Is the metaverse the next Zoom or the next 3D TV? Look beyond the hype – iNews

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As is my right and privilege, I want to write an entire newsletter off the back of a single sentence I read in a BBC Futures article several months ago.

The article was this one: Apparently, its the next big thing. What is the metaverse? Its about (obviously) the metaverse: the idea of a virtual-reality internet where we all walk around inside a 3D world and have meetings and so on.

And the line that caught my interest was: Hype about digital worlds and augmented reality pops up every few years, but usually dies away.

This is the sort of thing that might end me up in Pseuds Corner, but: Scottish philosopher David Hume would have loved that sentence.

Hume pointed out (Im writing this from dusty memories of philosophy seminars in the early 2000s, so it wont be perfect, but I think its basically about right) that we never see one thing cause another thing. We see a thing, and then we see the next thing, and we infer cause. We see a billiard ball hit another billiard ball, and we see the other billiard ball move, but we never see one thing cause the other.

So how do we decide what causes what? For Hume, we have to use induction: if every time we see Event A, it is followed by Event B, but if we dont see Event A we dont see Event B, then we can start to think that A causes B.

But theres a problem with induction. Philosophers loved to prove stuff. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; ergo Socrates is mortal, that sort of thing. All bachelors are unmarried. No power of two is divisible by three. These things are logical truths: If you accept the premises, you cant help but accept the conclusion.

That doesnt work with induction, though. You see the sun rise a thousand times, but you can never logically prove that it will rise tomorrow. The turkey notices that the farmer feeds him 364 days in a row, and is thus taken entirely by surprise on the 365th, when the farmer slaughters him and roasts him for Christmas.

Hume points out that you can only think of inductive reasoning in terms of probability. I think its likely that the sun will come up tomorrow: but I cant prove it, in mathematical/formal Aristotelian logic terms.

OK, so the metaverse. Hype about digital worlds and augmented reality pops up every few years, but usually dies away.

Every time you have seen the sun rise in the past, its risen the next day too. Every time the farmer fed the turkey, he fed it the next day too. Every time hype about virtual reality pops up, it dies away. But can you actually draw any conclusions from those things? After all, if you said The sun has always come up before, ergo I predict it will come up tomorrow, youd be making a correct prediction. If you said The farmer has always fed me before, ergo hell feed me tomorrow, youd be wrong (eventually, but importantly). Is Tech hype has always faded away before, ergo itll fade away again like the sun, or like the turkey?

Well, lets look at some other things. Video-calling technology is the obvious example. There was hype about that every few years. I learn from Wikipedia that it was first mooted in the 1870s, basically immediately after the invention of the telephone. The German Reich had closed-circuit television technology which allowed video calls in 1936. In the 70s AT&T released the Picturephone to great fanfare. In the 90s it started to work over the internet.

There have been various waves of hype about it. And each one died away, because the tech wasnt quite there, or it was too expensive, or not enough people had the kit to make it work. And you could reasonably have drawn the conclusion Hype about video-telephones pops up every few years, but usually dies away. And then the pandemic happened and suddenly a large percentage of us are doing it every day. No one is ever going to talk about video-calling hype again, because its just something we do and itd be weird to hype it in the same way itd be weird to hype, I dunno, bookshelves. Its just a technology that we have and that works and that is useful.

On the other hand, 3D glasses. Everyone thought that was the future of cinema, and then it died away, and then it came back (Avatar!) and then there was that brief 3D television thing, and that died away. And I dont think thats a product of the tech not being there polarised glasses are cheap, using two cameras instead of one isnt exactly ground-breaking stuff I think its that its basically a novelty, and the inconvenience and discomfort of having to wear the silly glasses outweigh the gains to your Viewing Experience of seeing things in 3D. Sometimes hype cycles really are just hype cycles.

Whats the difference between video-conferencing and 3D glasses? Whats the difference between the sun rising and the farmer killing the turkey?

The fundamental difference is one of theory. We have a really good theory to explain why we should predict the sun to rise tomorrow: Newtonian physics (we can do even better if we use relativity, but Newtons laws are fine). You predict that the sun will rise tomorrow because your theory says that the Earth spins on its axis once every 24 hours. That theory predicts lots of previous data, makes sense in the light of other theories, and generally seems pretty sound. Predicting that the sun wont rise tomorrow would mean rewriting a lot of what we think we know about the universe.

Whereas whats the turkeys theory for why the farmer is feeding him? Because he loves me and wants me to be happy, maybe, which is nice, but there are lots of equally plausible theories that could explain the data just as well.

