Category Archives: Wearable technology

It Took a Decade, but Google Glass is Finally Broken

Did you hear that Google finally pulled the plug on Google Glass?

Probably not. The announcement definitely flew under the radar. It came with much less fanfare than the original roll out in 2013. The technology, which has been quietly on life support as an enterprise tool aimed at select industries, finally had its plug pulled with this simple statement on its support page:

Thank you for over a decade of innovation and partnership. As of March 15, 2023, we will no longer sell Glass Enterprise Edition. We will continue supporting Glass Enterprise Edition until September 15, 2023.

Talk about your ignoble demises. They’re offering a mere 6 months of support for those stubbornly hanging on to their Glass. Glass has been thrown in the ever growing Google Graveyard, along with Google Health, Google+, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Knol – well, you get the idea.

It’s been 10 years, almost to the day, that Google invited 8000 people to become “Glass Explorers” (others had a different name – “Glassholes”) and plunge into the world of augmented reality.

I was not a believer – for a few reasons I talked about way back then. That led me to say, “Google Glass isn’t an adoptable product as it sits.” It took 10 years, but I can finally say, “I told you so.”

I did say that wearable technology, in other forms, would be a game changer. I just didn’t think that Google Glass was the candidate to do that. To be honest, I haven’t really thought that much more about it until I saw the muted news that this particular Glass was a lot more than half empty. I think there are some takeaways about the fading dividing line between technology and humans that we should keep in mind.

First of all, I think we’ve learned a little more about how our brains work with “always on” technologies like Google Glass. The short answer is, they don’t – at least not very well. And this is doubly ironic because according to an Interview with Google Glass product director Steve Lee on The Verge back in 2013, that was the whole point:

“We all know that people love to be connected. Families message each other all the time, sports fanatics are checking live scores for their favorite teams. If you’re a frequent traveler you have to stay up to date on flight status or if your gate changes. Technology allows us to connect in that way. A big problem right now are the distractions that technology causes.”

The theory was that it was much less distracting to have information right in the line of sight, rather than having to go to a connected screen that might be in your pocket.

Lee went on. “We wondered, what if we brought technology closer to your senses? Would that allow you to more quickly get information and connect with other people but do so in a way — with a design — that gets out of your way when you’re not interacting with technology? That’s sort of what led us to Glass.” 

The problem here was one of incompatible operating systems – the one that drove Google Glass and the one we have baked into our brains. It turned out that maybe the technology was a little too close to our senses. A 2016 study (Lewis and Neider) found that trying to split attention between two different types of tasks – one scanning information on a heads up display and one trying to focus on the task at hand – ended up with the brain not being able to focus effectively on either. The researchers ended with this cautionary conclusion: “Our data strongly suggest that caution should be exercised when deploying HUD-based informational displays in circumstances where the primary user task is visual in nature. Just because we can, does not mean we should.”

For anyone who spends even a little time wondering how the brain works, this should not come as a surprise. There is an exhaustive list of research showing that the brain is not that great at multi-tasking. Putting a second cognitive task for the brain in our line of sight simply means the distraction is all that much harder to ignore.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for Google. I think sometimes they get a little starry eyed about their own technological capabilities and forget to factor in the human element. I remember talking to a roomful of Google engineers more than a decade ago about search behaviors. I remember asking them if any of them had heard about Pirolli and Card’s pioneering work on their Information Foraging theory. Not one hand went up. I was gob smacked. That should be essential reading for anyone working on a search interface. Yet, on that day, the crickets were chirping loudly at Mountainview.

If the Glass team had done their human homework, they would have found that the brain needs to focus on one task at a time. If you’re looking to augment reality with additional information, that information has to be synthesized into a single cohesive task for the brain. This means that for augmented reality to be successful, the use case has to be carefully studied to make sure the brain isn’t overloaded.

But I suspect there was another sticking point that prevented Google Glass from being widely adopted. It challenged the very nature of our relationship with technology. We like to believe we control technology, rather than the other way around. We have defined the online world as somewhere we “go” to through our connected devices. We are in control of when and where we do this. Pulling a device out and initiating an action keeps this metaphorical divide in place.

But Google Glass blurred this line in a way that made us uncomfortable. Again, a decade ago, I talked about the inevitable tipping point that will come with the merging of our physical and virtual worlds. Back then, I said, “as our technology becomes more intimate, whether it’s Google Glass, wearable devices or implanted chips, being ‘online’ will cease to be about ‘going’ and will become more about ‘being.’  As our interface with the virtual world becomes less deliberate, the paradigm becomes less about navigating a space that’s under our control and more about being an activated node in a vast network.”

