Facebook, taken from the unfavorable publicity against it, found an escape route by announcing the metaverse. The virtual and augmented reality, where people will communicate through their avatar in virtual workplaces, education and entertainment equally.
Metaverse, a product of artificial intelligence, promises a lot:
• people will be able to collaborate and move in space and time,
• reducing their need for physical movement and, of course, their carbon footprint,
• expanding the possibilities of learning through entertainment and holistic digital experience.
Metaverse will be the biggest escape from reality. More absorbent than the introduction of television, more addictive than drugs. This is not necessarily a bad thing at all. But here we are talking about the power of artificial intelligence, a potentially unbridled force that can escape anything that human ingenuity has ever used.
The introduction of a parallel universe (metaverse), which will merge work, entertainment and social relations of those who have the technological ability to resort to it, carries a negative aura, if you connect it with the current historical situation.
Last week, almost every country on the planet was represented in Glasgow at the UN Climate Conference. But China was absent. China, which is the largest producer of greenhouse gases, and the United States will find it extremely difficult to pass any agreement by President Joe Biden through its deeply dysfunctional Congress.
We are experiencing the culmination of the international interdependence imposed by global collective action. But this is hindered by the constant problem of countries that want the benefits of saving the planet without paying the price. So, too, with the global business giants, who, under pressure from governments, maintain tax havens that allow them to pay minimal taxes.
A big problem in advanced democracies is that their solid sections, which control most of the wealth, are cut off from the rest of society and from any sense of responsibility for it. They do not use social services and avoid being taxed.
Many rich people in the US forget that their success and wealth is due to the use of public goods-infrastructure, national security and public order and more generally the US global power from which they benefit. Also the technology giants forget that they built their own innovations, which were originally funded by public funds.
If the metaverse of the exit from reality ends up affecting the most privileged strata of the planet, it will widen the already huge inequality that exists in society as a whole and will leave many people behind, shattering the sense of public space around which democracies are formed.
