Few months ago, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, and the CEO of Facebook, announced a rebrand of the company. The parent-company would be called Meta, which would run Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram among others. Mark said the company is ready to build the Metaverse and the rebranding was done in line with this goal.
What is the Metaverse?
Many Silicon Valley’s influential Tech Giants, such as Apple, Google and Microsoft want to build a decentralized, multi-corporate virtual reality that many of them believe will be the successor to the internet as we know it. Metaverse will be a 3D shared space where anyone can do anything, accessible to people with internet. You can play, shop, work, learn, socialize, you name it! You are no more ON the internet; you are IN it! Living it! Experiencing it! All you have to do is create an avatar, wear a VR headset and you are in the Metaverse! The avatar doesn’t even have to look like you, it can look better than you. That’s right, you can configure it as you wish. You want to be thinner than you look or be able to see without glasses, well you can on the Metaverse. Once your avatar is created, you create an online space, where you can hang out or explore with your friends, virtually.
What are the advantages of the Metaverse?
1) Fulfil your wildest dreams
One of the fascinating things about the Metaverse is that it allows people to do things, that they could only dream of! Have you always wanted to go scuba diving, but you don’t know how to swim? Have you always wanted to travel, but you couldn’t because of financial reasons? You can do it on the Metaverse! The experience will be very realistic. You will be virtually teleported to the world of your dream just by staying safely at home. Amazing, isn’t it?
2) Learn faster
During the pandemic, the schooling shifted to online schooling, via Zoom and Google Meet. Even though, the education system managed to adapt to the pandemic, online education was not as efficient as the offline one. With the Metaverse, learning and gaining knowledge will become more enjoyable for the students and for the adults. Both will learn faster! Anyone would be able to teleport themselves to space or back in history to the different civilizations and experience themselves. Imagine sitting beside the Pharaohs or imagine touching the Sun, without getting burn! Everything would be possible in the Metaverse!
3) Increase productivity
In the Metaverse, you can choose the type of work environment you need to be, to be the most efficient possible. Do you need a quiet place, or do you like to work surrounded by Jazz music? All you have to do is modify the configuration. It is as simple as changing the wallpaper on your phone! As most of us are working from home, with the Metaverse, we would be able to conduct and attend meetings, with our avatars just like in real times! With the VR headset, our facial expressions would be sent in real time. It would be exactly like being in a real meeting! On top of this, you would be able to share your input faster because the VR will enable you to send a message to someone just by thinking to send message to someone!
4) Reduce our carbon print
With more and more people using the Metaverse, there would be lesser and lesser people travelling by car or train or flight because anyone can just teleport them self anywhere, in just a click! This is great news for the environment, as transportation is one of the main causes of air pollution! Plus, there would be lesser and lesser people buying real goods because most of them would be shopping and buying stuffs online, for their virtual place on the Metaverse. Hence, the production will decrease, which again works in favour of the environment.
5) Create a new economy
With more and more people joining and creating their own space on the Metaverse, the way we do shopping, will change. Anyone would be able to sell materials or experiences. Business will no more be reserved to the renowned brands. This is also one of the many reasons, why many famous brands, such as Gucci, are rethinking their ways of selling their products and have started investing heavily in the Metaverse.
Yes, the Metaverse seems fascinating, but it does have many drawbacks!
What are the disadvantages of the Metaverse?
1) Trust issues regarding the usage of our data
Social media is invasive. You just have to say, that you wish to travel to Dubai, for ads related to Dubai to pop-up, in your phone! Every day, we are uploading gigantic quantities of data on Facebook or any other social medias but till now, we have no idea, what they do with our data. With the Metaverse, we are talking about giving them access to our brain activity. Would it be safe and wise to let them have intimate details about our brain signals?
2) between the real world and the virtual world
On the Metaverse, you only create worlds you want to see. You don’t like insects; you won’t see them on your Metaverse. You don’t like pineapple on pizza; it won’t see them either! The Metaverse is designed to please as much possible to you, so you spend as much time in it, which is good for Tech Giants and their businesses. However, it is not good for us because we might lose touch with our real world. We won’t even know what is real or what is not. Imagine you are virtually hanging out with your friend. Imagine he says something, but you won’t be able to know, if he really said it because the Metaverse might modify it and show you, something you want to see. Worse, if your friend gets hacked, the Metaverse won’t tell you if you are conversing with your friend or the hacker!
3) Intrude our space
A whole team is dedicated by Meta to filter all the violent, dangerous, illegal contents on social media and remove them. In the Metaverse, it would mean that, they would monitor everything we do. Everything from what we are eating to what we are wearing, will be strictly monitored in the Metaverse, hence it would be very intrusive to our privacy.
4) Impacts on humans
The Metaverse is a world of illusion, where you can have a perfect bodies and life. This can have a very negative impact on us. Because of how perfect, the virtual world is, we might fear coming back to face our struggles and insecurities. We might even forget to take care of ourselves and of our biological needs. With the Metaverse, we don’t know to what extinct our social relationships, in real life, would be impacted. After meeting people online and having fun, would we even like to meet people in real? Some jobs might even disappear because we won’t need them such as engineers or gardeners or cleaners. Only those who have ideas and those who can execute them, would be required.
Conclusion
At first, the Metaverse seems like a perfect world; it helps you socialize without moving from your couch, fulfil your wildest dreams, learn faster, increase your productivity, reduce your carbon print, and create a different economy, where everyone can participate. It will seem realistic, so addictive. However, the Metaverse is not real, it is a virtual world. We don’t know if we can trust the Tech Companies, with information about our brain activity, for example. We don’t know how it would impact our perception about the real and the virtual world. We don’t know how intrusive the Metaverse would be to our private life. We don’t know how it would impact us, humans, and our relationship, in the real world. Everything is very scary, but we are already in the Metaverse. The only difference is that unlike Neo, in Matrix, we have not been given the choice to choose.