I’m just speculating, but maybe Google Glass was just a step too far in this direction – for now, anyway.

(Feature image: Tim.Reckmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

My Many Problems with the Metaverse

I recently had dinner with a comedian who had just did his first gig in the Metaverse. It was in a new Meta-Comedy Club. He was excited and showed me a recording of the gig.

I have to admit, my inner geek thought it was very cool: disembodied hands clapping with avataresque names floating above, bursts of virtual confetti for the biggest laughs and even a virtual-hook that instantly snagged meta-hecklers, banning them to meta-purgatory until they promised to behave. The comedian said he wanted to record a comedy meta-album in the meta-club to release to his meta-followers.

It was all very meta.

As mentioned, as a geek I’m intrigued by the Metaverse. But as a human who ponders our future (probably more than is healthy) – I have grave concerns on a number of fronts. I have mentioned most of these individually in previous posts, but I thought it might be useful to round them up:

Removed from Reality

My first issue is that the Metaverse just isn’t real. It’s a manufactured reality. This is at the heart of all the other issues to come.

We might think we’re clever, and that we can manufacturer a better world than the one that nature has given us, but my response to that would be Orgel’s Second Rule, courtesy of Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

For millions of years, we have evolved to be a good fit in our natural environment. There are thousands of generations of trial and error baked into our DNA that make us effective in our reality. Most of that natural adaptation lies hidden from us, ticking away below the surface of both our bodies and brains, silently correcting course to keep us aligned and functioning well in our world.

But we, in our never-ending human hubris, somehow believe we can engineer an environment better than reality in less than a single generation. If we take Second Life as the first iteration of the metaverse, we’re barely two decades into the engineering of a meta-reality.

If I was placing bets on who is the better environmental designer for us, humans or evolution, my money would be on evolution, every time.

Who’s Law is It Anyway?

One of the biggest selling features of the Metaverse is that it frees us from the restrictions of geography. Physical distance has no meaning when we go meta.

But this also has issues. Societies need laws and our laws have evolved to be grounded within the boundaries of geographical jurisdictions. What happens when those geographical jurisdictions become meaningless? Right now, there are no laws specifically regulating the Metaverse. And even if there are laws in the future, in what jurisdiction would they be enforced?

This is a troubling loophole – and by hole I mean a massive gaping metaverse-sized void. You know who is attracted by a lack of laws? Those who have no regard for the law. If you don’t think that criminals are currently eyeing the metaverse looking for opportunity, I have a beautiful virtual time-share condo in the heart of meta-Boca Raton that I’d love to sell you.

Data is Matter of the Metaverse

Another “selling feature” for the metaverse is the ability to append metadata to our own experiences, enriching them with access to information and opportunities that would be impossible in the real world. In the metaverse, the world is at our fingertips – or in our virtual headset – as the case may be. We can stroll through worlds, real or imagined, and the sum of all our accumulated knowledge is just one user-prompt away.

But here’s the thing about this admittedly intriguing notion: it makes data a commodity and commodities are built to be exchanged based on market value. In order to get something of value, you have to exchange something of value. And for the builders of the metaverse, that value lies in your personal data. The last shreds of personal privacy protection will be gone, forever!

A For-Profit Reality

This brings us to my biggest problem with the Metaverse – the motivation for building it. It is being built not by philanthropists or philosophers, academics or even bureaucrats. The metaverse is being built by corporations, who have to hit quarterly profit projections. They are building it to make a buck, or, more correctly, several billion bucks.

These are the same people who have made social media addictive by taking the dirtiest secrets of Las Vegas casinos and using them to enslave us through our smartphones. They have toppled legitimate governments for the sake of advertising revenue. They have destroyed our concept of truth, bashed apart the soft guardrails of society and are currently dismantling democracy. There is no noble purpose for a corporation – their only purpose is profit.

Do you really want to put your future reality in those hands?

Don’t Be Too Quick To Dismiss The Metaverse

According to my fellow Media Insider Maarten Albarda, the metaverse is just another in a long line of bright shiny objects that — while promising to change the world of marketing — will probably end up on the giant waste heap of overhyped technologies.

And if we restrict Maarten’s caution to specifically the metaverse and its impact on marketing, perhaps he’s right. But I think this might be a case of not seeing the forest for the trees.

Maarten lists a number of other things that were supposed to revolutionize our lives: Clubhouse, AI, virtual reality, Second Life. All seemed to amount to much ado about nothing.

