A New Reality: Building the Metaverse | Davos 2023 | World Economic Forum

where else do you can get a group of people we have two of the most important Tech Executives in the world one of the best science fiction authors ever and a really brilliant Minister for Rwanda you either get them at a Davos panel or a party at Mark benioff's house that's the only ways you can possibly get this group of people together I am delighted a little bit of housekeeping uh first off I'll be taking questions through slido so please ask your questions in slider if you're watching on the web stream I've been told by weff that they will remove certain questions I'm super curious what are the questions that they removed so push the limits I'll see them um as we go and we'll have a little wrap up at the end but now let me introduce our amazing amazing panel starting on my left Pauline goodberry she's the minister of tech and Innovation for Rwanda then we have Chris Cox he's the CPO of meta platforms we have Enrique lores he is the CEO of HP Inc and we have Neil Stevenson who wrote snow crash and so many other things and has done all kinds of wonderful work from describing the metaverse to helping to build it structure of this session also helpful for questions we'll do a little bit of definition because you're legally obligated to do that when you host a panel on the metaverse then we'll talk about some of the work that each of them is doing then we'll talk about some of the foundational questions and how the metaverse gets built some of the ethical questions and we'll end with some big thoughts about where we're going so let's get going you have to describe and Define the metaverse I have the man who came up with the word first so Neil in 1992 what was the metaverse how do you describe it now I'd been doing some work on kind of an experimental art project that involved heavy use of three-dimensional graphics stuff which was expensive and difficult to use at the time and but it obviously had promised and so I was asking myself what would it take to make that kind of Hardware as cheap as television was today how do we make turn it from a kind of laboratory curiosity into a mass Market medium and the the idea that I came up with to answer that question was the metaverse and so as you say it was published in 92 and then the year the next year two things happen Doom came out and the the web came out and both of those things as it turns out drove the cost of 3D Graphics Hardware down much more rapidly and effectively than I thought they would so it really turned into something that was driven predominantly I think by the games industry as opposed to my kind of TV Centric vision of it and how do you find the metaverse now when someone says what is the metaverse you say nascent yeah we we've got our ways to to go um so um the uh it's really just in the last couple of years that everything has come together I mean um the uh the the cost of of the of the the RAW graphics processing power came down a lot and that's how we get the video game industry um but you need more than that um to make with that you can make great games you can make great three-dimensional experiences but to Network all of that stuff together into something that looks like the metaverse you need in addition a lot of networking capability you need an ability to handle transactions cheaply and quickly and reliably and a lot of other elements that are kind of less obvious but haven't really started to materialize until just the last couple of years Enrique how do you define the metaverse I would say is immersive if we think I think that's immersive is the metaverse is the the way to really make the web and access to content immersive if we think about what has happened during the last years we started we stayed with text we moved to images we went to video the next step is really to totally engage to delegate immersive experiences this is what the metabolism device independent can I have an immersive experience with my phone and have it be the metaverse to certain extent yes but the user interface is going to escort is going to make making the difference if you think about when technology revolutions have happened has mostly been driven by when the user interface has totally changed when the customer experience is designed in a way that customers really wants to engage and participate this is what makes it special another technological revolutions were normally driven by the porn industry but we'll leave that aside for a future Davos I think that was on the list of inappropriate comments over one Chris do you define it as device dependent does the metaverse depend on using AR VR no I don't think so I mean I would think about it as a vert like the next version of the internet that gets less flat you know the the primary metaphor for the internet has been the web page since it was born you know we borrowed the language for describing designing the web page from typography and page layout and we used thinking about pages to talk about and imagine what the internet is and then the user interface has been a screen yeah um the screen was on our desk now it's in our pocket I think Computing brings interfaces closer to our senses to our fingertips to our speech to our ears I think that's part of what we're talking about um when we get into the metaverse is the internet unflattening and having experiences that feel more like physical experiences instead of video conferences and Screen experiences Paula well I think I'd also go with the massive but also really thinking about that space where imagination has no limits and just this afternoon I did I don't know how many of you in the audience have had the chance to go to the global collaboration Village for the experience that is there and my mind was blown away because I started to think can this replace consultancies where I get a paper on a strategy but rather give me tangible results on what are some of the things that I want to do and how can I feel then before I actually get in the real world to implement wow all right well I hope everybody does that experience you can um basically it's Davos with no legs it's very cool all right so now I want to go and talk about um I want everybody to talk about the work the work they're doing because we'll start with Neil because it's actually it layers up very nicely the way this panel was was selected good job with um uh at the different layers of how the metaverse is being built so Neil you not only write these wonderful novels but you've actually started a blockchain based layer for the metaverse explain what it is what you're doing and how