RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The metaverse—an immersive virtual world connecting countless digital spaces—moved a step closer to reality when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made it one of his key priorities a couple of weeks ago.
While some critics are skeptical about just how revolutionary the metaverse might prove, Dr. David Reid—Professor of AI and Spatial Computing at Liverpool Hope University—is adamant it’ll change all of our lives immeasurably, in the same way, the Internet did.
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Yet he also suggests that as well as providing significant benefits it also poses ‘terrifying dangers’.
And he is calling for urgent conversations to begin concerning how to protect metaverse users—before the technology becomes a reality in the next five to ten years.
Professor Reid of Hope’s Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering argues that “the metaverse has huge implications—it comes with fantastic advantages and terrifying dangers.”
“And we need a highly robust system in place to police the metaverse. We’re clearly in the very early stages, but we need to start talking about these problems now before we go down a route we can’t reverse away from. It’s crucial for the future,” he says to techxplore newspaper;
According to Professor Reid, the risks posed by the metaverse center on overall control and the gathering and protection of data.
Professor Reid says that “people have been talking about how the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will significantly change society and everything we do. And that’s true. But the metaverse is at least as big, if not bigger, than the rise of AI.”
“Because if you think about the way it works, the metaverse’s ultimate aim is not just virtual reality, or augmented reality, it’s mixed reality (MR). It’s blending the digital and the real world. Ultimately this blend may be so good, and so pervasive, that the virtual and the real become indistinguishable.”
With information from techxplore
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