But as I said almost 10 years ago, when I first started talking about one of those overhyped examples, Google Glass — and what would eventually become the “metaverse” (in rereading this, perhaps I’m better at predictions than I thought)  — the overall direction of these technologies do mark a fundamental shift:

“Along the way, we build a “meta” profile of ourselves, which acts as both a filter and a key to the accumulated potential of the ‘cloud.’ It retrieves relevant information based on our current context and a deep understanding of our needs, it unlocks required functionality, and it archives our extended network of connections.”

As Wired founder and former executive editor Kevin Kelly has told us, technology knows what it wants. Eventually, it gets it. Sooner or later, all these things are bumping up against a threshold that will mark a fundamental shift in how we live.

You may call this the long awaited “singularity” or not. Regardless, it does represent a shift from technology being a tool we use consciously to enhance our experiences, to technology being so seamlessly entwined with our reality that it alters our experiences without us even being aware of it. We’re well down this path now, but the next decade will move us substantially further, beyond the point of no return.

And that will impact everything, including marketing.

What is interesting is the layer technology is building over the real world, hence the term “meta.” It’s a layer of data and artificial intelligence that will fundamentally alter our interactions with that world. It’s technology that we may not use intentionally — or, beyond the thin layer of whatever interface we use, may not even be aware of.

This is what makes it so different from what has come before. I can think of no technical advance in the past that is so consequential to us personally yet functions beyond the range of our conscious awareness or deliberate usage. The eventual game-changer might not be the metaverse. But a change is coming, and the metaverse is a signal of that.

Technology advancing is like the tide coming in. If you watch the individual waves coming in, they don’t seem to amount to much. One stretches a little higher than the last, followed by another that fizzles out at the shoreline. But cumulatively, they change the landscape — forever. This tide is shifting humankind’s relationship with technology. And there will be no going back.

Maybe Maarten is right. Maybe the metaverse will turn out to be a big nothingburger. But perhaps, just perhaps, the metaverse might be the Antonio Meucci  of our time: an example where the technology was inevitable, but the timing wasn’t quite right.

Meucci was an Italian immigrant who started working on the design of a workable telephone in 1849, a full two decades before Alexander Graham Bell even started experimenting with the concept.  Meucci filed a patent caveat in 1871, five years before Bell’s patent application was filed, but was destitute and didn’t have the money to renew it.  His wave of technological disruption may have hit the shore a little too early, but that didn’t diminish the significance of the telephone, which today is generally considered one of the most important inventions  of all time in terms of its impact on humanity.

Whatever is coming, and whether or not the metaverse represents the sea change catalyst that alters everything, I fully expect at some point in the very near future to pinpoint this time as the dawn of the technological shift that made the introduction of the telephone seem trivial in comparison.

The Unusual Evolution of the Internet

The Internet we have today evolved out of improbability. It shouldn’t have happened like it did. It evolved as a wide-open network forged by starry-eyed academics and geeks who really believed it might make the world better. It wasn’t supposed to win against walled gardens like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL — but it did. If you rolled back the clock, knowing what we know now, you could be sure it would never play out the same way again.

To use the same analogy that Eric Raymond did in his now-famous essay on the development of Linux, these were people who believed in bazaars rather than cathedrals. The internet was cobbled together to scratch an intellectual and ethical itch, rather than a financial one.

But today, as this essay in The Atlantic by Jonathan Zittrain warns us, the core of the internet is rotting. Because it was built by everyone and no one, all the superstructure that was assembled on top of that core is teetering. Things work, until they don’t: “The internet was a recipe for mortar, with an invitation for anyone, and everyone, to bring their own bricks.”

The problem is, it’s no one’s job to make sure those bricks stay in place.

Zittrain talks about the holes in humanity’s store of knowledge. But there’s another thing about this evolution that is either maddening or magical, depending on your perspective: It was never built with a business case in mind.

Eventually, commerce pipes were retrofitted into the whole glorious mess, and billions managed to be made. Google alone has managed to pull over a trillion dollars in revenue in less than 20 years by becoming the de facto index to the world’s most haphazard library of digital stuff. Amazon went one better, using the Internet to reinvent humanity’s marketplace and pulling in $2 trillion in revenue along the way.

But despite all this massive monetization, the benefactors still at least had to pay lip service to that original intent: the naïve belief that technology could make us better, and  that it didn’t just have to be about money.

Even Google, which is on its way to posting $200 billion in revenue, making it the fifth biggest media company in the world (after Netflix, Disney, Comcast, and AT&T), stumbled on its way to making a buck. Perhaps it’s because its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, didn’t trust advertising. In their original academic paper, they said that “advertising-funded search engines will inherently be biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”  Of course they ultimately ended up giving in to the dark side of advertising. But I watched the Google user experience closely from 2003 to 2011, and that dedication to the user was always part of a delicate balancing act that was generally successful.

