By Casey Newton
Source: Theverge
Compilation: Carbon Chain Value, Wang Eryu
In late June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced an ambitious new plan to employees. Under the plan, the company's business scope will go far beyond the current series of social applications and related hardware projects. Facebook, he said, would create an all-encompassing, interconnected collection of sci-fi experiences—in short, a world called the Metaverse.
In a remote conversation with employees, he said that departments within the company focused on community, creators, commerce and virtual reality products will gradually participate in the realization of this vision. “I think the most interesting part will be how these different themes come together and come together into a larger idea,” Zuckerberg said. "The overall goal of all these initiatives is to make the Metaverse a reality."
The Metaverse is getting attention. Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche to refer to the fusion of physical reality, augmented reality, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Earlier this month, The New York Times profiled companies and products that increasingly incorporate elements of the Metaverse, including Epic Games' Fortnite, Roblox, and even The Assemblage. La! Animal Crossing: New Horizons. (Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been saying for months that he is eager to contribute to the Metaverse.)
「People see us today as a primarily social media company, and in the future we will effectively transform into a metaverse company.」
In January 2020, venture capitalist Matthew Ball wrote a seminal article identifying key features of the Metaverse. Including: it had to span the physical and virtual worlds; it had to include a complete economy; and it had to offer "unprecedented interoperability," meaning users would be able to move their avatars and items from one location in the Metaverse to another. A location, regardless of who operates each location. The key point is that the metaverse will not be operated by a single company, but will be operated by many different parties in a decentralized manner. In Zuckerberg's words, it will be an "internet that can be placed in it" (embodied Internet). internet).
Watching the video of Zuckerberg's talk, I'm not sure if his vision itself is bolder, or his timing. At a time when the U.S. government is trying to break up his company, he is announcing a more all-encompassing Facebook, one that connects social, work and entertainment. A package of bills before Congress could force the company to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, and could limit Facebook's ability to make future acquisitions or offer services related to its hardware products.
Even if tech regulation in the U.S. stops there (and, judging by past experience, it probably won't), the thriving Metaverse will raise all kinds of familiar and unfamiliar questions about how to govern virtual spaces, how to manage content within them, and how How does the presence of a person affect our shared sense of reality. We dare not even let go of the two-dimensional version of the social platform, and the difficulty of supervision of the three-dimensional version is bound to increase exponentially.
At the same time, Zuckerberg said that the metaverse will bring huge opportunities, including for creators and artists; for people who want to work and own housing in places far from urban centers; local people. He said that a metaverse that came to life was the next best thing to a "teleportation" device. Now, Facebook is trying to create just such a metaverse through the company's Oculus division, which makes the Quest headset.
「I don't think the overarching goal is to get people more involved with the Internet, I think it's to get people to participate more naturally.」
After watching the video of his talk, I had a conversation with Zuckerberg. (We didn’t have access to Metaverse Talk at press time, so we used Zoom.) We discussed his vision for this immersive internet, the associated governance challenges, and the gender imbalance in virtual reality today. I also asked President Biden about it as his vehement criticism of Facebook’s failure to remove anti-vaccine content hit the news.
secondary title
The following is the original text of the conversation:
Casey Newton：Mark Zuckerberg, welcome to The Vergecast.
Zuckerberg:Thanks Kathy, it's a pleasure to be here. We have a lot to talk about.
Casey Newton：As always, there is a lot to discuss with you. The White House is asking Facebook to do more to remove misinformation about vaccines, I know a lot of people are concerned, I'll ask about that later. But first, I want to start with a conversation you had inside Facebook a few weeks ago, and I recently had a chance to watch that video. You tell employees that your vision for the future of Facebook is not the two-dimensional version we use today, but something called the Metaverse. What is the Metaverse, and what parts of it does Facebook plan to build?？
Zuckerberg:This topic is huge. The Metaverse is a vision that spans many companies and encompasses entire industries. You can regard it as the successor of the mobile Internet. This is certainly not something that one company can build, but a large part of our energy in the next stage will be directed to this field, and contribute to the construction of the Metaverse by collaborating with many companies, creators and developers. You can think of the Metaverse as an internet that you can live in, where you can not only view all kinds of content, but also be a part of it. You can interact smoothly with others as if you were somewhere else. You can get all kinds of experiences that are difficult to achieve through two-dimensional applications or web pages, such as dancing, or different fitness methods.
