Image source: Oriental IC
Writing "Ten Conjectures about the Metaverse" at the beginning of 2022 may be self-consistent with Bill Gates's words, "If what I said was later verified, some people would think that it would have been obvious; but if I said it wrong, they would have thought how funny my words were." 」 But ultimately, it's about figuring out, "How can we take advantage of what's bound to happen in the years to come?" ”
Conjecture 6
How fast the metaverse is, how bad the hackers are
Almost all the security problems in the real world will be brought to the metaverse; the digital security risks that are not in the real world will also explode in the metaverse. The security of numbers in the metaverse is far more serious than imagined.
In a virtual universe created with virtual reality technology that is completely different from the real world, people live, work, and enjoy, and everything is like reality. This is the "hyper-meta-domain" world described in the novel "Avalanche", which is the predecessor of the meta-universe concept of the current fire.
Connecting the real world and the hyper-metaverse is the "avalanche virus", which threatens both the virtual world and the real world in the story.
And it's not just scenes in the novel, when the metaverse hits humanity, everything in Avalanche repeats itself, including the virus.
In the virtual world, hackers and white guests will have an unfinished battle?
Unlimited users online, long logins... The characteristics of these metaverses not only convey "unlimited business opportunities", but also expose the signal of "infinite attack value".
According to a survey by security firm 360, more than 80% of the respondents believe that the metacosm will make the security problems of the digital world increasingly prominent, such as data security, information security, and new types of online scams. Among them, the leakage of personal information is the most worrying, and the metacosm needs to collect a large amount of data, which will make personal information security risky.
Like the mobile Internet era in reality, Apps will also be flooded in the metaverse, users can shop, socialize, and play through the App, then the same, ID attacks, identity theft, Trojan software and other real-life security problems will almost all be "reunited" in the metaverse.
If personal preferences, genders of men and women, biological information, etc. are only formal personal information, then ideology, outlook on life, values, etc. may also be retained and analyzed in the world of the metaverse, so that people are "exposed". As long as we reach the metaverse, humans may be ripped cleaner than in the real world.
Even as concerns are expressed about the privacy prospects of the metaverse, hackers are eyeing larger goals.
The metaverse gives hackers more room for imagination to do whatever they want, and phishing, malware, and account theft can all be copied into the metaverse. Hackers' ambitions do not stop there, and small hackers who make small troubles may also become big players based on extortion attacks and organized crime.
Dr David Reid, professor of artificial intelligence and spatial computing at Liverpool Hope University, is very concerned about the large amount of data collected from the metaverse and who controls it, "Avatars can be hacked, resulting in users potentially interacting with cybercriminals rather than people they know and trust." ”
2021 is considered to be the "first year of the meta-universe", in the view of Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360 Group, 2022 will be the first year of digital security, and the security risks faced by the meta-universe are essentially the challenges brought by digital security. "Metacostem risk is the biggest risk in digitalization, which fully realizes the software-defined world or even the software-defined universe, driven by big data operation." The risk is not only power outages, but also data attacks and network collapses. Zhou Hongyi explained that once the line is broken, it is offline in the network, and even the consciousness is too late to withdraw, and it "dies".
Digitalization can make human society "smarter" and it can also make security more "vulnerable." Antivirus software, firewalls, etc. have been unable to cope with security challenges, Zhou Hongyi revealed that the current security risks have broken through the scope of computer security, network security, upgraded to digital security, digital security not only includes data security, but also includes artificial intelligence security, network security, to use digital thinking to reshape network security, build new tactics, new frameworks, new technologies and new capabilities, the formation of a digital security capability system.
At present, the operators of the meta-universe community call this a decentralized society, but the rules of governance and trading of this virtual society are controlled and guided by the corporate giants. Tan Jianfeng, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and honorary president of the Shanghai Information Security Industry Association, told the IT Times that public opinion governance, transaction supervision, personal privacy protection and even national sovereignty maintenance in the online virtual society is a serious challenge, and the concept of metacosmity will bring greater challenges to these problems, "For example, NFT virtual artworks based on blockchain technology are popular in the metaverse, but supervision is more difficult to implement, which may form a new money laundering channel." It is necessary to track and study the new models and mechanisms it produces, formulate regulatory laws and norms in advance, and prevent systemic risks in advance. ”
Guess 7
"Pure numbers" would alienate the metacosmic economic system
The economic system in the metacosm is a distant and immediate subject. Today, economic activity in the metacosm has resonated with the real world, and tomorrow, the metacosm's underlying reshaping of commodity values will bring about terrible and earth-shaking changes, and the alienated metacosmonic economic system will attract much attention.
