Metaversed

Chapter 7Digitalizing Humans

You don't choose your Avatar…your Avatar chooses you.

—Jake Sully, Avatar

“Alexa, what's the weather today?” “Siri, what's today's date?” In 2018, these requests became part of the daily lives of smart speaker owners. These software agents became personified in our minds, as if we were interacting with real people. It was like we were talking to a small being living within a piece of hardware or a friendly colleague on a speakerphone. Although their usage has been declining slightly,¹ these voice assistants marked a turn in how almost 200 million of us² moved from tapping a screen to simply speaking our wants and needs to a piece of hardware.

This isn't the first time in recent years that new innovations have changed the way we interact with technology. With smart screens with computer vision, we began to gesture toward a piece of hardware to establish what we want. With mobile phones, we started to trigger an action through our gaze to a small handheld rectangle object made up of mostly metal, glass, and plastic. There is, in fact, an entire field of research established in the 1980s that is focused on “human–computer interaction.”³

This also isn't the first time that human–computer interaction has been transformed by giving technology human-like characteristics. In 2003, with a small yellow circle.⁴ Emojis (named after the Japanese terms for “picture” and “character”) were created to communicate feelings much more quickly and efficiently than ...