I think a lot of people think of the Metaverse and only think of VR, and I also think VR is going to be a big part of the Metaverse. We are also actively investing in this part, because virtual reality technology provides the clearest form of presence. But the Metaverse is more than virtual reality. It will be accessible across all different computing platforms; VR, AR, but also PC, mobile and consoles. Having said that, there are also a lot of people who think that the Metaverse is mostly about games. Entertainment is obviously a big part, but I don't think it's just about games. I think it's going to be a persistent and synchronous environment where we can all come together, and the Metaverse will probably be sort of a hybrid of today's social platforms, but at the same time, it's going to be an environment where people can be in it.
It can be 3D, but it doesn't have to be. You might be able to jump into an experience through your phone, like a 3D concert or something, and you can get some 2D elements or 3D elements. I'd love to go into more detail about a bunch of use cases, but overall I think the Metaverse is going to be a big part of the next phase of the tech industry, and we're very excited about it.
It just hits on a lot of the big topics we're exploring. Such as communities and creators, such as digital commerce, such as building next-generation computing platforms, including virtual reality and augmented reality, to provide people with a real sense of presence. I think that the various plans that Facebook is promoting today are basically laying the foundation for the vision of the metaverse.
If all goes well, I hope that in the next five years or so, we will enter the next chapter of our company, which is seen today as a primarily social media company, by which time we will effectively transition into a metaverse company. And everything we do today across our apps contributes directly to that vision (building communities and cultivating creators). So there are a lot of things that can be drilled into, and I'm curious which part you want to explore. This is something I have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about and doing. I think it's going to be a huge part of the next phase of work for the industry as a whole.
Casey Newton: This sounds like a pretty distant vision of the future, and there may be parts that are already discernible or coming together. Overall, it feels like an all-encompassing version of the internet. You say to employees, “From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed, we can jump into the metaverse and do pretty much anything imaginable.” Probably some of us already use the Internet in this way.
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: What excites me is helping people provide or experience a much more real sense of presence, allowing people to interact with people they care about, people they work with, places they want to go. Indeed, today's mobile Internet has been able to meet the various needs of many people from waking up to going to bed. There are many mornings where I reach for my phone before I even put on my glasses, just to glance at a message I received in the middle of the night and make sure there's nothing I need to jump up and deal with right away. So I don't think the primary purpose of the metaverse is to get people more involved with the internet. I think it's about getting people to participate in the Internet more naturally.
「We all basically process our lives and communicate through these little, glowing rectangles. I don't think this is the best way for humans to interact.」
Today, I'll think about the computing platforms we already have. Like these phones, they're relatively small. We spend a lot of time basically processing our lives and communicating through these small, glowing rectangular devices. I don't think this is the best way for humans to interact. A lot of the meetings we have today are staring at faces on a screen. That's not how we go about things either. We are used to being with people, we are used to having a sense of space, for example, if you sit on my right, it means that I sit on your left, and we will share a common sense of space. When you speak, the voice comes from my right. And not all from the screen in front of me.
I've had so many work meetings like this over the past year that it's sometimes hard to remember who said what in which meeting because they all look the same and are all intertwined in memory. I think part of the reason is that we lack this sense of spatial presence. What virtual reality and augmented reality can do, and what the wider metaverse can help people experience, is this sense of presence, which I think makes the way we interact more natural because it's how we're wired to interact . This will also make us more comfortable, more immersive, and have a richer interactive experience. In the future, we don’t have to talk on the phone, you can be a hologram and sit on my sofa, or I can be a hologram and sit on your sofa, and we will feel like we are in the same room, even if we are thousands of miles apart. I think it's going to be very powerful.