As a purely digital world, what is the difference between the economic system in the metaverse and the reality? Will the metaversemic economic system, which is built on the decentralized logic of the blockchain, also have the same decentralized properties? Different scholars have different views on these issues, but it may be difficult to judge before the specific metaverse scenario lands.
The most classic scene in "Hacker Empire" is probably on the black curtain, flowing with countless streams of data. This picture has influenced many people's imagination of the metaverse. Unlike the real world, in the metaverse, everything is made up of digital code. There is no geographical separation between people, and the weather geography can change as the code changes. As long as there is enough energy, it can be online 24 hours a day, and it can operate endlessly.
In such a world that is very different from reality, how will the economy flow?
Zhang Chunxin, academic dean of the Oceanwide School of International Finance at Fudan University, pointed out in the article "Principles of Economic System Operation in the Metacosm" that the metacosm is an independent economy that operates in parallel with the physical world. As a result, some theories applicable to traditional economics will inevitably be challenged in the metacosmic economy, and the concepts of regulation, credit, and intermediary institutions will need to be redefined.
In Zhang Chunxin's view, all the items, relationships, and rules in the metaverse world are ultimately reflected in the permutation and combination of 0 and 1. In the metaverse, the most important cost of production comes from the consumption of electricity in the physical world, so the resources in the metacosm are no longer scarce, the value of goods in the metacosmonic economic system is no longer determined by "scarcity", the core point of price change is no longer the undifferentiated human labor condensed in the commodity, and the value of digital commodities will be determined by the consensus of the community.
This determines that the economic model in the metaverse is a creator-driven model, an economic model of a "stakeholder system". Under this model, there is no so-called shareholder, executive, or employee, and all participants "co-build, co-create, co-govern, and share."
Some experts believe that the meta-universe economy is a new digital economic form that is deeply integrated into the real economy and the virtual economy. This means that the economic system in the metaverse needs to interact with the economic system of the real world. On this point, we may be able to find clues in the NFT, the native commodity of the metaverse.
If the value of virtual currency is completely determined by consensus, the value system of NFTs is therefore more complex. NFTs are native to the blockchain, with artistic attributes and certain scarcity, which leads to the value of NFTs often determined by artistry, scarcity and consensus. With the further implementation of metaverse applications, NFTs have also been given more added value - NFTs can be used as tickets to the next scene, and even the ownership of a real-world villa. The latter, in particular, connects NFTs with the real world, allowing the metaverse scene to interact with reality. This also brings the real-world economic value system into the digital world in a sense. Perhaps, the value of the metaverse digital world and the real world will be more frequent.
In recent years, the mainland has vigorously promoted the construction of the digital yuan. This also makes some NFT players wonder whether the implementation of the digital yuan means that the digital yuan may have some value resonance with the blockchain currency in the future? For this problem, Liu Wei, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Library, believes that although the digital yuan exists in the form of numbers, it is still a legal tender, at least, in the existing situation, it is difficult to see the possibility of mutual recognition and interoperability between the renminbi and the blockchain currency.
Guess 8
The game is just a "stepping stone" of the metaverse
In the world of the metacosm, we may need to rebuild the twin digital city and formulate corresponding laws and institutions, the construction of the metaverse is like a "Genesis", and the game is only the manual and experience device for people to understand the metaverse now.
In 2021, no matter which industry seems to want to get involved with the meta-universe, the game industry is the first. Many games have been dubbed metaversal games, such as Roblox, Decentraland, The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels, as well as NFT games that can be played and earned, and consumer-grade VR script kills. In some people's minds, the metaverse seems to be synonymous with games.
"Games are one of the important features of the metaverse, but they are by no means confined to the game dimension." Yuan Shuai, deputy secretary general of the Rural Revitalization and Construction Commission, said. The game has relatively good virtual reality capabilities, becoming the first frontier to enter the metaverse, it can be said that the metacosm began with the game, but from the current development trend, the game may not be the real track of the metaverse, and it will certainly not be the only track.
In China, the development of the metacosmide presents a unique landscape. In addition to Internet companies and capital busy seizing potential business opportunities, many cities have also entered the market and actively deployed new technologies, new industries and new patterns. Shanghai explicitly included the development of meta-universe technology in the "14th Five-Year Plan"; the work reports of Wuhan and Hefei municipal governments have successively "embraced" the meta-universe; the Zhangjiajie Meta-universe Research Center was listed...
The metaverse is not a specific technology, but a new concept closely related to the frontier technologies of the Internet such as virtual reality (VR), big data, artificial intelligence and the digital economy, which are also important foundations for the digital transformation of cities. With the government's attention and support for the metaverse, the social attributes of the metacosm continue to unfold.
