New Week #69
Meta draws the line on personal space in the metaverse. Oxfam calls for a windfall tax on the world's ten richest people. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This week, Meta’s decision to put a personal boundary around avatars in its virtual world raises some deep questions about life in the metaverse.
Also, autonomous vehicle startup Waabi offer a glimpse of our Simulated Future. And should 2022 be the year of the windfall tax?
Let’s go!
✋ Don’t stand so close to me
This week, a short but telling news snippet from the annals of the metaverse.
Meta say they’re introducing personal boundaries around human avatars in their Horizon VR world. The system places an invisible force field around each avatar, with a radius of two virtual feet. The result, says Meta, is that others are prevented from ‘invading your personal space’; though two people can still reach through their boundaries to high five (thank God).
The boundaries are switched on as default inside Horizon Worlds and the Horizon Venues live event space, and there’s currently no option to turn them off. In future, say Meta, users may be able to set their own boundaries.
Horizon Worlds opened to the US and Canadian public in December, after a long period of beta testing. During those tests at least one person complained of being virtually groped by another user. Meanwhile, last month saw a series of high-profile articles about Nina Jane Patel, co-founder of child-focused metaverse startup Kabuni, who reports being virtually groped and verbally abused by three male avatars inside Horizon Worlds.
⚡ NWSH Take: What’s behind this move? In the immediate term, it’s likely Meta were concerned that reports of virtual groping could become a PR nightmare. No touching; problem solved? // But look beyond the tactical horizon, and this is a fascinating glimpse of the way social conventions such as ‘personal space’ can be hard-coded into virtual worlds. Next question: which conventions, and who gets to decide? // Entering a social VR world for the first time is a disorienting experience: it’s a new form of space, with its own dynamics. In addition to importing and adapting some existing norms, we’re going to need entirely new norms and customs to deal with virtual life. What constitutes violence in the metaverse? What constitutes a consistent self over time, and what constitutes lying about your identity? Is it acceptable to move through a world invisibly? // Meanwhile, will we need new IRL laws, too? According to lawyers quoted on the subject, a virtual attack of the kind Patel describes is not a crime. Should this change? // Meta’s move on personal boundaries is a coherent first attempt at shutting down virtual behaviour that is clearly unacceptable. In the end, though, the new universe of metaverse norms will have to be devised by all of us.
🚴♂️ Pedal faster
A quick update on the launch of NWSH monthly essays, which I wrote about back in January.
I promised the first essay would hit your inboxes on Sunday 13 February. I’m sad to say that a mountain of work, and some family stuff, has prevented me from making the progress I wanted. And it turns out the first essay – all about virtual worlds, nihilism, and our relationship with the real – is going to be a beast. At this point it’s closer to a book than an essay.
I thought about delaying for a week or two. But it’s better to just eat the whole frog: I’m pushing it back by a month. The Worlds to Come will be with you on Sunday 13 March.
Thanks for understanding 🙏
👨💻 Meet the sims
Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi made headlines this week with its new invention: Waabi World.
It’s a simulated environment intended to solve a familiar problem: how do we teach AIs to drive, and do it safely?
Waabi World re-creates driving conditions on public roads by simulating data drawn from sensors that were placed on real cars. The result, says Waabi, is ‘the ultimate driving school for autonomous vehicles’: an environment that allows the Waabi AI to experience the trials of public driving and learn from its mistakes, without having to venture on to real roads and risk causing a crash.
Warning: this explainer video contains high levels of Marketing Energy and obligatory Philip Glass-esque wonderment piano:
⚡ NWSH Take: Waabi aren’t the only autonomous vehicle startup using a simulator to teach their AI; Waymo recently launched their own, called Simulation City. But it’s it’s the potential simulations have to transform our lives that I find most intriguing here. // The convergence of technologies that makes Waabi World possible – including ubiquitous sensors, VR, and machine learning – will allow for many new kinds of simulation, including those that could change our relationship with everyday objects and activities. Back in November I wrote about automaker Porsche’s new digital twin service: buy a car, and you’ll also get a simulated twin fuelled by data drawn from sensors on the real vehicle. That twin will alert you when maintenance is due or repairs are needed. A useful simulation. // A simulated car is one thing. But over time people will come to expect more: useful simulations of complex phenomena, including social interactions. See, for example, Tinder’s coming VR dating experience. No one thinks VR dating can replace the real thing. But will virtual dating become a kind of test drive; a simulation that helps people decide if they want to progress to IRL? A world of sims awaits. The challenge may be staying in touch with reality.