people are using it it's called lamina one and it um it kind of emerges from the uh uh the observation that I've made over the last of 10 years of working with games and game technology in different ways is that if we're going to have a metaverse that's being used and enjoyed by millions and millions of people then there are going to have to be experiences in the metaverse that are worth having and um the the people who know how to create those kinds of experiences right now by and large work in the game industry and you know some of them work for great big AAA game studios some of them work for little scrappy Indie companies some of them are even solo practitioners but but they're the ones who whose talents are going to be needed to actually make a metaverse that people are going to want to visit so what we're trying to do with the lamina one project is to build a blockchain that is optimized specifically for those kinds of creators there are a lot of people um right now in the game industry trying to incorporate um and not just games but other kinds of immersive experiences but sort of harp on games but they're they're trying to incorporate uh blockchain into what they're building because there's a big overlap between what those people need to to make money and what blockchain is capable of providing but right now it's difficult and it's uh it's frequently a little scary um so uh the what laminate one is trying to do is um in its early days and it's a kind of pure engineering project at this point but we're we're building a chain that um that can bring the the benefits of that kind of technology to as many Builders as as we can reach so I for example if I were one of those Builders I would build an application into some metaverse system and underline it identity and other things would be stored on your blockchain layer yeah so identity is a good example of something uh that that is kind of if you think of a game let's say you uh you you go on to World of Warcraft or fortnite or whatever you're you're logging onto their server you you prove that you know that you are who you say you are and then you get access to your avatar your inventory all of the stuff that you've accumulated playing that game that works fine as long as you're sticking to one game but if you want to fluidly move from one experience to another then it doesn't work anymore because you're constantly having to sort of log in log out of one experience and log into another so identity is one example of something that needs to be distributed and decentralized if the metaverse is actually going to work um and there's lots of other examples like just the ability to to carry things with you you know if you've got if your avatar is wearing certain things or carrying certain inventory items um you know who created those items how do they get paid uh what happens when you try to carry them from one part of the metaverse to another we think that um there are blockchain based solutions that can help solve those those problems all right Chris you want to explain um what you're doing and why so many Australian plumbers are using your uh your your devices um yeah so at Meadow we're basically um it's been about eight years since we acquired Oculus Oculus was a a small startup that had designed the first really good VR prototype this was about eight years ago John Carmack who was the creator of Doom which you'll mentioned earlier was one of the engineers who helped build a VR headset that was uh pretty wondrous when you put it on so we basically acquired Oculus and then we've spent the last eight years trying to productionize and improve um VR to get to a VR product line that is Affordable enough usable enough and impressive enough that it can be used in Social experiences Fitness gaming medicine you're starting to see it used drug development industrial design you know for sneakers and cars a piece of Hardware that could be used to basically be used instead of a PC for things that wanted to be or were more naturally done in 3D so we build a VR Hardware line we're working on augmented reality which is a much farther out version of the future where you would wear you know a nice pair of glasses like what many of you have on it would be light it would be comfortable it would have waveguides that would allow you to see screens in front of you your messages the weather you know translating the menu in front of you you'd have a cursor to control it you know with your fingers you could speak to it Etc we believe that one day that Computing platform will be as important as the smartphone has become in in our lifetimes and so we're working on a lot of the early r d to bring that to life so that's VR and AR we're also working on software so work rooms is an example of a piece of software we build to allow folks to have meetings in VR so you put on a headset and rather than a zoom call or a Skype meeting you could get together and actually have the experience of being together in a room it's an avatar who's rendered as your body but you have spatial audio and you can see body movements and you can see hand gestures so rather than sort of seeing faces arrayed in a screen in front of you you have a feeling of presence and we view the feeling of presence as being the essential ingredient for the user experience of something that feels metaverse like and work rooms for us has been the killer app of something that is a really a meaningful reason to put something on in a work context to put a headset on in a work context so we're trying to build some of this software and we're also trying to support a developer ecosystem of developers again across categories including medicine including education including filmmakers who are starting to make 3D content um really just trying to start to seed the ecosystem of content and experiences for VR um and you do have a lot of Australian plumbers training there Enrique that's news to me um Enrique you have um you build a lot of services like Business Services in the metaverse the coolest one that I read about is you're either working on her I've already developed the ability to 3D print an object that's designed in the metaverse will you explain how that works and where you think that will go sure part of what we do in the company is really translate digital Concepts into physical Concepts this is what we have been doing with printing for a long time where we go from a digital photography into a paper photography the same concept can be applied to print and to create physical objects when we have Engineers designing in the metaverse physical parts we can translate them and create a physical