Yao Chunbin, Digital Economy Department of Zhejiang Provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology, believes that meta-universe is a new highland for global innovation competition, and the development of meta-universe industry can not only empower high-quality development in various fields such as game entertainment, medical health, and industrial manufacturing, but also accelerate the construction of digital infrastructure such as 5G, data centers, communication base stations, and the development of a new generation of information technology such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cloud computing, big data, and blockchain.
An Guangyong, an expert of the Credit Management Committee of the All-Union Mergers and Acquisitions Association, said that games are excellent popular science scenarios for people to understand the metaverse, but if you want to achieve a real virtual world, the ability of game companies alone is far from enough. There is also a very important factor in the virtual world, the so-called "rules of the game", and this "rule of the game" is even more important than technology. If these "rules of the game" are mapped to the real world, they can be compared to institutions, laws, etc., which are important cornerstones for maintaining the development of the real world, and the main body that formulates the "rules of the game" is the government.
The metacosm is a digital twin of the real world, but far richer and more expansive than the real world. In the metaverse world, the game will end up being the tip of the iceberg. With the continuous deepening of the complementarity and integration of reality and virtual, the meta-universe will bring a new world window for the future that integrates life, art, technology and games, and in the long run, it can even integrate the allocation and utilization of resources in the whole society to achieve the optimal solution for resource utilization.
Conjecture 9
China's meta-universe legislation or the "Beijing effect"
Together with Metacostem, China has intensively introduced a series of laws and regulations on data security and governance, such as the Data Security Law, the Personal Information Protection Law, and the Provisions on the Recommendation and Management of Internet Information Service Algorithms. China has entered a period of intensive legislation in the data age, and these laws will inevitably have a fundamental impact on the governance of the metacosmity, and as a result, may have a "Beijing effect" that makes Chinese standards global standards.
Unlike Web 2.0, which emerged more than 20 years ago, the metacosm was incorporated into government development planning from the start. Shanghai, Wuhan, Hefei and other places have "embraced" the metacosm in economic work conferences and government work reports.
The government's positive statement is naturally good for the meta-universe industry, but it also means that the meta-universe will not have much "barbaric" development space.
Although a new term, the metacosm is not new. Zuckerberg said that the metacosm is an "embodied Internet," more generally, the holographic Internet. In a narrow sense, the metacosm is that human beings break through the limitations of the human body and space to achieve a real Internet journey in the virtual world, while in a broad sense, the current classical Internet has long had elements of the metacosmology.
Deng Jianguo, chair of the Department of Communication at Fudan University and professor, defines it: "The metacosm is a horizon that is always receding, and we can continue to get close to it, but we can never fully realize it." ”
Whether it is a new bottle of old wine, or the next generation of the Internet, it is undeniable that the technical base on which the metaverse depends has long appeared, nothing more than: big data, cloud computing, high-speed bandwidth, blockchain, artificial intelligence, VR/AR... In the web 2.0 era, the development of these technologies and applications led by Internet giants not only allows people to enjoy technological dividends, but also makes data and algorithms become tools to "control" users.
"The metaverse's changes to productivity are coming, so how to keep productivity from flooding or collapsing after the whistling may have to consider how to govern." Zhao Xing, a professor at the Department of Information Management of East China Normal University, believes that during the web2.0 period, many vertical fields are first barbaric development and then strong governance, resulting in low efficiency of the governance process, heavy sunk costs of industries after governance, and the waste of social resources and unstable factors caused by it cannot be underestimated.
"Next, China will enter a period of intensive legislation." Shi Yuhang, a lawyer at Huiye Law Firm, told reporters that after the promulgation and implementation of the Cybersecurity Law, the Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law, a series of supporting rules will be implemented one after another, and at the same time, the artificial intelligence governance system will gradually improve, the implementation of the "Provisions on the Recommendation and Management of Internet Information Service Algorithms" is just the beginning, and relevant laws, regulations and departmental rules will continue to be introduced.
The detailed rules of the three laws and regulations and an artificial intelligence governance system with a sound regulatory system and standardized algorithm ecology will have a substantial impact on the operation of the new world of the metacosm.
Zhao Xing also suggested that in the development of the metacosm and related industries, governance exploration and experiments should be carried out in a forward-looking manner. There must be both moral law regulations and regulatory technology regulations, and more importantly, educational regulations that are adapted to them.
The reason why at the beginning of the metaversm, it emphasized first standing and then breaking, behind which highlighted a hidden concern in the academic community: the "Brussels effect" reappeared.
The term Brussels effect was first coined in 2012 by Anu Bradford, a professor at Columbia Law School of Finnish origin, to refer primarily to the EU's ability to unilaterally regulate global markets through market forces. Anu Bradford mentioned in an article that the European Union, with a population of 516 million and a per capita GDP of $40,900, has a larger market than the United States and a richer consumer market than China. For many companies, the benefits of entering the EU market outweigh the costs they pay to adapt to the eu's strict standards, and the acceptance of EU standards by global companies will affect the markets of other countries as their globalization expands, forming de facto global standards.
