Metaverses from the Abstract

I’ve been slowly reading this book over the last while. Finished it recently when I acknowledged that much of it is skimmable. What it lacks in grandeur it repays by being dense and information rich in parts while still painting a complex big picture of the coming metaverse revolution, or what have you.

For me, it’s a great reminder of all the practical reasons why a true metaverse is further away than some tech lords might wish. Not least among these reasons, that a small handful of huge corporations have laid claim to the economic lanes—the payment rails, as the crypto bros say. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash, was already lecturing about data privacy in 1999’s Cryptonomicon.

Still, I read the book because I am one of the people who believe some version of the metaverse as envisioned by science fiction will eventually emerge. I want to think about it a bit in preparation to tackle another writing project. We already have a number of proto-metaverses in the many online games people play all over the world. The power and processing speeds needed for a worldwide persistent 3D virtual environment and economy will require even greater incentives for clean energy and quantum computing. At the same time, we’re likely past the point of being able to turn back some of the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels. If the surface of our planet becomes increasingly uninhabitable in parts of the world, yet we have found sources of clean power, we may rely on metaverse tech to help us live as social humans in a sometimes inhospitable environment.

Although they are different categories, I drop my interest in/research on AI into the same bucket. Why?

I see fans of the current LLM AI bots and related tech on Reddit talking about the singularity; I don’t believe that based on any of the chat tech I’ve seen, in spite of its impressive imitative abilities. But when I think about source of boundless energy [fusion] + exponential compute [quantum computing] = x, then introducing x to LLM-type massive collections, full of words and images and sounds…

I see some potential there.