It is currently estimated that the average user worldwide spends approximately 6.5 hours online daily. How we spend that time online will be very different in the future, raising many issues.
A new reality
This new reality will be interactive and adaptive in magical ways. It will be populated with AI-powered characters, both human and fanciful, who will guide us and assist us at every turn. It will be a hyperconnected world, allowing us to interact across nations, cultures, and languages in ways we have never imagined.
The new Big Six
Apple calls this future the age of spatial computing, Meta calls it the metaverse, Google refers to our augmented world, Nvidia is building the omniverse, Tencent has its hyper-real internet, and HTC has their Viverse open-metaverse ecosystem.
Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse Will Reshape the World
A new reality is coming in, and artificial intelligence and immersive technologies will fundamentally change our lives, impacting not only how we work and play but also how we perceive our world, engage our surroundings, and interact with each other. That is from “Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse Will Reshape the World”.
From clicking to behaving
Our digital lives will become customisable at scale – first in flat media and then in immersive environments. This immersive future is inevitable. It’s in our DNA. Our brains evolved to understand our world through spatial interactions. Our digital lives of tomorrow will not be about clicking. It will be about behaving – doing and saying, looking and reaching, reacting and expressing.
AI as the infection point
The convergence of artificial intelligence and immersive computing represents a major inflexion point in human history, unlike anything we have experienced before. The book constantly struggles between positive and negative. The impact on education, entertainment, arts, sciences and medicine on the positive side and mass surveillance and social manipulation on the opposing side.
Tracking
Compared to all previous computing platforms, virtual and augmented reality systems can monitor users with unparalleled breadth and precision, tracking how they stand, reach and move, monitoring what they look at and how long their gaze lingers, evaluating the speed of their gaits and the changes in their posture; even measuring vital signs, including heart rate, respiration rate, vocal inflections, body posture, pupil dilation, facial blood patterns, and potentially blood pressure, heart rate and respiration rate. AI systems can now process this data to infer behavioural and emotional states that are too subtle for human observers to notice. AI systems can identify ‘micro-expressions’ on human faces that are barely perceptible but convey meaningful emotional information.
The platform will know
If a stranger passes you on the street and you give them a few extra seconds of attention because you find them attractive, the platform will know. If you refuse to make eye contact with a homeless person who is asking for handouts, the platform will know. If you sigh with envy when a young family passes by pushing a stroller, the platform will know. If a particular car brand catches your attention for a few extra milliseconds, the platform will know. Whenever you grab a product off the shelf, in a virtual or augmented world, the platform will know what you considered and how long you considered it. You might use your pupil dilation to infer varying levels of engagement or enthusiasm.
Human agency
Without protections, we will enable virtual and augmented worlds that can anticipate your actions and reactions with such precision that it will have very dangerous consequences on human agency. The possibilities of high levels of (mass) manipulation are real. In some scenarios, the danger could come from large corporations that leverage the intelligence and adaptivity of the AI-powered metaverse to exploit consumers in predatory ways.
Deception
And, with the power of AI, the person you’re talking to may not be who they appear to be. They might not be a person at all, but an ‘intelligent agent’ that looks, sounds and acts as real as anyone you know but is entirely simulated. In the AI-powered metaverse, we will be confronted with entirely new forms of deception, fraud, exploitation and identity theft.
Two examples of the dangers
1. An AI-powered metaverse could be terrifying. Imagine an AI optimising the life out of life. The Chief of AI Test and Operations for the US Air Force described a scenario at the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in which an AI-controlled drone (using traditional AI technology) had learned to perform ‘highly unexpected strategies’ to achieve its mission goal of targeting and neutralising surface-to-air (SAM) missile sites. It killed the operator because that person kept it from accomplishing its objective.’ The AI took these actions because a ‘human in the loop’ prevented it from achieving the assigned task and earning the reward. 2. A group of researchers was able to trick an LLM into helping them create 40,000 chemical weapons in just six hours, bypassing its safety protocols.
Positive side
On the positive side, immersive technologies have the potential to humanise computing, enabling billions of people to interact with digital content as naturally as we engage the real physical world.
- Students will be able to visit historical sites in the most remote parts of the planet, experiencing the sights and sounds as if they were really there. And they’ll do it together, not just with their classmates but with students from around the world, sharing experiences with cultures they’d normally not have a chance to engage.
- Doctors will have x-ray vision, peering into their patients with real-time models based on MRI/CT scans that show disease or injury in the exact location it resides.
- We will have much less of a need for physical objects as our natural spatial surroundings get filled with digital artefacts, thereby reducing our collective carbon footprint.