object and this is something that we have started to do and for which we already have some applications and this is especially relevant when the power is unit the part is unique and has been designed for a specific person so for example the the case I I brought here today is for gaming these are personalized gaming keyboards where the gamer can design the type of keyboard he wants to use or she wants to use and we can print that and then we send it and he will be or she will be configuring her own keyboard things like that we can do with almost any object almost in any type of material well Paula however how is it being used the most in Rwanda so I think for us and it's really everything that we hear here is how do we create an enabling environment for that to all happen so whether it's some of the policies we're putting in place around you know deploying 5G infrastructure we've had about the limitations around most 5D use cases and I think with of us you have a perfect use case on when a country or you know partners are deploying 5G and so for us it's really looking at what are those foundations for this to happen whether it's building high-speed Broadband networks and and making sure that they're accessible affordable and available for everyone and then the second bit is Around Talent and so these are linked back to whether it come it's companies like meta or it's startups that are building some of these use case applications and just creating the right talent that is going to build solutions that respond to those specific challenges or social economic challenges that we are trying to solve for and what is your vision of how the medical the role the metaverse will play in order you'll have you want to see you see the metaverse as the next great platform and so you want lots of Rwandan companies building tools you see it as a use case and you want you you understand it's going to be actually platforms you are wanting to be using it how do you what is your vision I think there are particular industries that you could we we're already mapping out so there's the tourism industry the creative industry there's also education we're talking about um immersive education experiences I think earlier as we were getting ready for this panel we're just discussing whether it's in the medical field how do you provide that opportunity for those Hands-On skills even before where people can simulate or learn before they can get in the real world right and so these are some of those particular Industries or use cases that we're already mapping out and figuring out what's important which brings me uh to the last part of what are those foundations which is data the policies that need to be in place whether it's around the availability and collection of data the privacy laws around that which are very important if you're really going to simulate some of these experiences um but very particularly I think what we want to do as a government even as public sectors can we also Walk The Talk we've talked about data-driven policy making what does it mean when we're thinking about metaverse use case applications and when I did talk about consultancy I wasn't joking because well we've used data models to sort of predict some of the police interventions that we want uh to create but sometimes it's also useful if you can simulate the impact of these policy interventions and I think it gives more clarity and more confidence in how you're going to push some of the public Investments excellent I will say that we've had actually this panel has already led to something good in the green room I asked I asked I asked Paula what headsets they were using in Rwanda and she said well we weren't using Oculus and Chris why not he said we don't have the permits and she says I do the permits so um just like that so anybody who's invested in metastock is going to shoot up because the sales in Rwanda soon so let's talk to some of the some of the logical questions because they're so interesting right it's this like right now if you're talking about VR obviously air is better but what we're dealing with right now it's like a relatively heavy thing for the most part on your head there's a battery there's heat and you may be tethered you may not be tethered there are all kinds of complex things right and many people have been in the metaverse you maybe feel a little nauseous though apparently nobody has thrown up at weft at the demo yet you may feel a little nauseous when you do it there's so many interesting things that we're trying to solve so it'll be Enrique or Chris or Neil you want to jump in and say something fascinating and disagree with you excellent I I think that that the way uh that billions of people around the world are interacting with fully immersive 3D environments today using 2D screens I see okay and um uh you wouldn't think that would work because I mean we're literally using the wasde keys on a Victorian typewriter keyboard in order to move around uh in these spaces and yet the brain brain is incredibly good at making us believe that we're actually in that space and that's the basis of the game industry so I it's going to be both like the headsets are definitely coming on both VR and AR and they're getting a lot better but but don't discount the importance of of interacting with the metaverse through a two-dimensional rectangle okay I think it's all going to depend on what is the use case and the application there are applications where with some of the 2D Technologies is going to be perfectly fine and if we think about how design had been done for many years designers have been designing 3D Parts using 2D Technologies and has worked and for other Technologies maybe in education as some of the examples you were bringing before a more immersive technology really will make a difference and there are going to be multiple different type of applications and technologies that will develop for for each Chris what's the hardest thing your most interesting thing you're trying to yeah one thing I mentioned to you previously on this is concurrency is an interesting problem we're running up against so if you want like a comedy club experience is one of the is one of the experiences we've been playing around with which is like a comedy club is not just about watching the the comedian it's about hearing the audience laugh and interacting with the audience it's it's a very group experience at comedy club so we've been trying to to try and figure out if comedy could work and the metaverse and it turns out a comedy club with 18 people and it doesn't really work you want a little bit bigger of a room you want to