But that innocence of the original Internet is almost gone, as I noted in a recent post. And there are those who want to make sure that the next thing — whatever it is — is built on a framework that has monetization built in. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg is feverishly hoping that his company can build the foundations of the Metaverse. It’s why Google is trying to assemble the pipes and struts that build the new web. Those things would be completely free of the moral — albeit naïve — constraints that still linger in the original model. In the new one, there would only be one goal: making sure shareholders are happy.

It’s also natural that many of those future monetization models will likely embrace advertising, which is, as I’ve said before, the path of least resistance to profitability.

We should pay attention to this. The very fact that the Internet’s original evolution was as improbable and profit-free as it was puts us in a unique position today. What would it look like if things had turned out differently, and the internet had been profit-driven from day one? I suspect it might have been better-maintained but a lot less magical, at least in its earliest iterations.

Whatever that new thing is will form a significant part of our reality. It will be even more foundational and necessary to us than the current internet. We won’t be able to live without it. For that reason, we should worry about the motives that may lie behind whatever “it” will be.

The Relationship between Trust and Tech: It’s Complicated

Today, I wanted to follow up on last week’s post about not trusting tech companies with your privacy. In that post, I said, “To find a corporation’s moral fiber, you always, always, always have to follow the money.”

A friend from back in my industry show days — the always insightful Brett Tabke — reached out to me to comment, and mentioned that the position taken by Apple in the current privacy brouhaha with Facebook is one of convenience, especially this “holier-than-thou” privacy stand adopted by Tim Cook and Apple.

“I really wonder though if it is a case of do-the-right-thing privacy moral stance, or one of convenience that supports their ecosystem, and attacks a competitor?” he asked.

It’s hard to argue against that. As Brett mentioned, Apple really can’t lose by “taking money out of a side-competitors pocket and using it to lay more foundational corner stones in the walled garden, [which] props up the illusion that the garden is a moral feature, and not a criminal antitrust offence.”

But let’s look beyond Facebook and Apple for a moment. As Brett also mentioned to me, “So who does a privacy action really impact more? Does it hit Facebook or ultimately Google? Facebook is just collateral damage here in the real war with Google. Apple and Google control their own platform ecosystems, but only Google can exert influence over the entire web. As we learned from the unredacted documents in the States vs Google antitrust filings, Google is clearly trying to leverage its assets to exert that control — even when ethically dubious.”

So, if we are talking trust and privacy, where is Google in this debate? Given the nature of Google’s revenue stream, its stand on privacy is not quite as blatantly obvious (or as self-serving) as Facebook’s. Both depend on advertising to pay the bills, but the nature of that advertising is significantly different.

57% of Alphabet’s (Google’s parent company) annual $182-billion revenue stream still comes from search ads, according to its most recent annual report. And search advertising is relatively immune from crackdowns on privacy.

When you search for something on Google, you have already expressed your intent, which is the clearest possible signal with which you can target advertising. Yes, additional data taken with or without your knowledge can help fine-tune ad delivery — and Google has shown it’s certainly not above using this  — but Apple tightening up its data security will not significantly impair Google’s ability to make money through its search revenue channel.

Facebook’s advertising model, on the other hand, targets you well before any expression of intent. For that reason, it has to rely on behavioral data and other targeting to effectively deliver those ads. Personal data is the lifeblood of such targeting. Turn off the tap, and Facebook’s revenue model dries up instantly.

But Google has always had ambitions beyond search revenue. Even today, 43% of its revenue comes from non-search sources. Google has always struggled with the inherently capped nature of search-based ad inventory. There are only so many searches done against which you can serve advertising. And, as Brett points out, that leads Google to look at the very infrastructure of the web to find new revenue sources. And that has led to signs of a troubling collusion with Facebook.

Again, we come back to my “follow the money” mantra for rooting out rot in the system. And in this case, the money we’re talking about is the premium that Google skims off the top when it determines which ads are shown to you. That premium depends on Google’s ability to use data to target the most effective ads possible through its own “Open Bidding” system. According to the unredacted documents released in the antitrust suit, that premium can amount to 22% to 42% of the ad spend that goes through that system.

In summing up, it appears that if you want to know who can be trusted most with your data, it’s the companies that don’t depend on that data to support an advertising revenue model. Right now, that’s Apple. But as Brett also pointed out, don’t mistake this for any warm, fuzzy feeling that Apple is your knight in shining armour: “Apple has shown time and time again they are willing to sacrifice strong desires of customers in order to make money and control the ecosystem. Can anyone look past headphone jacks, Macbook jacks, or the absence of Macbook touch screens without getting the clear indication that these were all robber-baronesque choices of a monopoly in action? Is so, then how can we go ‘all in’ on privacy with them just because we agree with the stance?”