🌳 Blowin’ in the wind
Energy company BP this week announced profits of $12.8 billion for 2021, its highest for eight years.
The company is benefitting from surging gas and oil prices; CEO Bernard Looney says at current prices BP is ‘a cash machine’.
Meanwhile, Alphabet announced record sales of $75.3 billion for the final quarter of 2021, up 32% year-on-year. The number was driven primarily by Google’s advertising business, which prospered as lockdowns pushed more consumers to shop, and therefore search, online.
Here in the UK, BP’s huge profits and rising household fuel bills have ignited a conversation around a one-off windfall tax on the energy giants.
Huge profits, you say? Windfall tax, you say? I think you can see where I’m heading.
⚡ NWSH Take: The argument for a windfall tax on BP, Shell, et al is compelling. Leaders from those companies say such a tax would damage their plans to invest in green energy, and that they definitely won’t be using all that cash to give massive payouts to shareholders and award themselves huge bonuses. // While we ruminate on that, here’s another idea. Another set of companies have been, recently, in receipt of massive profits born of circumstances they had no hand in making. That is, Big Tech and online retailers. Around the world, lockdowns pushed millions away from physical businesses and forced them into the arms of online competitors. Here in the UK, online clothes retailer ASOS saw half-year profits saw by 253% in the six months to April 2021. So how about a one-off windfall tax on the vast Pandemic Profits earned by a subset of online giants? // Want to be even bolder? Oxfam points out that a 99% windfall tax on the Covid-19 wealth gains of the world’s ten richest humans could pay to vaccinate the entire world, plus change. Those ten men, nine of whom hail from Big Tech, saw their wealth increase by a combined $1.5 trillion during Covid, thanks to a stock market boom fuelled by quantitative easing. // None of these taxes will happen, because they require systems of global cooperation that don’t exist. Our focus, then? We should build those systems, so that next time something like this happens, the wind can blow.
🗓️ Also this week
💥 Scientists at the UK-based JET Laboratory say they’ve made a major breakthrough on nuclear fusion. The team broke the record for the amount of energy generated by a fusion reaction: their five-second reaction generated 59 megajoules, which is roughly enough to boil 60 kettles. The team say this test validates experimental methods that can be scaled up. Along with AI and genetic tech, nuclear fusion could help spur the Great Acceleration: a new golden age of IRL innovation.
🚲 Peloton laid off 2,800 staff, and the CEO resigned. As lockdowns end and gyms reopen, the company is struggling to maintain the level of demand it saw during the early days of the pandemic.
🐷 German researchers say they will breed genetically modified pigs to supply hearts for human transplants. Eckhard Wolf, a scientist at Ludwig-Maximilian University, says he hopes the animals will be ready for transplant trials by 2025. The world’s first pig-to-human heart transplant took place in the US last month.
👁 EU digital chief Margrethe Vestager says she has her eye on the metaverse. Vestager says the emergence of virtual worlds, and commerce within those worlds, will pose new challenges for regulators.
🐞 MIT researchers are building life-like robot insects that can hover in mid-air. They’ve created tiny, ‘muscle-like’ actuators that allow the robots to rapidly flap their wings.
👾 Australian scientists scanned billions of stars in our galaxy for signs of alien technology, and found none. They used the Murchison Widefield Array, a collection of 4,096 antennas in the Western Australian desert, to search for the technosignatures that would indicate intelligent life.
📱 The UK government says it may force Facebook and TikTok to ask users to confirm their age by entering credit card details. The move may form part of a package of measures intended to shield children from harmful online material.
🤖 Alphabet’s AI division, DeepMind, have released a new AI coding tool that they say can compete with human coders. AlphaCode was tested in an online competition, Codeforces, and ‘placed at about the level of the median competitor’. But this AI research scientist points out that many of the competitors were high school students, and says proper human-level coding by AIs ‘is still light years away’.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,926,121,633
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8027389746
💉 Global population vaccinated: 53.6%
🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 11% complete
📖 On this day: On 10 February 1996 the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Gary Kasparov at chess, becoming the first machine to win against a reigning world champion while playing under normal time controls.
Virtually There
Thanks for reading this week.
The quest to develop new social norms and laws for virtual worlds will see age-old human values collide with an emerging technology.
It’s a classic case of new world, same humans. This newsletter will keep watching, and thinking about what it means for our lives in the decades ahead.
There’s one thing you can do to further that mission: share!
If you found this week’s instalment valuable, why not forward this email to a friend, family member, or colleague? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why they should read. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.
In the meantime, I’ll get back to work on the essay I keep promising you. Be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.