Meta fundamentally doesn't understand what the Metaverse is going to be.

They picture a virtual space where you, a human, will go to interact with other humans you know and love.

They are thinking MMO Metaverse.

What it's actually going to be is a place where you go mostly alone into a virtual space that's being actively curated for and in response to your interactions with it.

Most people aren't going to care about hanging out for hours in VR with Aunt Patty whose political rants they can barely tolerate on FB.

But being able to bring back dead pets or loved ones to interact with, or have simulacrums of celebrities who want to be your friends, or experiences that are being tailored on the fly specifically for you and using eye tracking and pulse to reengage your disinterest?

The Metaverse is going to be the place where AI comes alive in ways it will be prohibitively expensive to do in real life with robotics and manufacturing. And ultimately what that can offer will beat out all other media.

We may have limited invitation of loved ones into our curated spaces, but it's mostly going to be a solitary (and yet intimately social - AI therapists/friends are going to end up well beyond Eliza) place.

Meta is a company that for over a decade wasted the data gathering opportunity of finding out what people DON'T like to the point it's damaged society.

They're just not going to "get it" in order to succeed as long as Zuck is CEO, in spite of very talented engineers.

As someone who's never played Animal Crossing, this sounds a lot like my impressions of the game, only its more dynamic and customized to you.

>simulacrums of celebrities who want to be your friends, or experiences that are being tailored on the fly specifically for you

If Aunt Patty spends her time hanging out with and unloading her crappy opinions on AI Paula Deen instead of spewing them publicly on FB it could be for the better. Although it seems like it could only make people's filter bubbles much worse.

While custom-tailored games may be interesting, it seems like such a thing would be socially fragmenting and isolating. People need shared experiences to relate to each other. I'm not sure the world would be a better place if people gradually have fewer and fewer shared experiences.

It seems like we could have both; people can generate worlds by some combination of automation and manually tweaking parameters or mods, then they can share that world with their friends, and visit worlds created by their friends. Some people may have esoteric taste, but the internet is good for finding people who share your esoteric taste, for better and for worse.

That begs the question of how those friendships came to exist in the first place. I’m of the last generation that had a largely analog childhood, where friendships were the natural outcome of being bored and in the physical presence of others. If our technology reaches a place where people basically never have to be bored, nor do they have to be physically present with others to alleviate boredom, then I wonder on what basis anyone would ever develop deep relationships outside of family.

Seems like a pretty natural consequence of robotic companions as well. Why put up with all the complexity of a human relationship?

Unfortunately very few large companies truly operate to make the world a better place if their making money depends on the other direction.

I wonder if carving out individual experiences would prevent users from displaying their use of said entertainment to create social status. So I’m coming at it wondering if people value the status that their form of entertainment provides more than the experience itself. On the other hand, maybe we’ll continue to just observe the death of the “main stream” as we all slip into our own niche communities, each with its own complex system of status signifiers?

This stuff really leaves me pretty puzzled. I’m a culture guy, English grad. Art is not supposed to behave like this!!!

> But I think the top game of the 2030s will be something like AI Minecraft or AI Steam, where everything, including the very rules of the game, is generated from a structured data set optimized for the player.

Steam and Minecraft are both social by nature. People very often want to play with other people. It's like the joke I do all the time about AI feeds on Netflix: they recommand the same thing to everyone because the AI realized that everyone want to talk about the thing they saw more than they want to enjoy seeing the thing. Humans are socials creatures.

A Kalvin-ball AI would be a pretty interesting novelty but I think good games are usually focused on simple rulesets. Not sure an AI is really needed there. Maybe you just mean hyper tuning drop rates and and modifiers and such?

I'm sure AI will eventually have a huge impact on the art, narrative, and engineering of games, though, so maybe you're correct that will bleed into game design as well.

I think with eye/attention tracking it will be absolutely amazing what 3D content can be generated and optimized by AI/ML to maintain the interaction feedback loop. I'm not sure it will be a good thing (at least for those who didn't grow up with it)... much like FB doom scrolling is a problem for the over 50 set.

Wow! That's a crazy thought. Eye tracking tightly coupled (i.e., in a ~realtime feedback loop) with PG/ML/AI seems ... powerful, or scary, or both. Something along the lines of a computer controlled lucid dream, sprinkle in a handful of whatever the equivalent would be of blinking banner ads, product placements, or subliminal messages, etc. and my mind spirals out of control imagining how that would play out.

I can't but remember the setting in Otherland. Probably my favorite take on how a future with many connected virtual worlds could be like.