6G and Onward to Next G

CHAPTER 10Opportunities vs. Risks

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.”

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENSa.k.a. Mark Twain(1835–1910)

In the current human‐centered Anthropocene era, today's societies worldwide are undergoing rapid change, both technologically and environmentally. As a result, they are facing a new reality that is characterized by an ever‐increasing number of what is often referred to as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) situations. Within this context of growing uncertainty, this chapter discusses the specific opportunities as well as risks of the Metaverse to become the human‐centric approach of choice toward realizing the vision of a super smart Society 5.0 for the twenty‐first century.

To rapidly exit the Anthropocene in the coming 6G and Next G era, we have to harmonize our human activities with nature's time‐tested self‐organization mechanisms found in living systems. More specifically, we have to drive the mutually beneficial symbiosis of digitalization and biologization, the two guiding principles of the future bioeconomy, to enter the next era in human history named Symbiocene, which will foster human development by harvesting satisfying human experiences (see Section 8.5). Recall from Chapter 9 that it is not sufficient to say something like being smart and cooperative is a generally good thing, so humans evolved to be smart and cooperative. Evolution does ...