Will the metacosm be the future of humanity?

On January 11-14, 2022, the "Tencent Technology for Good Innovation Week" jointly sponsored by Tencent Research Institute and Tencent Sustainable Social Value Division was held. Professor Shi Zhan of the China Foreign Affairs University delivered a speech entitled "Metacosm and Future" at the conference.

He not only talked about the metaverse, but also discussed the ethics of algorithms, network violence and so on from different perspectives. For "Will the metacosm be the future of humanity?" This soul questioned, and Shi Zhan gave a positive answer in his speech. As for why he was so convinced, he would not understand until he finished reading the speech.

The following is the full text of Professor Shih Tzu's speech (some of the text has been slightly adjusted):

Hello everyone, I'm casting. Many people think that I am a difficult scholar to locate, I graduated from the History Department of Peking University with a doctorate in French history. In recent years, I have been paying attention to Chinese history, especially China's frontier corridors, and at the same time I have spent a lot of energy studying China's manufacturing industry, and I am still paying attention to the metacosm.

In fact, my attention to these issues is behind a larger, overall awareness of the problem.

My discussions are different from many common discussions, and today I want to talk to you about some of my thoughts on the metacosm. Last year, we heard too many stories about metaverses, and many tech companies began to move in this direction, such as Facebook changing its name to Meta and directly changing its name to "metaverse".

What exactly does the metacosm mean? Does something that seems so illusory mean the future, or is it just a bubble? That's what I want to talk to you about today.

Is the metacosm the future of humanity?

First, let me come to my basic conclusion about this question: the metacosm is, of course, the future of humanity. Why am I so determined? It seems to me that any industry or any technology that wants to be the future must be not only because of the imagination it contains, but more importantly, be able to solve the most pressing problems facing humanity.

What problems does the metaverse specifically solve? To answer this question, let's do a simple backtracking. In 2019, I went to Vietnam, the Pearl River Delta, and the Yangtze River Delta to do a lot of research, mainly to respond to the question of whether China's manufacturing industry can still be maintained under the Sino-US trade dispute.

During the survey, I accidentally noticed another fact. The factory owner told me that one robot can replace 4 people and can pay the full cost in 5 to 6 months. At that time, I was surprised that even such an industry began to replace people by machines, so in other industries with higher technical content and more complex, the substitution of machines for people will be more extensive and faster.

This has the potential to bring about a specific change in the structure of labour unprecedented in human history. If you make a rough typological analysis of the labor structure in human history, for example, in the era of agricultural economy, resources are relatively scarce, 95% of the population may work, but the production of relatively few things, so only 5% of people can consume as much as they want, and 95% of people can probably only basically survive.

In the era of the industrial economy, the production of goods expanded dramatically, and it was possible that 95% of the population was producing and 95% of the population was consuming. The question is, if a large number of jobs created in the era of industrial economy will be replaced by robots and AI, what will the future look like? Let's do a more exaggerated typological analysis, it is possible that the future digital age is 5% of people are producing, 95% of people are consuming, and it is a complete reversal with the era of agricultural economy.

This sounds like an interesting future, but the question is, 95% of the population does not want to produce, but does not have the opportunity to produce, because his jobs have been replaced by robots, if these 95% of people do not have the opportunity to produce, then they have no income, what does he use to spend? What does the 5% of those who reproduce produce without spending power produce? He has nothing to produce, and if he can't sell it, then the whole economic cycle may be broken.

But it is an irreversible fact that machines will replace people. So the new question arises, what should the 95% of the people who have been replaced do? And how should the economic cycle break due to the substitution process be solved? I came to the hypothesis that unless the consumption behavior of these 95% of people is itself equal to production, that is, consumption itself is production, this logic will work and the economic cycle will be able to function again.

Our consumption behavior on shopping platforms continues to generate data, and in the digital age, the most important means of production is data. So in the digital age, data is constantly generated, and the demand for data is getting bigger and bigger, the value is getting bigger and bigger, then the consumption behavior itself is equal to production, so the logic that we are talking about 5% of the population production and 95% of the people consuming should be further clarified into 5% of the people are carrying out traditional production, and the 95% of the consumers are actually carrying out another new form of production.

At this point, it is important that we need to find a scenario. In this scenario, people are efficient enough to produce data through the consumption process, the quantity produced is large enough, and the data produced is differentiated enough, because the more differentiated the data, the higher its value. So what scenario can meet these requirements, meet these conditions? One of the most likely scenarios we can imagine at the moment is the metaverse.

