20220301 Why Build A Metaverse - orbitalfoundation/wiki GitHub Wiki

As developers we have to make choices about what we do, what we choose to work on - why work on one thing versus another? Which result will have the most impact? Even if we know what we want to do, what is the best way to achieve the outcome we want? Here are a few thoughts.

People

As individual humans we are an extension of nature - our needs, passions, senses and abilities are deeply connected to and resonant with this physical world. Wittgenstein talks about an idea of how we lean heavily on the world, that we are "embodied" in the world. There is no "inner version of us" that drives our exterior bodies like somebody driving a Caterpillar Excavator. We sometimes forget this; but effectively we are nature seeing itself.

But then again we aren't exactly individuals. There is something of an illusion of self. In some senses an individual isn't 'human' in the same way that a group is. An individual exhibits many traits; but if you put an individual by themselves on an empty planet they're not going to achieve many of the goals that we value in being human. We in fact often social creatures that work together to solve hard problems. If you sample a persons day to day activity they are usually working in community on a problem larger than themselves. Some of what we think has meaning, and a lot of our physical ability is derived from group activity, as a highly social, almost hive, species.

We live straddling multiple somewhat disjoint worlds. Often our mental gaze is directed at the physical world that we are embodied within, that is an extension of ourselves. In this world we are have a strong sense of spatial awareness, and significant capabilities to communicate using facial expressions, gestures, signage. Our minds have even reason about abstract problems using spatial and physical metaphors. We spend time outdoors, connected to that world, both in nature and even in our cities. But we also increasingly live in an online world, of conversations at a distance, abstract and not entirely spatial concepts. These two worlds do overlap but with some tension. Our real world is invisibly decorated with virtual post-it notes, information about local co2 emissions or legal boundaries, or routing for plumbing or electrical lines. We're aware of where our friends are, we have a subtle understanding of the health of our gardens and even larger neighborhoods. This tension is as of yet somewhat unreconciled.

Tools

*Today we use a variety of tools to communicate, to share insights, ideas, art - both for others and for our future selves. There is a long history of communication tools - from language, to writing, to the kinds of letter exchanges that Humboldt and others engaged in.

Like all things, we become our tools, we are a hybrid of human and machine. Our tools at their best operate at a "Human Scale" that is a function of our embodiment: that match our physical senses, velocity, reasoning ability even prosocial traits. As [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1R2jH4PQEo](Alan Kay) mentions "When we change the nature of communication we change what it means to be human". These are similar sentiments to Douglas Engelbart and Amber Case.

Computing specifically has turned us into a planetary scale entity. We see the planet in a way we didn't entirely appreciate. Satellite remote sensing for example helps us see better. We can also communicate not just with words, images or animations, but with procedural models and interactive thought experiments that allow participants to explore an idea in depth, in many variations. It is in fact sharing interactive experiences that is novel today.

Effectively there is a class of tools that are groupware or social tooling. As a group organism, using our tools, we are able to perceive and start to deal with Hyper Objects - problems at a vastly larger scale, on geological time frames, that individual humans struggle to even recognize. We face an existential crisis today, global warming, our ability to socially organize, disparities in motives and incentives between rich and poor in a new gilded age. Reconciling this will require us to organize socially at scale in a way we have not yet done. Ideally a healthy community is anti-fragile; it can take outstanding ideas from anywhere, and anybody, and percolate those ideas through the system.

Undefining the Metaverse

We imagine the web and the Metaverse as overlapping concepts, or the web being replaced by the Metaverse. We see it as a social tool, a tool that lets us see the world and each other better, but also as with any clean slate we also see this an opportunity to undo a bunch of previous design flaws and grievances and "to get things right this time". The Metaverse may indeed be a richer storytelling medium, increasing a sense of co-presence, shared awareness and possibly even empathy - but that is an effect or outcome - not a core technical deliverable.

It's notable that definitions of both the traditional web and Neal Stephenson's Metaverse tend to focus on appearance over substance. Neal Stephenson's Metaverse is specifically phrased as a 3d virtual space with 3d avatars. The inaccuracy here is that the appearance of something, the spatial or visual representation, is often a side-effect of underlying procedural logic. How things "look" or are perceived is not only subjective but contextual. We view objects in relation to other objects, often as pinterest boards, as spreadsheets, as gantt charts, as calendars, as maps, as text documents. A more fundamental need is first the ability to easily publish and consume not just text, layout and images but also digital agents or behaviors themselves.

The web has historically been a planet spanning communications tool that runs a single application: a presentation layout tool. It is fairly novel in that it's a "platform" not a product in itself. It runs across many devices, there are few gatekeepers, operates at world scale, anybody can publish to it, and it's somewhat hard to censor or restrict access. Content can be shared with a single consistent namespace (a URL) and access to fresh URLS has low barriers. More recently the web is moving towards becoming a portable platform for computation. It can now fetch applications over the wire, run them locally, make sure they are reasonably sandboxed, and generally empower participants to tell richer stories. But walled gardens such as the Apple App Store have done a much better job of allowing the safe distribution of rich behaviors.

A more useful or accurate way of thinking about the Web and the Metaverse is that they are simply social operating systems. Behaviors need a computational substrate to run on, and ideally a behavior should have a low latency "human scale" interaction from a given participants perspective. What the Metaverse should strive to improve on is supporting dynamic code execution. The Metaverse for our purposes is about sharing code. Participants should be able to create avatars that represent their will, that can advocate for their interests, and then publish them. Because of the way the Internet is built an idea of computational soups or Actor Model becomes a natural way to think this.

Getting to the Why

There's a risk in any research of "boiling the ocean" - and tackling concepts like the Metaverse has hints of this. Nice-to-haves do not always connect with real user needs. We may not need a highly stylized neon universe where we wear cyberpunk avatars and manipulate data objects by handing them to each other. We may need, or at least grow, if we have a social computing platform that takes the best of the web and re-imagines it for the future, that meets real ecosystem needs, enfranchises a huge diversity of stakeholders, and is democratic and open.

There are real needs that are blockers for ongoing planetary conversations. Today it is difficult to share richer media experiences in a durable and persistent way. We need to be able to run each others sandboxed code: demos, applications, experiments, vignettes, stories and ideas. We need to be able to do so in a safe lightweight, persistent way - without the protection and undue censorship of a centralized App Store or walled garden. Apps need to collaborate with each other - for example one app may simply put a funny hat on each of your friends when seen through your AR glasses. In this case the apps are not running in totally separate sandboxes but have a shared understanding of the geometry of the world. Here we see a Metaverse as an operating system that can run sandboxed code and do real work. The uses cases do arguably lean towards spatial and visual computing (since we are physically embodied beings) but those powers are in some senses side-effects of improving underlying architectures.

Effectively the 'why' is that there's an opportunity to let us talk to each other more easily with richer tools, to become a new kind of people, that can have different kinds of conversations than we can have today. To see each other better, to protect the world better. We ourselves can't yet see exactly what we will become when such tools became available, but those future selves would definitely thank us.