AI killed the metaverse and no one noticed
There was a very interesting article in the Irish Times a couple of weeks ago concerning Mark Zuckerberg’s retreat from the metaverse after spending $70 billion over four years trying to turn his virtual world vision into a reality. It cited reports that Meta plans to reduce its metaverse budget by 30% next year to focus more resources on AI.
As I was never one of those tempted to spend the precious limited hours of my life in a universe created by Zuckerberg, this news was not really a major concern at first glance. Sure, we can look around the world today and think that if there is a creator of this particular reality, he or she hasn’t done a great job of it, but it’s still probably better than anything Mark Z could come up with.
In any case, assuming there is/was a creator, I think we can safely admit the world as created is not the same as the world today now that we humans have had more or less free rein to reshape it according to our own whims and desires. No wonder, perhaps, some people are tempted to believe that if we end up putting the world into the care of AI, it could be an improvement.
I appreciated the accuracy of the headline for the article Has AI buried the metaverse even if I thought the emphasis was slightly misplaced. I don’t think that the metaverse has been buried by AI, the tech industry’s “shiny new toy”, the “next phase of the digital revolution, taking over the work we don’t want to do and generally making our lives better, as long as we don’t work in one of the jobs that AI expects to eliminate or change beyond recognition, of course”.
While I agree that AI has buried the metaverse, I think the reason is not so much connected to the next phase of the digital revolution but to the creation of a new reality. And unlike the metaverse, this one is not confined to virtual worlds, it’s about reshaping our reality into a world that reflects the whims and desires of an alliance of Zuckerberg and fellow members of the techligarchy, the Trump administration, far right governments and parties across the world.
At one level, this has been surprisingly easy compared to constructing virtual realities. The cost of buying the political class can be measured in millions of dollars. Hard realities, such as climate change and surging rates of inequality, have been obfuscated by the amplification of distortionary messaging and disinformation through existing technology platforms, such as X and Facebook. The success of that effort brought the whole viability of expending vast sums on virtual realities into sharp relief.
AI, by contrast, can be seen as a natural evolution to the fractured reality we currently inhabit shaped by social media. Why not build on that, rather than waste time, effort and money on virtual reality? You can see how current widespread algorithm manipulation can be developed into something far more powerful if AI is employed to create a new reality.
Given how successful social media has been in distorting and hobbling reality, how could the techligarchy not be tempted to impose its own version of reality upon us all?
Consider this: just a percentage of the vast pile of wealth hoarded by those very same broligarchs could be used to make our world so much better for everybody. Poverty, famine, starvation, climate devastation could be reversed, eradicated even. Global universal education and healthcare could be more than a pipe-dream.
Instead, they choose to devote their vast riches to building a world with a future based on AI. Why? How is that going to create a better world? More importantly, who is it going to create a better world for?
Compared to AI, the metaverse was mere child’s play. After all, no matter how negatively you might feel about virtual reality, you could always take the headset off and see the world as it really is.
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