The point is that you cant just look at the fact that there have been hype cycles and say from that that the thing will never happen. There have been AI winters before times when AI research stopped being fashionable, and funding into it slowed but I dont think there will be any more, because now AI is making people money. Theres a current hype cycle around fusion power, and maybe itll die away like the last several (fusion is 30 years away and always will be), but maybe one day itll just become profitable. [This thing] is coming and itll change the world will always be wrong every single time until its right.

So you need to look at the theory behind it and decide as best you can, not just on the hype cycle, whether you think its likely.

This isnt just true of new technology, by the way. Its true of disasters as well (every warning of an apocalypse will be false apart from one). Experts told us swine flu/bird flu/SARS/MERS would be a devastating global pandemic, and they were wrong every time, so we dont need to worry about this novel coronavirus.

There are various up-and-coming technologies that get repeatedly hyped and then die away again. Artificial general intelligence: people have thought that was on its way many times. Fusion energy. Life extension. Space colonies. Virtual reality.

For what its worth, I think true artificial intelligence and fusion energy probably will happen in the next few decades nature has proved theyre both possible (you can make an intelligent being out of neurons, you can make a fusion reactor in a star), obvious progress has been made towards them, and crucially people will be able to make lots of money out of both of them.

(Cheap energy is obviously valuable; really, really clever machines that can do exactly what you ask of them will have an incredibly wide array of uses if we manage to stop them from killing us all.)

Life extension seems to be plausible and, lets face it, rich people will pay for it once its available but super expensive, so I suspect theres a good chance of that happening. Space colonies are not likely to be profitable, but the worlds two richest people are interested in them and keep pushing money into technology that could make it happen, so I can see how that might happen.

And the metaverse I dont know. It always seems like a pain in the arse to me. The headsets are uncomfortable and I dont know if most of the use cases (conferencing etc) are so much better than a Zoom call that itd make it worthwhile. Maybe theyll get less clunky over time, but its pretty unlikely theyll ever get less clunky than a pair of 3D glasses. But Mark Zuckerberg obviously thinks its worth betting heavily on, and hes probably looked into it more closely than me.

But you cant know any of that just from looking at whether the hype has come and gone in the past. We do that too often. The climate has always changed! [So we shouldnt worry about it changing now.] Fusion is 30 years away and always will be! [So its not coming soon.]

Instead you have to actually look at the details. Its not enough to say that the farmer feeds you every day, so he always will. Sometimes Christmas happens.

Why do so many people believe things that are patently untrue? The point of believing things, surely, is to help us navigate the world: if there is a big hole in the ground in front of us, it is useful to believe that there is a big hole in the ground in front of us, so that we dont fall into it and break our legs. But lots of us all of us, probably believe things that are clearly untrue. A few that are probably relatively uncontroversial among Geek Week readers: astrology can predict your future; vaccines cause autism; there was a paedophile conspiracy involving Hillary Clinton run out of a Washington pizza restaurant.

(I dont know which of my beliefs are clearly untrue if I did Id stop believing them but it seems overwhelmingly likely that some of them are.)

Kevin Simler makes the case that beliefs have several roles. Some beliefs help us navigate the world. But others help us maintain social standing. Whether or not I believe in climate change will have very little effect on the actual outcomes of climate change, but it will have a huge effect on my ability to enjoy nice dinner parties in north London (or chats with rural Republicans in the American Midwest). He compares it to employees in a company in a corrupt, nepotistic town:

Consider the case of Acme Corp, a property development firm in a small town called Nepotsville. The unwritten rule of doing business in Nepotsville is that companies are expected to hire the city councils friends and family members. Companies that make these strategic hires end up getting their permits approved and winning contracts from the city. Meanwhile, companies that refuse to play ball find themselves getting sued, smeared in the local papers, and shut out of new business.

In this environment, Acme faces two kinds of incentives, one pragmatic and one political. First, like any business, it needs to complete projects on time and under budget. And in order to do that, it needs to act like a meritocracy, that is, by hiring qualified workers, monitoring their performance, and firing those who dont pull their weight. But at the same time, Acme also needs to appease the city council. And thus it needs to engage in a little cronyism, that is, by hiring workers who happen to be well-connected to the city council (even if theyre unqualified) and preventing those crony workers from being fired (even when they do shoddy work).

It might make sense to hire the mayors useless nephew, even though you know he wont pull his weight, because it will make your companys life easier. By comparison, it might make sense to believe things that arent true, as a signal that youre part of Team We Believe That Stuff. Sometimes those beliefs will actually be true.

Ive used relatively uncontroversial examples above. But I bet you could think of more mainstream beliefs that are clearly untrue (I cant face the row). And the real trick is to try to work out which of your own beliefs are held at least partly for crony reasons, because its just not plausible that there arent any.

This is Geek Week with Tom Chivers, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If youd like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week,you can sign up here.

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Is the metaverse the next Zoom or the next 3D TV? Look beyond the hype - iNews