Category: Software

I Do Not Want Mark’s Metaverse

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[WE WILL PUBLISH YOUR MOST THOUGHTFUL RESPONSES. Send to ronbaecker@gmail.com, 300-1000 words, include hyperlinks.] 

In a blog posted two days ago, I highlighted phrases and sentences from Mark Zuckerberg’s recent keynote speech sketching his vision of Meta’s intended metaverse. Here are thoughts triggered by his words: 

1. “ you’re going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine … “This isn’t about spending more time on screens … [include] communities whose perspectives have often been overlooked … consider everyone …” 

No, Mark, be honest. This is about getting more people into Meta, and about getting them to spend more time in the metaverse, because that’s the only way you can sustain the growth your shareholders expect, and the only way you can withstand the onslaught of firms like Tiktok that now have greater appeal to the next generation of users. 

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Social credit

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Nosedive was the first episode of the third season of the British science fiction television anthology Black Mirror.  In this episode, everyone has a mobile phone which, when pointed at another person, reveals his or her name and rating. Everyone has a rating, which ranges from 0 to 5. The following happens continually as you are walking down a street or along the corridor of a building. You give a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ to each person you pass, based on your instantaneous impression of that person and the nature of the encounter, no matter how trivial or quick the encounter is. A ‘thumps up’ raises that person’s rating a tiny bit; a ‘thumbs down’ lowers it. The other person concurrently rates you. Ratings determine one’s status in life, and the ability to get perks such as housing and travel. Therefore, people are on a never-ending, stressful, and soul-destroying quest to raise their online ratings for real-life rewards. Heroine Lacie desires a better apartment; she has a meltdown as she deals with unsurmountable pressure in the context of her childhood best friend’s wedding.

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Sales Support No More

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In a previous blog, I spoke about outsourcing, and the trade-offs for both companies and consumers, given the practise of many companies to outsource customer support globally. Here I shall speak about a related issue — the current tendency of most companies to skimp on or omit human customer support altogether. I shall illustrate this by describing three hours I spent yesterday and today trying to find a nearby store that had a USB-C to VGA converter for my Mac laptop.

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Unsafe software

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Most of the recent attention about risks arising from the use of digital technologies has focused on security, including concerns over data breaches and Russian election hacking; privacy, as revelations about misuse of Facebook data have accelerated in number; and AI, because we have become aware of life-or-death decisions that are increasingly being placed in the hands of bots and robots, as, for example, in their roles in autonomous vehicles and weapons.

Yet there are risks with other technology that we regard as mature and benevolent.  Consider, for example, software that assists pilots in guiding, stabilizing, and landing airplanes.  Most recently, these risks have become apparent in the case of the Boeing 737 Max.  There were two crashes with many fatalities, one in Indonesia in October 2018, the other in Ethiopia in early March 2019.

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