Your boss wants a metaverse strategy, but what would that be, and what does metaverse even mean? If we strip away the noise, what can we say about this, and what can we predict?
Sometimes it seems like every big company CEO has read the same article about the same tech trend, and sent the same email to their team, asking “What’s our strategy for this?!” A couple of years ago there were a lot of emails asking for a 5G strategy, and now there are a lot of emails asking about metaverse.
Answering the 5G email was actually pretty easy, partly because almost no-one needs a 5G strategy at all (I wrote about this here), but also because we knew what 5G meant. We probably don’t know what ‘metaverse’ means. More precisely, we don’t know what someone else means. This word has become so vague and broad that you cannot really know for sure what the speaker has in mind when they say it, since they might be thinking of a lot of different things. Neal Stephenson coined the word but he no longer owns it, and there’s no Académie Française that can act as the tech buzzword police and give an official definition. Instead ‘metaverse’ has taken on a life of its own, absorbing so many different concepts that I think the word is now pretty much meaningless – it conveys no meaning, and you have to ask, ‘well, what specifically are you asking about?” Read More
Daily Archives: November 2, 2022
Inside Eric Schmidt’s push to profit from an AI cold war with China
A prominent private-sector voice amplifying rhetoric that pits the U.S. against China in a battle for AI supremacy, Schmidt’s borrowing from a Cold War-era playbook to urge the government toward decisions the AI industry wants it to make.
Eric Schmidt has prodded the Pentagon for years to hurry along its software-buying process.
Today the AI tech investor and former Google CEO is more determined than ever to urge government decision-makers to pick up the pace, but not just when it comes to buying more software for the Defense Department.
Schmidt wants the government to implement his sweeping blueprint to fight what he considers an existential threat to democracy posed by China’s AI plans, an effort that could also bolster his own commercial AI interests.
He says the U.S.’s national security and economic leadership are dependent upon spending billions to procure smarter software, bolster AI research, and build the country’s computer science talent pool. And he says he knows better than the Pentagon itself how to remove the bureaucratic blockades preventing more agile use of AI by the government. Read More
The Corporate Metaverse Can’t Compete
The metaverse can’t succeed if no one wants to be there, which Meta and other big metaverses seemingly don’t yet understand.
… At the 1990 SIGGRAPH conference for computer graphics and interactivity, where he appeared on a panel titled “Hip, hype and hope—the three faces of virtual worlds,” John Perry Barlow, a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted as saying that bullshit is “the grease for the skids upon which we ride into the future.” As we watch Mark Zuckerberg click his avatar’s heels to show off virtual legs that don’t yet exist, and people clamor to pay too much money grabbing virtual land to immediately recreate entrenched landlord-tenant structures and financialized real estate, everything about the new metaverse hype seems to be riding that grease.
Corporations like Meta are attempting to manufacture enthusiasm for the metaverse (more specifically, its own metaverse). Clearly, it isn’t working. In its recent earnings report, Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which operates its metaverse and virtual reality projects, reported an almost 50 percent decline in revenue and an operating loss of $3.7 billion in the last year. Meanwhile, virtual social spaces like Roblox, VRChat, Rec Room, and Second Life already have loyal, active, creative user bases. People who were involved in these successful spaces told Motherboard what modern pushes toward a corporatized metaverse are missing. Read More
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