The Meta "stack" or core competencies they wish to align in this product domain, set up a profoundly dystopian world.
Their interest in being the platform is to own next-level surveillance of you for as much of your waking life as possible. They intend to track every gesture, your gaze, and (soon) your biometrics,
so as to feed their other big build out area, ML and similar tools for making superhuman insights about you and your interests,
which they they marry to their bread and butter, selling you to any and all comers regardless of any ethical concerns or concerns about societal consequence whatsoever. (That's not even hyperbole, it's a simple statement of fact.)
I don't believe they're ahead on this, but we can also expect to be ever more successfully manipulated by AI-powered chat bots increasingly well-tuned to provoke "engagement" and emotional response, through which to steer our beliefs behaviors and limbic system. C.f. Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina.
A friend made me try his rig against VR porn once, and picked a scenario which leveraged gaze and similar monkey-mind cues like whispering in one ear up close, to trigger all the "intimacy" responses.
Or: made me try the "walk the plank off the top of a skyscraper" demo. I knew perfectly well I was 1" off the floor on a 2x4. I could not step off.
We are utterly defenseless against what is coming,
and if there is one company in the public consumer sphere which has demonstrated that it utterly untrustworthy as a steward of our individual and collective wellbeing, it's Meta.
I dearly hope they crash and burn before they can foist this hellacious future on those of us unable to get out from under it.
There's a short story called the Lifecycle of Software Objects. It introduces the idea of platform wars, e.g. competition between various metaverse worlds. I see this playing out with Horizon, maybe Roblox, Epic, etc. Things are mostly interoperable across platforms but some have limitations.
Having the choice for digital worlds would make it a little less dystopian. But I think the bigger thing is having competition with hardware, for the 'next-level surveillance' reason you highlight.
Their interest in being the platform is to own next-level surveillance of you for as much of your waking life as possible. They intend to track every gesture, your gaze, and (soon) your biometrics,
so as to feed their other big build out area, ML and similar tools for making superhuman insights about you and your interests,
which they they marry to their bread and butter, selling you to any and all comers regardless of any ethical concerns or concerns about societal consequence whatsoever. (That's not even hyperbole, it's a simple statement of fact.)
I don't believe they're ahead on this, but we can also expect to be ever more successfully manipulated by AI-powered chat bots increasingly well-tuned to provoke "engagement" and emotional response, through which to steer our beliefs behaviors and limbic system. C.f. Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina.
A friend made me try his rig against VR porn once, and picked a scenario which leveraged gaze and similar monkey-mind cues like whispering in one ear up close, to trigger all the "intimacy" responses.
Or: made me try the "walk the plank off the top of a skyscraper" demo. I knew perfectly well I was 1" off the floor on a 2x4. I could not step off.
We are utterly defenseless against what is coming,
and if there is one company in the public consumer sphere which has demonstrated that it utterly untrustworthy as a steward of our individual and collective wellbeing, it's Meta.
I dearly hope they crash and burn before they can foist this hellacious future on those of us unable to get out from under it.