The Tech Giant Trust Exercise

If we look at those that rule in the Valley of Silicon — the companies that determine our technological future — it seems, as I previously wrote,  that Apple alone is serious about protecting our privacy. 

MediaPost editor in chief Joe Mandese shared a post late last month about how Apple’s new privacy features are increasingly taking aim at the various ways in which advertising can be targeted to specific consumers. The latest victim in those sights is geotargeting.

Then Steve Rosenbaum mentioned last week that as Apple and Facebook gird their loins and prepare to do battle over the next virtual dominion — the metaverse — they are taking two very different approaches. Facebook sees this next dimension as an extension of its hacker mentality, a “raw, nasty networker of spammers.” Apple is, as always, determined to exert a top-down restriction on who plays in its sandbox, only welcoming those who are willing to play by its rules. In that approach, the company is also signaling that it will take privacy in the metaverse seriously. Apple CEO Tim Cook said he believes “users should have the choice over the data that is being collected about them and how it’s used.”

Apple can take this stand because its revenue model doesn’t depend on advertising. To find a corporation’s moral fiber, you always, always, always have to follow the money. Facebook depends on advertising for revenue. And it has repeatedly shown it doesn’t really give a damn about protecting the privacy of users. Apple, on the other hand, takes every opportunity to unfurl the privacy banner as its battle standard because its revenue stream isn’t really impacted by privacy.

If you’re looking for the rot at the roots of technology, a good place to start is at anything that relies on advertising. In my 40 years in marketing, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that it is impossible for business models that rely on advertising as their primary source of revenue to stay on the right side of privacy concerns. There is an inherent conflict that cannot be resolved. In a recent earnings call,  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it in about the clearest way it could be said, “As expected, we did experience revenue headwinds this quarter, including from Apple’s [privacy rule] changes that are not only negatively affecting our business, but millions of small businesses in what is already a difficult time for them in the economy.”

Facebook has proven time and time again that when the need for advertising revenue runs up against a question of ethical treatment of users, it will always be the ethics that give way.

It’s also interesting that Europe is light years ahead of North America in introducing legislation that protects privacy. According to one Internet Privacy Ranking study, four of the five top countries for protecting privacy are in Northern Europe. Australia is the fifth. My country, Canada, shares these characteristics. We rank seventh. The US ranks 18th.

There is an interesting corollary here I’ve touched on before. All these top-ranked countries are social democracies. All have strong public broadcasting systems. All have a very different relationship with advertising than the U.S. We that live in these countries are not immune from the dangers of advertising (this is certainly true for Canada), but our media structure is not wholly dependent on it. The U.S., right from the earliest days of electronic media, took a different path — one that relied almost exclusively on advertising to pay the bills.

As we start thinking about things like the metaverse or other forms of reality that are increasingly intertwined with technology, this reliance on advertising-funded platforms is something we must consider long and hard. It won’t be the companies that initiate the change. An advertising-based business model follows the path of least resistance, making it the shortest route to that mythical unicorn success story. The only way this will change will be if we — as users — demand that it changes.

And we should  — we must — demand it. Ad-based tech giants that have no regard for our personal privacy are one of the greatest threats we face. The more we rely on them, they more they will ask from us.

The Terrors of New Technology

My neighbour just got a new car. And he is terrified. He told me so yesterday. He has no idea how the hell to use it. This isn’t just a new car. It’s a massive learning project that can intimidate the hell out of anyone. It’s technology run amok. It’s the canary in the coal mine of the new world we’re building.

Perhaps – just perhaps – we should be more careful in what we wish for.

Let me provide the back story. His last car was his retirement present to himself, which he bought in 2000. He loved the car. It was a hard top convertible. At the time he bought it it was state of the art. But this was well before the Internet of Things and connected technology. The car did pretty much what you expected it to. Almost anyone could get behind the wheel and figure out how to make it go.

This year, under much prompting from his son, he finally decided to sell his beloved convertible and get a new car. But this isn’t just any car. It is a high-end electric sports car. Again, it is top of the line. And it is connected in pretty much every way you could imagine, and in many ways that would never cross any of our minds.

My neighbour has had this new car for about a week. And he’s still afraid to drive it anywhere. “Gord,” he said, “the thing terrifies me. I still haven’t figured out how to get it to open my garage door.” He has done online tutorials. He has set up a Zoom session with the dealer to help him navigate the umpteen zillion screens that show up on the smart display. After several frustrating experiments, he has learned he needs to pair it with his wifi system at home to get it to recharge properly. No one could just hop behind the wheel and drive it. You would have to sign up for an intensive technology boot camp before you were ready to climb a near-vertical learning curve. The capabilities of this car are mind boggling. And that’s exactly the problem. It’s damned near impossible to do anything with a boggled mind.