remove around this size so you can hear the murmur and the roar at like a big chuckle laugh and you can hear Whispers And you can hear sort of people around you if you want that to work you need a high concurrency so you need lots of different people who all of whose avatars are being rendered in a headset that's sitting in front of your face where their movements were communicated over the internet none of it can be pre-rendered it all needs to be pretty accurate in timing so that if you're gesturing or responding to a joke or a movement I'm getting it you know in less than a handful of of milliseconds and that trades off against how high resolution the experience is so if you ever ask like well why isn't the metaverse like super high resolution yet well the answer is if you want really high resolution you need to trade off against concurrency if you want High concurrency you need to trade off against latency so we're running up against basically the computer processor and having to start to understand the trade-off space of which of those things in which context is most important that's a little bit nerdy but I think it paints a picture of but is that a problem that inevitably gets solved as processors become faster batteries become more efficient everything starts to work better is it a more probably can be solved with Moore's Law yeah I mean it will be helped by Moore's Law um you also have the the form factor problem which is the computer needs to gives off heat and because the computer is not sitting there with a fan in front of it and is not inside of a device that has cooling you have some physical constraints there that that Moore's Law doesn't get you outside of um but that's just a way of saying we're in the very early version like the Xerox Park stages of the hardware where we're starting to try and figure out how to get around some of the technical constraints but we're also learning about which of these things is most important for the user experience also the ability to upload and download information fast enough from the cloud this is another big limitation that as Chris was saying is really limiting what how many things can be done that's why you need great 5G infrastructure in Rwanda everywhere um so I have a question that's coming from someone who works in this space probably 25 years ago an engineer who said a remark that stuck with me which is the speed of light sucks and and because ultimately no matter how fast you make everything work you've still got to transmit all of this at less than the speed of light and so that's kind of the ultimate ceiling on on how fast this stuff can work but beneath that ceiling there's all kinds of clever things you can do to make it seem like it's faster yeah I mean and this this gets it to me one of the most interesting big questions about the metaverse which is is it like mobile where it's like a whole platform world where everything happens or is it like video games which are a discreet amazing thing but some people use and some people don't right and so does it become a universal layer of our life or is it discrete in particular maybe awesome maybe not you use it for some things or maybe you don't it seems like all of you are saying it's going to become a universal platform which kind of suggests that these problems will be solved pretty well and they're not fundamental problems is that a fair way of looking at it I think we hope so I just think it's a matter of time um I think the internet's a pretty good way to think about the metaverse Because the Internet some parts of the internet are very coherent with each other if you're inside of Wikipedia if you're inside of Instagram you know these are experiences that are self-consistent that have a single designer that have a single server that have a single privacy and identity model where you understand the rules in those systems those systems are interlinked so you can move from Instagram easily to Google Maps you're not confused how you got there you know the link the hyperlink was the thing that got you there and I think part of what doesn't exist yet for the metaverse is what is the hyperlink what is the model of travel from sort of one set of experiences for the other what what identity comes with you does your inventory come with you to use Neil's example are you inhabited by the same person you were in the fitness experience when you go to the to the work experience probably you want to change clothes at least um and these are just some of sort of the the examples of what we don't know yet when we talk about one big amorphous Thing versus lots of different subdivided things is there's going to be some coherence and connectivity between them well that's the you know that's the that's why it's so interesting and why I love having this panel because at some point we're going to figure out what the hyperlink is right or we're going to figure out whether your identity goes with you and it'll be maybe a decision made by a company maybe kind of a collective decision but then we'll have huge consequences down the line right Neil what to you is the most interesting open question about how the metaverse develops it's who's going to develop it um is it going to be um it's sort of the decentralized bottom-up organic growth model versus a centralized top-down approach and each has its advantages and um in in my way of thinking um just it doesn't happen unless you create an open system that's kind of analogous to the early web or the early internet where anyone who's interested can latch on to a shared protocol and begin to to build what they want to build in that world and you know a lot of what people build is is going to go nowhere but but some of it is going to be taken up and um and embraced and used by by large numbers of people so we have to figure out a way to make sure that when that happens the people who created it um don't get screwed and get paid and recognized for the contributions that they've they've made well so can you give some advice to Chris Chris is a top-down company a big important valuable company building out this what should he be doing to match this Vision or is it impossible for a large centralized company like Facebook like meta to do that uh I don't know enough about the internals of that company to uh you've got one of the most powerful people right here so uh I'm not sure how much uh he's empowered or willing to to divulge in the way of proprietary uh data about those those plans but right now the the image that one has of Facebook and other big social media companies is very much that of a centralized you know top downish kind of