Metaverse Archives - NevilleHobson.com

The metaverse is not your destination

When Meta fka Facebook announced its change of purpose and name last year to become a self-described “social technology company,” it was widely seen as a signficant move in establishing the leading role in defining and enabling the metaverse as the next level up from current social networks, AR, VR, virtual worlds, the whole online shebang that is layered onto the current Internet. Which gets to my point in this article – considering the question, “What is the metaverse?” Some…

Keep an open mind about AI

The suspension of a Google engineer called Blake Lemoine, who claimed an AI (artificial intelligence) in the form of a computer chatbot he was working on had become sentient and was thinking and reasoning like a human being, has stimulated a lot of comment over the past few weeks following the story’s publication in the Washington Post. It formed the starting discussion that Shel Holtz and I had in this month’s long-form episode 263 of the For Immediate Release podcast,…

Pay attention to metaverse experiments

The metaverse isn’t what you think it is because we don’t know what it is, says CNET. It’s a good starting point to think about a topic that I believe is one of three elements – metaverse, Web 3 and Internet 2 – that make up a singular entity that’s evolving. One of the three names might become the singular descriptor for all three. Or it might be something else entirely. The term “the metaverse” is simplistic, CNET says, adding…

The Metaverse, Web 3 and Internet 2: the conversation (and hype) continues

Two things happened recently that reminded me of the saying “what goes around, comes around” but in a good way. Both things concern the metaverse, Web 3 and Internet 2. These are terms that everyone is talking about online and offline, yet no one seems to be talking about them from the same page. The most recent reminder came a few days ago in a tweet from Joe Garde in Dublin who noted the state of things back in 2008.…

Metaverse: how Facebook rebrand reflects a dangerous trend in growing power of tech monopolies

Facebook’s rebranding as Meta has been seen by many as the company’s latest attempt at corporate crisis control. The social media giant has been publicly attacked for creating an environment that fosters far-right extremism and violating individuals’ data privacy. Yet it also represents an attempt to rebrand the growing power of tech monopolies to shape all areas of our lives through social expansion. It points to a troubling new era of “metacapitalism” – or “capitalism on steroids” as Forbes called…