The acceptance of new technology has generated a vast body of research. I myself did an exhaustive series of blog posts on it back in 2014. Ever since sociologist Everett Rogers did his seminal work on the topic back in 1962 we have known that there are hurdles to overcome in grappling with something new, and we don’t all clear the hurdles at the same rate. Some of us never clear them at all.

But I also suspect that the market, especially at the high end, have become so enamored with embedding technology that they have forgotten how difficult it might be for some of us to adopt that technology, especially those of us of a certain age.

I am and always have been an early adopter. I geek out on new technology. That’s probably why my neighbour has tapped me to help him figure out his new car. I’m the guy my family calls when they can’t get their new smartphone to work. And I don’t mind admitting I’m slipping behind. I think we’re all the proverbial frogs in boiling water. And that water is technology. It’s getting harder and harder just to use the new shit we buy.

Here’s another thing that drives me batty about technology. It’s a constantly moving target. Once you learn something, it doesn’t stay learnt. It upgrades itself, changes platforms or becomes obsolete. Then you have to start all over again.

Last year, I started retrofitting our home to be a little bit more smart. And in the space of that year, I have sensors that mysteriously go offline, hubs that suddenly stop working, automation routines that are moodier than a hormonal teenager and a lot of stuff that just fits into the “I have no idea” category. When it all works it’s brilliant. I remember that one day – it was special. The other 364 have been a pain in the ass of varying intensity. And that’s for me, the tech guy. My wife sometimes feels like a prisoner in her own home. She has little appreciation for the mysterious gifts of technology that allow me to turn on our kitchen lights when we’re in Timbuktu (should we ever go there and if we can find a good wifi signal).

Technology should be a tool. It should serve us, not hold us slave to its whims. It would be so nice to be able to just make coffee from our new coffee maker, instead of spending a week trying to pair it with our toaster so breakfast is perfectly synchronized.

Oops, got to go. My neighbour’s car has locked him in his garage.

Adrift in the Metaverse

Humans are nothing if not chasers of bright, shiny objects. Our attention is always focused beyond the here and now. That is especially true when here and now is a bit of a dumpster fire.

The ultrarich know that this is part of the human psyche, and they are doubling down their bets on it. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are betting on space. But others — including Mark Zuckerberg — are betting on something called the metaverse.

Just this past summer, Zuck told his employees about his master plan for Facebook:

“Our overarching goal across all of (our) initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.”

So what exactly is the metaverse? According to Wikipedia, it is

“a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet.”

The metaverse is a world of our own making, which exists in the dimensions of a digital reality. There we imagine we can fix what we screwed up in the maddeningly unpredictable real world. It is the ultimate in bright, shiny objects.

Science fiction and the entertainment industry have been toying with the idea of the metaverse for some time now. The term itself comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” It has been given the Hollywood treatment numerous times, notably in “The Matrix” and “Ready Player One.” But Silicon Valley venture capitalists are rushing to make fiction into fact.

You can’t really blame us for throwing in the towel on the world we have systematically wrecked. There are few glimmers of hope out there in the real world. What we have wrought is painful to contemplate. So we are doing what we’ve always done, reach for what we want rather than fix what we have. Take the Reporters Without Borders Uncensored Library, for example.

There are many places in the real world where journalism is censored, like Russia, the Middle East, Vietnam and China. But in the metaverse, there is the option of leapfrogging over all the political hurdles we stumble over in the real world. So Reporters without Borders and two German creative agencies built a meta library in the meta world of Minecraft. Here, censored articles are made into virtual books, accessible to all who want to check them out.

It’s hard to find fault with this. Censorship is a tool of oppression. Here, a virtual world offered an inviting loophole to circumvent it. The metaverse came to the rescue. What is the problem with that?

The biggest risk is this: We weren’t built for the metaverse. We can probably adapt to it, somewhat, but everything that makes us tick has evolved in a flesh and blood world, and — to quote a line from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

It’s fair to say that right now the metaverse is a novelty. Most of your neighbors, friends and family have never heard of it. But odds are it will become our life. In a 2019 article called “Welcome to the Mirror World” in Wired, Kevin Kelley explained, “we are building a 1-to-1 map of almost unimaginable scope. When it’s complete, our physical reality will merge with the digital universe.”