「I've been thinking about some of these things since I first started programming in middle school」
I've been thinking about some of these things since I first started programming in middle school. I remember in math class, I would pull out my notebook and write down various codes and ideas that I could program when I got home. Some of it I was able to do at the time, and some of it I have never been able to do, and one of them is like a kind of immersive Internet, where you can be in the environment and be transported to different places in an instant, to meet friends.
I probably didn't have enough mathematical knowledge to do it at the time, and the technology was still decades away from actually being able to do it in a proper way, and probably for these reasons, I didn't work hard in this direction at first, to Build a different social experience. But it's always been something that excites me. Long before I started Facebook, I thought it would be the magic weapon of social interaction. Now, the next generation of platforms will actually be able to do that, and I'm really excited about that.
「People aren't born to use grids or apps for things」
One of the reasons we're investing so much in augmented reality and virtual reality is that the smartphone was born around the same time as Facebook, and we didn't play much of a role in the development of those platforms, so from my perspective, The way they were developed was not very natural. People aren't born with grids or apps for things. If we can feel we are in the same space as others, our interactions will be much more natural. We orient ourselves and think about the world through other people, through our interactions with them, and what we do to them. If we can help build the next generation of computing platforms and experiences in a more natural way that allows us to feel more physically present with other people, I think that will be a very positive thing.
Zuckerberg？
Zuckerberg: Well, I would like to respond to your question that people may not be used to wearing VR devices to work all day. This technology obviously needs one evolution, or multiple evolutions, before it can become people's main way of working. But I think we'll have that day before the end of the decade. Today's VR devices are still a bit clunky and less than ideal. We still need to make a lot of improvements, including being able to express yourself, providing higher resolution, reading text better, and so on. But we're making progress, and each new version is a little bit better than the previous one. In terms of how people are using it, the Quest 2 has been pretty popular so far. I was all amazed.
We were going to focus primarily on gaming apps, and we thought a lot of social interaction or work-related things would be a while away, but some of the most popular experiences that people have on Quest 2, some of the experiences that people spend the most time on, have been social. There are also activities related to work and productivity. There are even some that I have never thought about, such as fitness. With some apps, like Supernatural and FitXR, it’s kind of like Peloton, except instead of a spinning bike or a treadmill, you’re using a VR headset, and you basically have a class, a boxing class or a dance class, all in VR, and it’s a lot of fun. If you haven't tried it, you might as well try it, many people like it very much.
Now going back to what you said about work, again, I don't think it's going to be entirely limited to VR, it's going to include AR as well. As for why there are VR devices like Quest 2 now, and AR glasses will not be available for a few years, it is because people are less mindful of wearing VR devices in their own homes. But if you're going out wearing AR glasses all day, it has to look like regular glasses. To do this, you would have to cram almost all the components of a device that would have been considered a supercomputer 10 years ago into a frame about 5 millimeters thick, including computer chips, network chips and holographic waveguides, as well as the components used to perceive and map the world. The components, as well as the battery and speakers, all have to be packed into the glasses, which is a daunting challenge.
「We tend to like to applaud big things, don't we?」
I would go so far as to say that this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest technological challenges our industry will face in the next decade. We tend to like to applaud big things, don't we? But I think miniaturization is the bigger challenge, like fitting a supercomputer into a pair of glasses. But once we have these devices, with AR glasses, with VR headsets, I think it will lead to a lot of very interesting use cases.
For example, you can build the perfect workstation with a flick of your finger. No matter where you are, you can walk into Starbucks, sit down with a cup of coffee, wave your hand, and instantly have any number of monitors, a full set of workstations that you can resize at will, or carry over the setup you have at home. No matter where you go, you can take it with you.
If you have a problem to solve and someone you need to talk to, it might not be intuitive to just make a phone call, and you can just teleport them over and give them all the background on the problem. They can see your five screens, or whatever, can see your documents, all your code windows, or the 3D model you're working on. They can stand next to you and interact with you, and when the problem is solved, in the blink of an eye, they can be back where they came from.