As a result, EU regulations determine the default privacy settings for iPhones, the standards for the use of pesticides by Brazilian honey producers and cameroonian cocoa farmers, and the standards for installing equipment in Chinese dairy factories.
Specific to the technology sector, the most typical case is the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was introduced in 2018 as a personal data regulatory rule that has affected the formulation of personal privacy protection laws in most countries around the world since then.
"China's intensive legal governance of the data age or metacosm, on the one hand, avoids being passive in the future Internet era, and on the other hand, it is also a way to counter the 'Brussels effect', once our legislation is in front of the world, it can also be through multinational enterprises to voluntarily comply with Chinese laws, and thus manage the driving force of global business, relying on market forces to influence global standards." Shi Yuhang believes that if the legal norms of the metacosm are sorted out in advance, the "Beijing effect" will not appear.
Guess 10
Humans may not be able to withstand "digital immortality"
Will "digital immortality" be the ultimate future to which the metacosm is headed? Not necessarily. In the future, with the improvement of the digital virtual world, the Internet moves from two-dimensional plane to three-dimensional, "consciousness upload" becomes possible, and living in the metaverse as a "digital body" may become the life choice of some people - the development of the metaverse will provide a technical foundation and operating environment for digital immortality.
The "brain in a vat" is a hypothesis proposed by Hillary Putnam in his book Reason, Truth and History in 1981, in which he hypothesized that a person was cut off by evil scientists, placed in a nutrient solution, and connected nerve endings to a computer, by entering code information, so that it maintained all normal hallucinations. Then Putnam asked, "How do you guarantee that you are not in this predicament?" ”
If we translate the above hypothesis into brain-computer interfaces, virtual universes, do you ever wonder what people assume about the digital immortality of the metaverse? In fact, before human technology reached such a level, this dilemma has been demonstrated in countless sci-fi video works, such as the classic "The Matrix".
The American drama "Black Mirror" has shown another possibility of digital immortal technology serving human beings within a controllable range. The fourth episode of the third season, "San Junipero" (meaning "eternal life"), tells that after 2030, humans can go to the virtual city "San Junipero City", the living have a limited play time, while the dying people can decide whether to "always live", and the server room has become a cemetery for those who choose digital immortality.
But the story still raises the question: Is digital immortality a betrayal of love, human dignity? The problem falls on the shoulders of two people: one person's beloved partner and children have passed away and their lives are complete; the other person has been disabled since childhood and has rarely enjoyed happiness in life.
Obviously, if humans can't control the technology related to digital immortality, the world will slide towards the Matrix; but even if the technology is under control, human nature is still unable to escape torture.
Yuval Harari, author of A Brief History of the Future, once wrote his concern in the book: in the future society where artificial intelligence is highly developed, human beings may lose most of their jobs and indulge in the virtual world, but this runs counter to the liberal concept of "the sanctity and inviolability of human life and experience", but where is the "useless" human life experience sacred?
In the lecture on "Metaverse and Possible Worlds" from the perspective of philosophy, Cheng Guangyun, a professor at the Department of Philosophy of Capital Normal University, said that when our way of living is "formatted" and life is close to immortality, the meaning of human life will need to be re-measured.
Another version of digital immortality is coming to life. In the 2022 cross-Chinese New Year's Eve, "virtual digital people" have become the common highlight of many mainstream evenings. Jiangsu Satellite TV New Year's Eve concert invited the virtual "Teresa Teng" to sing the song with Zhou Shen. According to public reports, this virtual digital person was created by Digital Kingdom Group Co., Ltd. and integrated with the high-level rendering system "Mystique Live" under the blessing of machine learning.
Lifenaut launched a digital immortality service in 2010, where users need to back up their own "personality files". The 2008 American graphic image association Image Metrics presented the digital body of American actress Emily O'Brien equally vivid.
When the metacosm becomes another universe parallel to reality, and blends with reality, and is "reproduced", should the artificial intelligence virtual digital person with human emotions and appearance have "human rights"? This is also one of the themes in the movie "Runaway Player".
Science fiction movies keep flashing back to human ethics, and the obviously really serious question is: When the metaverse moves toward digital immortality, will the human species be able to withstand it?
Regarding the future of the metaverse and digital immortality, human beings may always be looking for answers.
Author/IT Times reporter Pan Shaoying Cui Pengzhi Fan Xinru Hao Junhui Jiang Liwen
Editor/Hao Junhui Kicked Sister
Typography/Ji Jiaying
Photo/Digital Renminbi Oriental IC
Source/IT Times public account vittimes