In a Forbes article, futurist Cathy Hackl gives us an example of what this merger might look like:

“Imagine walking down the street. Suddenly, you think of a product you need. Immediately next to you, a vending machine appears, filled with the product and variations you were thinking of. You stop, pick an item from the vending machine, it’s shipped to your house, and then continue on your way.”

That sounds benign — even helpful. But if we’ve learned one thing it’s this: When we try to merge technology with human behavior, there are always unintended consequences that arise. And when we’re talking about the metaverse, those consequences will likely be massive.

It is hubristic in the extreme to imagine we can engineer a world that will be a better match for our evolved humanware mechanics than the world we actually evolved within. It’s sheer arrogance to imagine we can build that world, and also arrogant to imagine that we can thrive within it.

We have a bright, shiny bias built into us that will likely lead us to ignore the crumbling edifice of our reality. German futurist Gerd Leonhard, for one, warns us about an impending collision between technology and humanity:

“Technology is not what we seek but how we seek: the tools should not become the purpose. Yet increasingly, technology is leading us to ‘forget ourselves.’”

COVID And The Chasm Crossing

For most of us, it’s been a year living with the pandemic. I was curious what my topic was a year ago this week. It was talking about the brand crisis at a certain Mexican brewing giant when its flagship brand was suddenly and unceremoniously linked with a global pandemic. Of course, we didn’t know then just how “global” it would be back then.

Ahhh — the innocence of early 2020.

The past year will likely be an historic inflection point in many societal trend lines. We’re not sure at this point how things will change, but we’re pretty sure they will change. You can’t take what has essentially been a 12-month anomaly in everything we know as normal, plunk it down on every corner of the globe and expect everything just to bounce back to where it was.

If I could vault 10 years in the future and then look back at today, I suspect I would be talking about how our relationship with technology changed due to the pandemic. Yes, we’re all sick of Zoom. We long for the old days of actually seeing another face in the staff lunchroom. And we realize that bingeing “Emily in Paris” on Netflix comes up abysmally short of the actual experience of stepping in dog shit as we stroll along the Seine.

C’est la vie.

But that’s my point. For the past 12 months, these watered-down digital substitutes have been our lives. We were given no choice. And some of it hasn’t sucked. As I wrote last week, there are times when a digital connection may actually be preferable to a physical one.

There is now a whole generation of employees who are considering their work-life balance in the light of being able to work from home for at least part of the time. Meetings the world over are being reimagined, thanks to the attractive cost/benefit ratio of being able to attend virtually. And, for me, I may have permanently swapped riding my bike trainer in my basement for spin classes in the gym. It took me a while to get used to it, but now that I have, I think it will stick.

Getting people to try something new — especially when it’s technology — is a tricky process. There are a zillion places on the uphill slope of the adoption curve where we can get mired and give up. But, as I said, that hasn’t been an option for us in the past 12 months. We had to stick it out. And now that we have, we realize we like much of what we were forced to adopt. All we’re asking for is the freedom to pick and choose what we keep and what we toss away.

I suspect  many of us will be a lot more open to using technology now that we have experienced the tradeoffs it entails between effectiveness and efficiency. We will make more room in our lives for a purely utilitarian use of technology, stripped of the pros and cons of “bright shiny object” syndrome.

Technology typically gets trapped at both the dread and pseudo-religious devotion ends of the Everett Rogers Adoption Curve. Either you love it, or you hate it. Those who love it form the market that drives the development of our technology, leaving those who hate it further and further behind.

As such, the market for technology tends to skew to the “gee whiz” end of the market, catering to those who buy new technology just because it’s new and cool. This bias has embedded an acceptance of planned obsolescence that just seems to go hand-in-hand with the marketing of technology. 

My previous post about technology leaving seniors behind is an example of this. Even if seniors start out as early adopters, the perpetual chase of the bright shiny object that typifies the tech market can leave them behind.

But COVID-19 changed all that. It suddenly forced all of us toward the hump that lies in the middle of the adoption curve. It has left the world no choice but to cross the “chasm” that  Geoffrey Moore wrote about 30 years ago in his book “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers.” He explained that the chasm was between “visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority),” according to Wikipedia.

This has some interesting market implications. After I wrote my post, a few readers reached out saying they were working on solutions that addressed the need of seniors to stay connected with a device that is easier for them to use and is not subject to the need for constant updating and relearning. Granted, neither of them was from Apple nor Google, but at least someone was thinking about it.

As the pandemic forced the practical market for technology to expand, bringing customers who had everyday needs for their technology, it created more market opportunities. Those opportunities create pockets of profit that allow for the development of tools for segments of the market that used to be ignored.

It remains to be seen if this market expansion continues after the world returns to a more physically based definition of normal. I suspect it will.