I think this will help improve focus time and personal productivity, giving us the ideal work environment we call the "infinite office". We've already built a version of this for our VR headset, and it's been improving rapidly. This is very helpful for multitasking, and you can set up a complete work environment anywhere. Numerous studies have shown that people are more productive when they juggle multiple interrelated tasks at once. For example, when programming, opening multiple windows at the same time instead of single-tasking processing will make a big difference. I think this aspect will be helpful.
Another use that I think is exciting is for meetings, and I've done a lot of them in VR. While today's avatars aren't realistic enough, in many ways they already feel more real than a Zoom video call because of a shared sense of space. If someone is sitting to your right, sit to their left. If you form a circle, everyone can remember their order. Audio will also have a sense of space. There could be a screen at one end of the table, and if someone doesn't have access to VR or AR, they can participate through that screen. You can play slideshows, and everyone can share any number of documents. It will not happen that because there is only one screen, only one document can be shared at a time. In VR, people can bring up as many screens as they want, allowing them to share any number of background documents in a meeting. You can pull out a whiteboard and have people draw on it. Anyway, pretty crazy.
And it's clearly just the beginning. So I think the prospect of people being able to customize their office space and make it like their own physical office, a digital continuation, is going to be very exciting. I think it's pretty cool.
But I think you're asking more than that, and I do think there's going to be a whole new class of jobs when you're doing those jobs in the metaverse, in addition to the kind of jobs that we typically do in offices today. For example, we need to design places where people meet, which leads to a huge creative economy. We need individual creators to design experiences and places. Artists are required to do all kinds of work, like doing a comedy show...our team at Horizon did a comedy show the other day, and it was kind of fun, it felt like being with other people, which was better than having everyone staring at a screen, or Watching alone is more engaging and more energetic.
「you can transfer instantly」
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: It's not me acting, fortunately not. It's the Horizon development team, and Horizon is a big part of what we do in this area, and they're going to try these kind of cool things, to build use cases, to test development progress. I find it very interesting. You can also do concerts. You can let all kinds of creators create all kinds of experiences. It can be an individual creator or a team of dozens of people to create AAA games. You can participate in all these experiences through your avatar. You can achieve instant transfer. You can take your digital skin and digital items with you wherever you go. So I think there will be a whole set of economies around the metaverse.
I want to share a broader point of view here. One of the lessons I've learned running Facebook over the past five years is that I used to think our job was to build products that people would love to use. But now I think we have to take a more holistic view. It’s not enough to just build a product that people love. We have to create economic opportunity that has a broad positive impact on society, and at the same time, on a social level, everyone can participate, so be inclusive. We are now designing our work in this field from the ground up based on these principles. We're not just building a product, we need an ecosystem where the creators, developers who work with us can not only make a living, but employ a lot of people.
I hope eventually there will be millions and millions of people involved, creating all kinds of content, whether it's experiences, spaces, virtual goods, virtual skins, or helping curate and introduce people into spaces and keep them safe. I think it's going to be a huge economy that we need, frankly, to have. We need a tide that lifts many boats, not just one of our products.
「Overall, I'm very proud of our performance and the net impact we've had」
Zuckerberg？
Zuckerberg: Thanks for bringing up the full context, I do think the president gave more context after his initial comment. I think our basic role here is positive, and there are multiple issues involved here. One of them is that we need to help promote authoritative information, and we do. We have helped, I think during the epidemic, more than 2 billion people around the world have learned authoritative information about the new crown epidemic through the pinned information on Facebook and Instagram. We've helped millions of people, including in the United States, get vaccinated using our vaccine finder. So I'm very confident that we've been a positive force from an analytical and net impact standpoint.
In fact, over the past few months, there has been a significant uptick in vaccine acceptance among people using our products. While some groups are growing concerned, it's not a dominant trend on Facebook. And it also makes sense to look at it from a broader perspective, Facebook and Instagram and all of these tools are widely used in almost every country. If one country falls short of its vaccination goals while other countries using the same social media tools do well, social media platforms are probably not to blame.