The Problem of Algorithmic Ethics and Cyberbullying

The next question to discuss is, who is doing the metaverse? At present, several large technology companies in the United States and China are working hard in the direction of the metacosm and have begun to try to build their own metacosm. But there are some problems that have the potential to have a regurgitation effect. In addition, the metaverse formed by these digital companies has absolutely no possibility of exhausting the metacosm.

First of all, why is there such a risk of anti-phagocytosis? At present, among the technology companies exploring the metacosm, the longest establishment is probably Microsoft, about forty or fifty years, like Facebook may be more than ten years.

Tech companies will use recommendation algorithms because what you give users to see best matches his interests, but at the same time the recommendation algorithm brings another problem, such as the information cocoon. The recommendation algorithm judges what is most interesting based on the user's browsing habits and consumption habits on the platform, and then continuously recommends the things that are most likely to be of interest to him. As a result, the user will have an inexplicable sense of comfort, and it is easy to be taken to a particularly comfortable comfort zone.

In the comfort zone, users feel as if they have seen a lot of content and harvested a lot of things, but in fact, these contents are relatively single in nutrition. He can only see what he is interested in, and he thinks that the whole world is like him, and he cannot see anything different from him, so that if for some reason, he suddenly sees something different, he will feel seriously offended for a moment. And this strong feeling of being offended is superimposed on another problem.

Before the advent of social media, our social relationships were social relationships that were heavy social relationships, circles of everyday social partners, and it was basically people around us in the sense of physical space. Our relationship with these people is multidimensional: on the one hand we are all colleagues, on the other hand we may all be fathers, on the other hand, we may all be fans, and we have many other overlapping identities. All kinds of overlapping identities make us look up and not look down, we always have to have all kinds of cooperation, interaction, so I will have a motivation to restrain myself from releasing emotions at will.

After the advent of social media, the relationship between people and people entered a light social relationship – most of the people I interact with on a daily basis online never had the opportunity to meet offline. We're in the same group, or I'm on the same platform, just because the same topic is coming together, and in this case, our relationship with each other is one-dimensional. As soon as you annoy me, I will immediately scold you. Anyway, I haven't had a chance to see you in my life, so what about scolding? And I was in the comfort zone, forced out of the comfort zone because of something inexplicable, I was already on fire, and then suddenly I saw people who were completely different from my point of view, even sharp opposites. In this case, the confrontation between him and me was a serious offense to me. Similarly, the other person also felt that I was offending him.

In this case, each other's verbal scolding, so that the discomfort of being forced out of the comfort zone, more or less released, and after the scolding, they were blacked out, and they never saw each other again, and there was no loss to me. In this era of light socialization, people do not have the motivation to restrain themselves from releasing their emotional impulses. In recent years, the phenomenon of emotional catharsis on the Internet has been extremely serious, and all kinds of extreme discourses have been quarrelsome on the Internet, and the atmosphere is very torn, which is the reason.

In this light social superposition information cocoon, under the very polarized Internet mood, these technology companies will also encounter all kinds of troubles, it will find that public relations is becoming more and more difficult, its public image may become worse and worse, and the public image may be extremely torn, contradictory, very bad, and may encounter a relatively poor business environment.

So one of the issues I've been thinking about lately is the need for a new algorithmic ethic, even for tech companies' own benefit. You can't just recommend something that interests the user, you have to set a parameter, such as recommending 100 pieces of content to the user, 40% of which are completely uninterested, and make the user realize that there are many other things in the world. Only when he can see things that he does not like every day, or even things that are completely contrary to his ideas, will he be forced to jump out of his comfort zone, and he will not be so easy to jump like thunder.

If the recommended algorithm does not make such parameter adjustments and does not evolve in this direction, it may have a very large negative effect. But the evolution of algorithmic ethics alone is certainly not enough, there needs to be something more, probably driven together by forces beyond digital technology. But it is very important for us to have a deep enough understanding and reflective discussion on the ethics of algorithms.

A possibility of a distributed digital world?

Speaking of another problem, the metaverse promoted by technology companies is far from the possibility of exhausting the metacosm. The reason is that the digital world constructed is still not a truly distributed digital world.

At the content production level, all users are doing a variety of content production, and there is no doubt that this is distributed. But in terms of management, it is still centralized, such as Facebook in 2020 pulled the Australian government account network cable, this "can pull the network cable" centralized management, still does not fully release all the possibilities of the digital world created by the Internet, that is to say, there is no exhaustion of its possibilities.

