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It’s fresh The summer evening of 2030, and my 16-year-old daughter and I are walking down the street as we see the stars with augmented reality glasses. The majestic night sky above us is clear, overlaid with information about distant stars set up in constellations like Pegasus, whose legend I use to teach life lessons. It’s a beautiful moment.
A little further on, we pass a wooden fence made up of swear words and obscenities. I see graffiti through glasses, but my daughter has glasses set up to filter out inappropriate content, no. He doesn’t even understand the reason for the agitation written on the faces of those around him.
The first possibility excites me, but the second worries me. While I appreciate the ability to protect teens from inappropriate content, I understand the importance of having meaningful conversations about how some words and actions can harm others. That can’t happen if kids never live.
We continue walking and we see a homeless young man panhandling in front of the store. Here, the role of parental controls is darker. Inadvertently or by design, an algorithm tends to position its attitude on the sidewalk, making clothes and money unsuitable for children and making its appearance and surroundings more benign. Although changing and architecturing our experiences around the world may seem far-fetched, we have been constantly learning for years similar algorithmic biases editing what they show us on the net.
What would encourage my daughter to ask questions about important social concerns like homelessness and empathize with those she lives with if she has never seen her in her world? What if others who prefer an “idealized” world also choose these settings in AR glasses? How can we have meaningful conversations about how to deal with these challenges if a large part of the population does not know the real conditions of our community?
We are closer than you think to dealing with such moral issues. Facebook now plans to follow Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of becoming a social media company from a social media company – and we’ve already seen that a look Workrooms bringing a sense of presence and selected gestures. The fragmentation and echo chambers of the media have already shattered our common reality. If left unchecked, the metaverse can make things worse. It won’t be long before each of us is able to live in a whole world tailored to our personalities, interests, and tastes, which can erode shared experiences even more and make it harder for us to connect sensibly.
Collective experiences are essential to our ability to connect and collaborate. A large part of the division we see today is a product of our fragmented digital realities. When we are not faced with the same problems, it is difficult to come together to develop solutions and empathize with others. Filter bubbles are ultimately a problem of empathy.
The reality is that we already experience almost infinite realities online. A few moments after we started browsing, our web experiences are different. We each see vastly different things based on who we are, where we live, what content we consume. The things we like appear again and again in different forms, each new repetition more appealing than the last. In the end, our online life is entirely ours, which can lead to selective and self-reinforcing worldviews and thus to alternative realities.
Many of us (though not most of us) still strive to be different what is real and what is falseWe often don’t realize that external actors with an agenda in these experiences have a big impact – just as insignificant as selling a new product or as insignificant as shaping political beliefs and leaving disagreement. Metaverse will apply this dynamic to real-world interactions.
When companies repeatedly develop new technologies, they rarely do so while exploring the possibilities of their opponents. We have seen with this baby monitors, TO THIS, and of course social media platforms. The metaverse is not immune. It’s not hard to imagine malicious actors inserting extreme or toxic content directly into metabersical experiences.
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