Having said that, I do think we have an important role to play and we have deployed a range of countermeasures. We remove content that may cause imminent harm, our fact-checkers flag misinformation, and we limit the spread of such information, but it does not cause imminent harm. So we treat those two types of information differently, and I think that's the right thing to do. Overall, we put in a lot of effort. Since the 2016 election, our company has come a long way in this regard. It's hard to say that anyone was fully prepared for a pandemic, but I think we built a lot of systems that really work. Overall, I'm very proud of our performance and the net impact we've had.
But maintaining the integrity of those communities, whether it's against misinformation on Facebook or against other types of harm -- we track about 20 different kinds of harm, from terrorism to child exploitation to incitement to violence, there's a lot of different types s damage. We need to build specific systems to deal with them. Right now, we should have more than 1,000 people working on building the corresponding artificial intelligence and technology systems. About 30,000 to 35,000 people review content. The systems we build will naturally apply to all our future work.
In fact, the integrity of a system is a bit like fighting crime in a city. No one expects you to wipe out the city's crime problem completely. The same is true of the goal of the police. Does any crime in the city mean that the police are negligent? This is unreasonable. I think the general expectation is that a system of integrity, or the police, can help deter bad things when they happen, or catch criminals, and keep the bad things to a minimum, let the mainstream trend in a positive direction, and deal with other problems at the same time . We will do the same.
With the Metaverse, I think there are different types of integrity issues. One big concern, for example, is that there is a very significant gender bias, at least in virtual reality, where there are far more men than women. In some cases, this can lead to harassment. I think one of the reasons why some of our experiences are better than some other products like games is that we provide easier tools to stop harassment, we can detect when there may be harassment, and maintain A safe and inclusive space where everyone who wants to participate can participate.
Because it’s impossible to have a healthy and vibrant community if it’s so skewed toward one gender or the other that a large group of people don’t feel safe. So these aspects are crucial. This is key not only to having a good social impact, but also to building great products. This is something we've focused on from the very beginning.
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: Obviously there will be new challenges. Even within our existing 2D social media applications, there are new challenges. We can never do it once and for all. We started trying to tackle a lot of problems in a much bigger way around 2015 or so until the 2016 election, and we've ramped up our investment since then, and we know that if we're going to build AI systems that can proactively identify harmful content , which cannot be built in six months. We created a 3-4 year roadmap to do all the work needed to get there.
"I think the mix of problems we're seeing may be different, and I'm sure there will be new problems coming up"
Sometimes it can be difficult to move forward with long-term projects because you are eager to see results, but it will take years to actually implement them. However, we've done a lot of AI work, we've hired a lot of content moderators, and I think it's a little easier now to add new use cases that will fit into the systems we've built for different hazards. That's something we've been thinking about since the beginning. For example the issue of gender bias that I just mentioned, some women feel harassed in the space, which can be a bigger problem in games and in VR. Similar situations exist for other platforms, of course. But I think the mix of issues we're seeing may be different, and I'm sure there will be new ones. This is something that we need to keep paying attention to.
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: I think this is one of the central issues of our time. I think there are clear pros and cons to this. On the positive side, if you go back 20 or 30 years ago, a lot of people's personal opportunities and experiences depended on what opportunities and experiences were around them, didn't they?
I played Little League as a kid, not because I was born to play baseball, but because there were only a few activities available in the area. We also have a kid there who is also interested in computers, so I was lucky. This is my world. If I want to call and keep in touch with friends I met at summer camp or something, I have to spend more because long distance calls are much more expensive than talking to someone nearby.
I think one of the most amazing things now (and will become even more amazing in the future) is that the removal of distance barriers creates more opportunities for people. That way kids growing up today aren't stuck in the little leagues, but can find like-minded people, explore programming, surfing, or whatever interests them, and have a vibrant community. I think it's very attractive and very positive. I think it's also very important for economic opportunity. One of the big problems in today's society is inequality. Raj Chetty has done very interesting research on this, he should be at Harvard by now. He found that the zip code where we were born and raised is highly correlated with our future mobility and income levels. I guess it goes against the notion that people deserve equal opportunities in this country.