So where is the possibility of being distributed at the management level? I think blockchain technology has the potential to offer. Blockchain technology has allowed me to see the possibility of a completely new organizational mechanism unprecedented in human history, and I have simply expressed it in a concept that provides a third solution to the prisoner's dilemma.

In the prisoner's dilemma, it is easy for people to betray each other. But the reason why humans can stand at the top of the food chain and become the spirit of all things is precisely because humans can cooperate on a large scale. Since the prisoner's dilemma is inherently human, but man must cooperate, it means that the prisoner's dilemma itself needs to be solved.

The past history of mankind has provided two solutions to the prisoner's dilemma, one solution is through repeated games, and everyone considers the long-term gains and abandons the pursuit of short-term gains. For example, I will not betray, if I betray, I will not have the opportunity to make another deal with someone next time, and my long-term gains will be lost. Repeated games allow betrayal to be overcome and cooperation to unfold.

But repeated many games, this must be premised on the society of acquaintances. And the acquaintance society can only be a small-scale society, because in a large-scale society, you can't be familiar with each other at all. And modern society is a large-scale society, large-scale society is destined to be a stranger society, the opportunity to repeated multiple games is very small, most of the transactions are a hammer deal, then some things in human nature will soon emerge, people may be more inclined to betray each other, rather than cooperate.

Without cooperation, society collapses. And why hasn't the modern large-scale stranger society collapsed? It must be because people find the understanding that it is a strong third-party executor. Whoever dares to betray in the process of cooperation will come and punish you severely. In modern society, this third-party executor is the state, so for modern society, the state is an institution that cannot be circumvented in any way.

Blockchain offers the possibility of a third solution, which can achieve the effect of a society of acquaintances in a large-scale stranger society, an organizational mechanism that has never been seen in human history. Because of the existence of distributed bookkeeping technology, when I make a transaction on the chain with a stranger, the transaction will be published on the whole network on the chain, and after this account is recorded, if I cheat the person, anyone can check my past communication records to see if the person is credible. Once I've cheated, I'd rather work with anyone else, an effect that only occurs in a society of acquaintances. This new organizational mechanism also provides sufficient possibilities for the kind of distributed management mentioned earlier.

There is now a new organizational mechanism on the blockchain called dao (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), a fully distributed, self-made organization. In the past, a few people wanted to do something together, and they needed to register a company, but today, as long as a few people reach some kind of consensus, we can sign a smart contract and set it up on the blockchain.

It can be said that the metacosm is equivalent to constructing a digital world parallel to the traditional physical world, which is a completely different spatial logic. At the time of the Great Geographical Discovery, Spain took the lead in sailing on the sea, and there had to be some specific rules on the sea to govern, and there had to be laws, so Spain tried to translate the laws it was familiar with on land to the sea, to manage the sea, but the result was unsuccessful. Because the logic of the sea is completely different from the logic of the land, they are subject to two completely different legal logics. It was not until more than 100 years later that someone finally figured out the legal logic of the sea, and a new spatial order was opened, another order parallel to the land.

Parallelism does not mean that they do not interact with each other, but that the two interact very closely and complexly, but still have their own rules. Another brand new space parallel to the traditional space also requires a series of legal logic, ethical logic, political logic, and economic logic, but many things are not the same as the traditional space. We can't simply translate the rules of the traditional world into the digital world and expect it to work.

When we observe history or any order, we must remember that justice must be isomorphic with interests, and justice is the vitality of existence. Without profit, in the material sense, without the economic capacity to self-circulation, it cannot be sustained; and without justice, it cannot be supported by enough people, and there is no support for it, and this cannot be done. Therefore, only the isomorphism of justice and interest can finally unfold.

Then in the metaverse world, we also have to look for what the structure of justice and interest isomorphism might be, which is a question that must be considered today.

The meaning of the metacosm

We still have to continue to imagine and construct

I have a strong sense that in 20 years, the metacosm could form the most important part of our economy. The metaverse is constantly producing data, and people are doing all kinds of interactions, all of which are inseparable from physical hardware, and physical hardware constitutes a crucial interactive interface between the virtual world and the physical physical world offline.

Many people say that 2021 is the first year of the metaverse, so 2022 may be the second year of the metacosm, and by the time of the metacosm 20 years, what will the world look like? What does this mean for the future world order, the future economic order, the future human order?

Now, we have no definitive answer, but all kinds of wild imaginations. We should continue to think about what a better, better, more desirable world to live in, and how will this world come about? This requires us to imagine together, we need to construct together.

This article has been confirmed by the speaker that the content only represents the personal views of the guests and does not represent the position of Tencent Research Institute.