This market evolution may also open up new business model opportunities — where we’re actually willing to pay for online services and platforms that used to be propped up by selling advertising. This move alone would take technology a massive step forward in ethical terms. We wouldn’t have this weird moral dichotomy where marketers are grieving the loss of data (as fellow Media Insider Ted McConnell does in this post) because tech is finally stepping up and protecting our personal privacy.

Perhaps — I hope — the silver lining in the past year is that we will look at technology more as it should be: a tool that’s used to make our lives more fulfilling.

A.I. and Our Current Rugged Landscape

In evolution, there’s something called the adaptive landscape. It’s a complex concept, but in the smallest nutshell possible, it refers to how fit species are for a particular environment. In a relatively static landscape, status quos tend to be maintained. It’s business as usual. 

But a rugged adaptive landscape —-one beset by disruption and adversity — drives evolutionary change through speciation, the introduction of new and distinct species. 

The concept is not unique to evolution. Adapting to adversity is a feature in all complex, dynamic systems. Our economy has its own version. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called them Gales of Creative Destruction.

The same is true for cultural evolution. When shit gets real, the status quo crumbles like a sandcastle at high tide. When it comes to life today and everything we know about it, we are definitely in a rugged landscape. COVID-19 might be driving us to our new future faster than we ever suspected. The question is, what does that future look like?

Homo Deus

In his follow up to his best-seller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” author Yuval Noah Harari takes a shot at predicting just that. “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” looks at what our future might be. Written well before the pandemic (in 2015) the book deals frankly with the impending irrelevance of humanity. 

The issue, according to Harari, is the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness. Once we break the link between the two, the human vessels that have traditionally carried intelligence become superfluous. 

In his book, Harari foresees two possible paths: techno-humanism and Dataism. 

Techno-humanism

In this version of our future, we humans remain essential, but not in our current form. Thanks to technology, we get an upgrade and become “super-human.”

Dataism

Alternatively, why do we need humans at all? Once intelligence becomes decoupled from human consciousness, will it simply decide that our corporeal forms are a charming but antiquated oddity and just start with a clean slate?

Our Current Landscape

Speaking of clean slates, many have been talking about the opportunity COVID-19 has presented to us to start anew. As I was writing this column, I received a press release from MIT promoting a new book “Building the New Economy,” edited by Alex Pentland. I haven’t read it yet, but based on the first two lines in the release, it certainly seems to be following this type of thinking:“With each major crisis, be it war, pandemic, or major new technology, there has been a need to reinvent the relationships between individuals, businesses, and governments. Today’s pandemic, joined with the tsunami of data, crypto and AI technologies, is such a crisis.”

We are intrigued by the idea of using the technologies we have available to us to build a societal framework less susceptible to inevitable Black Swans. But is this just an invitation to pry open Pandora’s Box and allow the future Yuval Noah Harari is warning us about?

The Debate 

Harari isn’t the only one seeing the impending doom of the human race. Elon Musk has been warning us about it for years. As we race to embrace artificial intelligence, Musk sees the biggest threat to human existence we have ever faced. 

“I am really quite close, I am very close, to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me,” warns Musk. “It’s capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.”

There are those that pooh-pooh Musk’s alarmism, calling it much ado about nothing. Noted Harvard cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinker, whose rose-colored vision of humanity’s future reliably trends up and to the right, dismissed Musk’s warnings with this: “If Elon Musk was really serious about the AI threat, he’d stop building those self-driving cars, which are the first kind of advanced AI that we’re going to see.”

In turn, Musk puts Pinker’s Pollyanna perspective down to human hubris: “This tends to plague smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence and they don’t like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea — which is fundamentally flawed.”

From Today Forward

This brings us back to our current adaptive landscape. It’s rugged. The peaks and valleys of our day-to-day reality are more rugged then they have ever been — at least in our lifetimes. 

We need help. And when you’re dealing with a massive threat that involves probability modeling and statistical inference, more advanced artificial intelligence is a natural place to look. 

Would we trade more invasive monitoring of our own bio-status and aggregation of that data to prevent more deaths? In a heartbeat.

Would we put our trust in algorithms that can instantly crunch vast amounts of data our own brains couldn’t possibly comprehend? We already have.

Will we even adopt connected devices constantly streaming the bits of data that define our existence to some corporate third party or government agency in return for a promise of better odds that we can extend that existence? Sign us up.

We are willingly tossing the keys to our future to the Googles, Apples, Amazons and Facebooks of the world. As much as the present may be frightening, we should consider the steps we’re taking carefully.

If we continue rushing down the path towards Yuval Noah Harari’s Dataism, we should be prepared for what we find there: “This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.”