But in a more telecommuting world, I don't know how The Verge does it, but at Facebook, we understood early on that the pandemic wasn't going away anytime soon, and people might not be able to go to work for a while, so I'm very happy Tell the team early on, “Stop hiring people who are close to the company, they won’t be there anyway. Telecommuting is going to be a big part of the future. I think in 5-10 years, about half of all companies will be teleworking Office. We’re going to be hiring more people in different places now, and I think that’s going to create more opportunities.” But then there’s another problem, that is, when everyone goes back to work, there’s going to be a corporate culture in the hybrid office model "Compared with colleagues who work on-site and get along day and night, can colleagues who work remotely really have exactly the same opportunities?"
「In order to build a cohesive society, you need a shared base of values and an understanding of the world and the problems we all face together.」
I think with technology like holograms from augmented reality and virtual reality, the answer will be more positive. Now, people can only appear on flat screens, participate in video conferences or make phone calls, and don't see each other very often. As the technology to provide a sense of presence gets better, we will be more able to live where we like and be part of the community you want to be a part of. I think it will create more opportunities for people. Of course, you also need to manage the corresponding drawbacks. In order to build a cohesive society, you need a shared base of values and an understanding of the world and the problems we all face together.
We all probably wonder how we do this in a world where people have so much freedom and opportunity to explore their own interests and access different opportunities, and in a world where physical presence is less and less required. What about building a sense of cohesion and consensus? What's more, we may go further and further in that direction. But I think we should be able to solve this problem, or at least find a balance between freedom and cohesion. Overall, I think this is something to celebrate, and I believe it will create more opportunities for people everywhere, not just in the United States, but around the world.
Casey Newton: How do you see governance issues in the Metaverse? If it is a consortium of different companies, who will be in charge of formulating specific policies?
Zuckerberg:I think there are many layers to this question. A good vision is that the metaverse will be built by different companies, and interoperability and portability will be established. You have your avatars and digital goods, and you want to be able to move them anywhere, and you don't want to be locked into one company's platform. In our case, we're building Quest headsets for VR, and we're working on AR glasses. But the software we build, the worlds we create for people to work in or meet up with friends and so on, these things will be across all platforms. Other companies are also building VR or AR platforms, and our software will be everywhere, just like Facebook and Instagram are today.
So I think part of the job is that the companies that are involved are ideally able to work together across borders rather than being tied to a specific platform. But just as the W3C helped create standards around a set of important internet protocols and ways to build the web, I think the field needs standards to define the way developers and creators build experiences so people can bring their Avatars, digital goods, and their friends, move seamlessly between all the different experiences.
We've already started doing some of these things. We have an XR consortium with Microsoft and a few other companies that are interested in doing this. But I think this will be one of the biggest problems, the vision of each company is unlikely to be completely aligned. Some companies may be more closed in their thinking, but at least I think that for the metaverse to work well, it needs to be portable and interoperable.
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: Exactly. I think it fits with our mission and worldview. Our business is basically not serving a few people and charging a huge premium, that's not our business model. We want to serve as many people as possible and help people connect. Since our main task is to build social systems, we want everyone to be a part of the same system. So we're going to try to make sure it's affordable, make sure it's coherent, make sure they can run everywhere, they can talk to each other across different platforms. As for how to do this, there are many big questions involved. Including privacy issues, intellectual property protection issues and so on.
By the way, I think Matthew Ball's article is great, he also wrote a 9-part series on different aspects of the metaverse, it is worth reading for anyone who wants to understand the metaverse. But I would say that sometimes people can be a little bit idealistic and think that everything is going to go a certain way. The vision that Matthew presents, such as the vision of extreme interoperability, is also the vision that I hope to achieve. But from the history of modern computing, different companies will always strive in different directions. So in my opinion, there must be some companies trying to build very good closed platforms, and other companies trying to build more open and interoperable platforms.
I don't even think it's a win or lose issue, I mean, is open source better than closed source? Various options will exist at different times, some of which will find more expression in the technology industry, but our own goal is to help realize a more open and interoperable vision. But against this goal, there are also many questions about how it will work. Does interoperability depend on decentralization, like the current design of various encryption fields, and not rely on a centralized mechanism? Is it not only to achieve interoperability, but also to eliminate a control center? Or can interoperability rely on some body to set standards so that experiences can work together? I think there will be multiple ways to coexist in this regard. This will be one of the big questions about how the metaverse evolves.
