead of—the new technology with focus equal to those who are creating the new challenges.
The advertising campaign by Meta Platforms promises, “The metaverse may be virtual, but its impact will be real.” That AI-driven reality is barreling down on us now. Now is the time to deal with the public interest issues the metaverse raises.
The United States has failed to control or mitigate the adverse effects of online digital platforms. The next online innovation—the metaverse—will reinforce these old problems while launching an expanded collection of new challenges.
The move from the internet we know today to the metaverse is a transformational move from observation to participation. Today’s online activity began as an observational experience that gradually expanded through social media and online games to become more participatory. The metaverse accelerates that expansion utilizing virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence to create an immersive 3-D first person experience that puts the user “inside” a new pseudo-world.
We are moving from social media to social virtual reality without a plan for mitigating its ills.
But we are told by its proponents not to worry, that the full realization of the metaverse is still a long time off. That very well may be true, but that cannot be a reason to delay dealing with its challenges. Early metaverse services are a reality. Billions are being spent by the dominant digital platforms to further expand the capabilities of the metaverse. We the public—acting through our government—cannot stand idly by as the pseudo-world begins to redefine our real world.
When asked by a reporter what his company was doing “to ensure the problems of today’s internet don’t carry over into—or, worse, get amplified by—the metaverse,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO and metaverse evangelist, responded, “We have some time to try to work some of the stuff out up front.”3
Yet, that statement is misleading because we don’t have time to work out the emerging problems.
We must reverse the experience of digital pioneers charging ahead to exploit the capabilities of technology without considering the consequences only to act surprised about the adverse effects they created.
Gartner Research forecasts that by 2026—that’s less than three years away—one quarter of the population will spend at least one hour per day in the metaverse.4 Even if the Gartner research is optimistic (as some other reports seem to indicate), the clock is ticking.5 The companies that hope to profit from the metaverse are charging ahead. The effects of the metaverse on individuals and the public interest will be determined by who uses the next few years better: those with private interests or those concerned about the public interest.
The evolution from social media to social virtual reality is upon us. We must reverse the experience of digital pioneers charging ahead to exploit the capabilities of technology without considering the consequences only to act surprised about the adverse effects they created. Now is the time to get in front of the coming transformation to assert the role of the public interest and societal norms…before it is once again too late.
