Zuckerberg’s Mistake; The Surprising Way Metaverse isn’t Web 3.0
To understand Web 3.0 and the Metaverse first we must understand web 2.0 and Facebook, now Meta. Eons ago in the now forgotten era of the late 90’s to early 2000s, web 2.0 happened. This great cataclysm, known only by the eldest of millennial remembrancers, was the change to the dominance of user-generated content. Apparently, before that websites were not that way.
It turns out that the business model of allowing users to generate all your content for free/for a small royalty and then having that content be freely accessible with ads/selling user data/constantly asking for donations is pretty good. WordPress, Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, Etsy, Steam, 4Chan, Pornhub, monosodium glutamate, etc. These are all examples of websites that thrive on that or a similar business model.
Facebook and many other companies stepped over the bodies of those who failed to adapt to the change to web 2.0. Mark Zuckerberg knows this and wants to make sure the same won’t to him. He is trying to predict what web 3.0 will be and get a monopoly on it before anyone else can.
Web 3.0 in VR
Meta is Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to future proof his company against the coming web 3.0. Zuckerburg’s idea of web 3.0 is the metaverse, which is literally a term from a dystopian sci-fi novel warning against this exact thing. What the fuck Mark? That’s like starting a political party and calling it INGSOC or having your slogan be “service guarantees citizenship”. Cough cough, UKIP. At least I have the common decency to hide my evil shadow organizations behind nice sounding fronts like “Johnson’s Bakery”, “Friendly Flowers”, “RavingsOfAMadScientist.com” and “High Stakes Paintball: Instant Death”.
Basically, Web 3.0 is the idea that the internet will be in virtual reality. Mark wants everything to be in virtual reality and for people to never leave so that he can be the god of the new world. But this is stupid because it gives little to no advantage over the traditional 2D internet except for novelty, and it comes at the cost of having all the inconveniences of the real world but is significantly more expensive and time-consuming to develop webpages. It turns web design, something that my Mom can do in her spare time when she’s not being an amazing mom, into the equivalent of developing a AAA video game. Web 3.0 is not in the Metaverse.
I am sure that VR will be important in the future, but only for entertainment and in certain jobs that require a detailed 3D perspective on something, such as animation or for doctors reviewing 3D scans of their patients’ insides. People won’t live in the metaverse. Zuckerberg will probably not make back his investment in this industry, which will be very funny.
Web 3.0 in AR
So what will web 3.0 be? I see two options that could potentially change the internet as much as web 2.0 did. It seems to me that the goal of the metaverse is to have people spend as much time as possible on the internet. Yeah, it sounds dystopian, but honestly, I already do that so whatever. What’s better than spending all your time in the internet world while neglecting your real world responsibilities? Having the internet come into the real world!
Augmented reality could potentially change the way we interact with the internet. The problem is the social stigma against it that Google discovered after trying Google Glass. A necessary part of AR is having a camera that could be recording at any time so that the computer can overlay a display over your sight picture. People didn’t like the idea of other people constantly wearing cameras on their heads all the time which they couldn’t tell if they were being photographed. This is a bit silly since we are already constantly being recorded by government security cameras and Google/Facebook owns all our data.
The other option is a brain chip of some kind, Elon Musk’s Neural Lace being a good example of this technology in its nascent form, but that is even less likely to be accepted.
AR won’t be a thing until societal perception changes.
Web 3.0 in AI Generated Content
The other option of web 3.0 is more in line with an extension of web 2.0. But what if instead of user generated content you had computer generated content? Imagine going to Youtube but instead of just watching whatever the creators you subscribed to have made, you ask a superintelligent AI to make a video for you. The AI will use your request, its knowledge of your preferences, and its scientific understanding of the human mind to instantly generate a video that is perfectly tailored to you at that moment.
The AI generated content business model would generate content both of a much higher quality and quantity than what any human creators could ever hope to. Perhaps it could even produce content of quality on par or surpass Hollywood.
There are already some examples of a nascent form of AI generated content driven web 3.0. Look at AI Dungeon 2, Deepfake, DALL-E 2, GPT-3, etc. Seriously, if you haven’t already, look those up. It’s amazing what they can do. After you finish reading this article, like, sub, and comment of course.
One of the highest profile examples was young Luke Skywalker recent in the Mandalorian. If you didn’t know, that wasn’t Mark Hamil in makeup. He was entirely AI generated, even his voice. Disney only needed some random mocap guy to get the animations. Legally, they didn’t even need Mark Hamil’s input at all thanks to contract fuckery.
Sure, all these AIs are still pretty stupid and can’t really compete with real humans. Not to mention that it also consumes a lot of time and electricity to train learning algorithms. However, these issues may soon be resolved as is shown in Veritasium’s recent video We’re Building Computers Wrong. I wouldn’t be able to explain it better than he nor do I want you clicking away, so I’ll just embed that here.
Gone are the days of stupid AIs and nightmarish AI generated images. You would be forgiven for thinking some of this was made by an actual human. Or, at least a child or an adult with a minor concussion. AIs still lack an understanding of context and occasionally have minor glitches, but that’s really it. You would be surprised how often an understanding of context isn’t needed to still sound believable. Who can say how long it will be until the not mad scientist boffins work out how to do that?
So, what’s the future of the internet? Argue in the comments. Is the Metaverse the next big thing? Remember when this article was about Meta? I started writing this back when that was still a topical search trend. Subscribe or do whatever it is you do with blogs for more crazy tangents!
Featured image by geralt (Unknown Year)
Pixabay License / Free for most commercial use / No attribution required
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/metaverse-virtual-reality-man-7252038/
Hello, Mr. Scientist. Can I just call you Mad?
Anyways. Congrats on having a mostly functioning blog software. So one application of VR that I believe might really take off is as a way to better organize your workspace. In many ways, the most revolutionary aspect of the computer wasn’t it’s ability to do complicated math, but just the ability to manage documents and records. The office computer would’ve been revolutionary even if it stopped at 1980s level of technology. VR could continue to extend that idea. Sure the basic editing interface would be the same, but the fact that you could put up a live-updating number on the wall that just tells you how many software tickets are open, and maybe a little ticker below that that shows all “OH GOD THE SERVER IS ON FIRE” type issues. You could also have a simulated window of your choosing to increase morale. Maybe someone will write an application that lets you load your city from Cities Skylines or something.
As for Metaverse, it seems like one of those things where none of it’s proponents can explain what’s so special about this new idea. As some have pointed out, basically everything “unique” about the metaverse was done in Second Life 10 years ago. A couple proponents have said it would allow you to buy a hat in one part of the metaverse and use it in another. They can already do that. But why would they? If I buy a TF2 hat, what *possible* benefit could Fortnite get by supporting me getting a hat without paying them a dime? There’s a reason most restaurants have a no outside food or drink policy. People who suggest that been watching too much Sword Art Online (any amount is too much).
I think a lot of metaverses are basically going to be similar to those Flash Game Social MMOs like Club Penguin.
Exactly. It’s funny how many of those things no one can explain but love unconditionally there are these days. NFTs for example.
Please do call me Mad, Mr. Scientist was my father’s name!
I’m still not sure about this whole ‘mad’ thing. ‘Unethical’ worked just fine in my day.