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: I think there should absolutely be public spaces. I think this is very important for creating healthy communities and healthy spaces. And this kind of space will also be eclectic, there will be government-built, government-managed, and non-profit organizations will participate. Although such organizations are private, they will serve the public interest without setting a profit-making goal. Serve. Wikipedia, for example, is actually more of a public good, but it's run by a nonprofit, not a government.
I have been thinking about one thing: today there are a series of major technological issues, if placed 50 years ago, it seems that the government (here only talking about the situation in the United States) should invest a large amount of money to complete the corresponding construction. But that doesn't seem to be the case now, there are many large tech companies or corporate giants who are investing in building such infrastructure. Maybe this is the right way to move forward. In terms of 5G deployment, for example, it's hard for startups to actually fund infrastructure that costs tens of billions of dollars, so I think it's fine to have Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile do it.
But there are many problems with this tech giant model, such as how to define the direction of augmented reality and virtual reality in the overall metaverse vision. I think this will be a problem that requires tens of billions of dollars to study, but this research has the potential to unlock hundreds of billions of dollars or more in value. Some problems, such as self-driving, seem to be very close to being fully artificial intelligence (AI-complete), meaning that many different levels of artificial intelligence problems must be solved to fully realize autonomous driving, so huge capital investment is required. The same goes for some aspects of space exploration. Disease research still has a lot of government involvement.
China has invested a lot of money in these areas, and I am also curious to see what the results of that model will bring. But in the absence of that link, I also do think that public space is a healthy part of a community. We will have creators and developers driven by various motives. Today, on the mobile Internet and on the Internet, many people are already committed to various public welfare work, even without direct government funding. I think there will certainly be a lot of similar work in this field as well.
But yes, I do think there is a long-term problem like this, and as a society, we need to invest a lot of money in getting the most talented technical people to solve these futuristic problems and lead and innovate in these fields. I think there may be more balance in the space, some investment should come from the government, and there will be a lot of gaps filled by startups, open source communities, and the creator economy.
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: I appreciate this reference in Ready Player One.
「A single company should not have its own metaverse」
However, to be nitpicking about the issue, I don't think in the future people will refer to work done by a single company as a metaverse. Hopefully one day we can collectively build a more interoperable system where you can move between platforms, and at that point, it should all be called the Metaverse, and no single company should have its own Metaverse. Hopefully, in the future, asking a company if it’s building a metaverse is as absurd as asking a company if it’s building its own internet today. This is just an analogy, to give everyone a sense of the future of this concept... I may be digressing.
"People will see us primarily as a metaverse company rather than a mobile internet company"
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: This is an exciting field that will become a big focus in the future. I think it will become an important part of the next stage of Internet development after the mobile Internet. This will also be the next important chapter of our company, and we will greatly increase our investment in this area. We've done a lot over the last 17 years building apps that help people connect, primarily on mobile phones. I think if all goes well, maybe five years from now, maybe seven years from now, people will see us primarily as a metaverse company building new experiences rather than a mobile internet company. And I think the scope of these new experiences will expand dramatically.
People will be able to realize the feeling of being in the same space in different places, people will be able to do various jobs, there will be new forms of work, and new forms of entertainment. Whether it's gaming, like the incredibly complex treasure hunt you mentioned, or the fitness or acting that's becoming more and more enjoyable, or getting together to watch a comedy show like we just talked about. I think there's going to be endless use cases for this, and we have the potential to create massive economic opportunity in the process, empowering millions of people around the world to do creative work that they actually love, helping build experiences, creating virtual objects and art, focusing on All kinds of things that are more inspiring than the work they might do today. I very much look forward to playing a part in building the next chapter of the Internet. And I'm sure, Kathy, we're going to have a lot of conversations about that over the next few years.
Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg: It is a pleasure to be a guest. Okay, let's talk later.
Original link: https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview
