Unsupervised

CHAPTER 4Important Uses of Technologies You Cannot Ignore

Up until this point, we have explored the fundamental characteristics of interesting, rapidly evolving technologies and some of the processes, services, and products they enable. To illustrate the full scope of potential change, we now broaden our focus to the combined impact of these technologies on a few of those sectors most important to economies and lives around the world. While it may not be as essential to our lives as health and energy, we start with the metaverse as its primary point of access is the hardware used in AR/VR, discussed earlier.

The Metaverse

The metaverse means different things to different people, and because we are currently so early in its evolution, we have no way of predicting what it will become when it grows up (or, perhaps what it will be allowed to be by those who seek to control it). At present, the term Web 3.0 is used interchangeably by many in the space, and digital twins is also commonly used. For the sake of simplicity, we will use metaverse. The only current common agreement is that the term was first used (in print at least) in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash as a VR replacement for the current Internet at the time. Perhaps an uncontroversial current description is that of a digitally created alternative world that runs simultaneously alongside our real world—one in which we are characterized by “avatars” (self-chosen digital representatives). That metaverse ...