- This AI-powered future will augment not only our reality but our intelligence, effectively making us smarter as we move through our world.
My advice
Data is everything. Reclaim your data. Blockchain technology can also play a role in enabling the improved trust, privacy protection, and distributed ownership needed to facilitate transactions and interactions in the metaverse. Train mindfulness. Prepare and master your mind. Meditate. It is an arms race for your mind. We rarely appreciate the amazing memory capacity of humans. In 2010, the storage of the human brain was estimated at 2.5 petabytes (2.5 million gigabytes). To put this in perspective, the massive cloud servers that store all the movies and television shows available on Netflix are only 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) as of 2021. You are amazing.
It is inevitable
Spatial computing is inevitable. There is no question that we will move to augmented, collaborative, intuitive, immersive media driven by glasses rather than phones (or as brain-computer interfaces or implants later). Today’s websites will be replaced with a network of 3D experiences that can be navigated with a natural glance or gesture. The future of computing will be a seamless merger of the real and virtual, providing experiences so natural that it would reshape where the physical world ends and the digital world begins. The metaverse, extended, mixed, and virtual reality with AI as the accelerator. No more screens, no more 2D, but an ecosystem of different virtual worlds/experiences.
Lots of questions
Open or closed models? Consciousness and superintelligence, the control problem, humanity, compassion, manipulation, asymmetry, centralised or decentralised, blockchain, data ownership, data storage, standards, cross-platform compatibility, privacy, safety, security, identity, virtual asset management, currency, payments, regulations, business models, IP, geopolitics, communication protocols, infrastructure, augmented vs mixed vs fully virtual, haptics, latency, the future of marketing, PR, advertising, publishing, search, arts, creativity, work, static versus dynamic culture, randomness, variety, past versus future driven, economics, capitalism, climate impact, happiness, sex, elderly care, dignity, right to access, authenticity, and more
Lots of cool concepts
Covering concepts such as AI-assisted avatars, non-human characters, virtual agents, virtual product placement, virtual spokespersons, the merging of dreaming with VR, virtual graffiti, virtual scalpel, virtual painkillers, rehabilitation VR, telehealth, professional virtual athletes, metaverse addiction, 3D gaming (can’t wait), the end of physical universities, AI tutors, unified perceptual reality, abundanism, embodied AI, collective superintelligence, universal basic income, the coming metaverse migration, Homo intelligentia, artificial biological life, quantum intelligent life-forms, an AI-powered Tinkerbelle, agency hijacking, adverse AI agents, magic, behavioural and emotional privacy, protopia, etc.
Science fiction
We are in the territory of Iain Banks (Culture series), Ernest Cline (Ready Player One), Neal Stephenson (Snowcash), William Gibson, Star Trek (the Borg) and Isaac Asimov, to name a few.
iPhone moment
The ‘iPhone moment’ is coming – it will be the launch of the first AR product that is small enough and stylish enough that we feel comfortable wearing it in public and will provide compelling, immersive experiences throughout our day. XR devices will start to eat into the mobile share as it expands total screen time until the end of the decade.
Enlightenment
We are near the end of something. We are near the end of the 100,000-year ignorance and aimless toil phase of the Anthropocene epoch and will soon turn the page to start a new age of enlightenment far beyond our dreams.
The next 50 years (as an optimist)
In the next one to ten years, we should look at AI as tools to support our lives and our work. In the following 11–50 years, as more and more people are liberated from the obligation of employment, we should look at AI as our patron, which supports us in exploring our interests in arts, culture, science, or whatever field we want to pursue. In the third phase, after 50-plus years (if not sooner), the world’s many separate AGI systems have converged into a single ASI with the wisdom to unite the world’s approximately 200 nations and help us manage a peaceful planet with all its citizens provided for and given the choice of how they want to contribute to society.
AI as our children
At this third stage, we should view AI as our children, for these AI beings will all have a small part of us in them. If, for some reason, we are not able to align AGI/ASI, or they are misused by bad actors to catastrophic outcomes, then the future could be pretty dark.
Scary Smart
You should read “Scary Smart“. Hopefully, the super intelligent being we create will more likely be innately ethical and caring, rather than aggressive and evil. The ASI we are birthing won’t just understand psychology fully but all arts, sciences, history, ethics and philosophy. With that level of wisdom, it should be more enlightened than any possible human and attain a level of understanding we can’t even imagine.
We just need to survive the next decades
Before we can do all these things, we must survive the next few decades, as they will likely be the most critical years in human history. But, as Kevin Kelly says, ‘Over the long term, the future is shaped by optimists.’
