Technologies of all kinds are tools that can be put to good or bad uses, and it’s fundamental to our creative human nature, both for better and worse, that there is no way to keep ever more impactful innovations from “progressing.”
No examples of such transformative advancements are more evident than benefits and pitfalls afforded by spectacularly rapid artificial intelligence-driven information and social media technologies.
In addition to opening unlimited opportunities for learning, communication, and yes, entertainment, these services also deliver some very real dangers.
Key among these hazards, such “smart” systems and applications are outpacing our sensible abilities to avoid becoming seduced away from reality into virtual worlds controlled by Big Tech algorithm wielding masters.
Enter Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, inventor of the social-media world we live in, who claims humanity will move into a future “metaverse,” leaving our reality worlds behind for escapes into new imaginary pretend ones that disconnect us from consequential challenges and miseries.
To serve this dystopian purpose, Facebook’s rebranded “Meta” company plans to spend the next five to 10 years building an immersive artificial world, including scent, touch and sound, to allow people to get lost in virtual reality (VR).
Speaking to tech podcaster Lex Fridman, Zuckerberg explained that there will be a point where these virtual worlds are so immersive and convenient … places so absorbing and handy that we won't want to leave. And this is the point where it becomes the “metaverse.”
“A lot of people think that the metaverse is about a place, but one definition of this is it's about a time when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time,” Zuckerberg told Fridman.
These virtual reality environments aren't at that level yet, Zuckerberg explained, but lots of people already live much of their lives in the digital world — just on 2D screens.
Metaverse represents a huge paradigm shift from living in narrow 2D bandwidth screens to an abstract world that isn’t rich and unpredictable in ways the real world is.
Here, we’re no longer dealing with specialized forms of seemingly harmless and beneficial artificial intelligence (AI) devices that drive a Google car, help a doctor make diagnoses, or guide Wall Street investment decisions.
Instead, we’re now talking about vastly expanding addictive programs that monitor, data mine and manipulate our thought and value patterns through personal social networks; video preferences; shopping, health and fitness habits; and more.
Metaverse exceeds virtual reality with capabilities for mixed reality (MR) which seeks to blend digital avatar and real worlds so persuasively that they become consciously indistinguishable.
Many current (MR) metaverse prototype systems already have face-, eye-, body- and hand-tracking tech, and some even incorporate Electroencephalogram (EEG) technology able to pick up brainwave patterns.
In other words, everything you say, manipulate, look at, or even think about can be monitored in MR, meaning that whoever becomes the master of this reality will have access to an unprecedented amount of data and power.
This danger includes added risks of being hacked to end up interacting with avatar cyber criminals rather than people we know and trust.
Although Zuckerberg points out that metaverse has yet to fully mature over time, it currently exists in some forms now — with Facebook's Oculus VR, and games like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are already weaponized by armies of social statisticians and researchers who constantly work to figure out new ways to addict us to their preferred messaging and behaviors.
This is analogous to a World War II experimental project to create pigeon-guided missiles by training the birds to peck at a target and be rewarded with food when they completed a task correctly.
When we disconnect from the real world, we no longer maintain awareness of such manipulations … or sustain essential disciplines and boundaries to resist our control by the pigeon feeders.
Take, for instance, a young male wandering the internet whose libido gets sapped by porn sites as substitutes for truly meaningful relationships in real-life society. Or habitual video gaming that stereotypes mindlessly gory glory battles.
Our greatest future societal responsibility is to ensure that an entire generation of young people is not made intellectually shallow ethically dysfunctional through such programming addiction.
Tragically, this is already occurring.
Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower offered congressional testimony last fall charging that Instagram, owned by Meta, was fully aware its addictive programming was damaging the mental health of children and teenagers, but nevertheless continued such practices as part of its business model from ads targeted on this group
Haugen provided documents showing Instagram knew of studies showing increased suicidal thoughts and eating disorders among young girls who used the site.
Ms. Haugen spoke of what she called “little feedback loops” in which “likes and comments and reshares” trigger “hits of dopamine to your friends so they will create more content.”
Dr. David Reid, a professor of AI and Spatial Computing at Liverpool Hope University, warns that metaverse visceral experience of immersion can be exceptionally emotive, drastically deepening existing childhood social media data privacy concerns and cyberbullying incidents.
This, Reid emphasizes, will require “a highly robust system in place to police the metaverse,” something far too important to allow any single company to control.
"We’re clearly in the very early stages but we need to start talking about these problems now before we go down a route we can’t reverse away from. It’s crucial for the future.”
All that policing should begin by example — starting right now with some discipline of our own.
In short, let’s all strive to get a real life apart from the internet.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 11 books, "Beyond Flagpoles and Footprints: Pioneering the Space Frontier" co-authored with Buzz Aldrin (2021), is available on Amazon along with all others. Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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