organization is that to what extent is that um I've coded into the the DNA of what you guys are trying to build yeah I mean I mean one thing about the at least the development of Facebook and Instagram is a lot of it is focused on giving tools to creators and tools to businesses I mean the content you see on Instagram is not content that we created it's content built by tools from people from businesses um the creative tools that we give them is a lot of what makes the experience unique along with some set of assurances around safety and privacy which is where the centrality can offer a big benefit to the user I think with the metaverse we're probably going to see spaces that are self-consistent oftentimes offered by big companies we're going to see spaces that are built by you know startups and shops I think how those interoperate is the most important conversation for making sure that we don't sort of accidentally sort of step on each other's toes well Enrique maybe you can take a crack at this from your perspective would you rather there was kind of a core layer of the metaverse with one big company that sets the rules keeps everybody safe a little bit like iPhone and iOS in which we all put apps and you could sell your software or would you prefer it would be more like Android right where there's a layer with far fewer rules you can put on what you want and lots of different companies doing the hardware or would you rather be completely open what's better for your business which which of the models of future metaverses metavers eye would you prefer for for our business and more open metaverse is better it will allow us to give provide more value then you have to build in a whole bunch of different you know form factors and Frameworks and all that that's still better yes because it all depends about control points if someone controls the full metaverse the ability to add value is much smaller and we have seen this in other parts of the technology World interesting and this makes a this makes a big difference super interesting but it will be very important though is that no matter what how many metaverses we have there is a common layer of privacy and security that all of us can build from and when we were talking about key enablers this is one of the key enablers to make sure that this can be used in a secure way we're also consumers can be sure that their privacy is protected that's a very important technology section that it needs to be developed super duper interesting Paula I would also agree with an open model because you also talking about building capabilities across the board and also understanding that perhaps a one-size-fits-all may not just work and the same way we're going to be trying to figure out the different use case applications that may be unique to every country to every region to every part of the world so the more you make it open the more you Empower more and more people that can build applications for the metabus so Chris let's talk a little bit about how exactly meta is building out to explain the degree to which your I mean they're holding I guess I the degree to which You're Building Hardware that can be used in multiple metaverses built by other people to the degree that you're building software uh that can work on other people's Hardware into which other people can add apps and to the extent that you're dealing with identity of these three different vectors which is the most important to you and where is meta going yeah I mean so for meta the most important is to build experiences for people connecting and doing stuff together I mean that's sort of the mission of the company that's the company's Heritage what does the living room look like what is the what does the conference look like between friends you know what does a phone call look like you know those are if you just look at what we do you know with 80 percent of the company's investment you know it's WhatsApp it's Instagram it's Facebook it's messenger it's those sorts of experiences so from a pure mission perspective that's to us the most interesting question um we're developing the hardware and the operating systems just because they don't exist I mean this stuff doesn't exist in the world we want to see them come into existence we didn't set out to be a hardware company when we were born but as it turns out if you want to start to bring some of these experiences to life sometimes you need to build the hardware and you need to do the research and you need to think about operating systems but it's all completely open I mean if you look at our top apps you're seeing game developers you're seeing social experiences you're seeing messaging experiences you're seeing education some of the stuff we've talked about being built from companies around the world and we want to be a platform that's open to everybody and that's part of being a hardware platform that consumers want to use let's talk a little bit this is such a fascinating debate I love that we just had those last few minutes I thought it was brilliant interesting and degree I'd never I'd never heard before let's talk for a minute about some of the rules that we'll have to make inside the metaverse because we got a lot wrong I think everybody can agree we got a lot wrong in web 2 and they're going to be all kinds of issues I was just thinking when you know the the new devices you can track someone's gaze right that's great for a meeting right but you could tell whether someone's gay or straight in like 30 seconds if you knew exactly where their eyes were going right so the amount of information that you'll have because of how tight these sensors are these systems are is phenomenal so what are the most important rules anybody can answer this question what are the most important rules to get right as we move forward I think one of them is is going to be to to make sure that the information that is shared about myself is the information that I decide to share and when Chris was saying I there is different information I want to share when I'm gaming at home versus where I am in the office I need to be able to make that choice yeah to make sure that my information is protected that's a very important rule and very hard to develop so something that is going to require a lot of work Neil is that something is that that sounds like one of the foundational questions you're trying to solve on your blockchain well the we had to think about this a lot at magically um for the reason you mentioned which is that there's a whole sensor package that is going to learn a lot about you and um the um to make a long story short I I think this is a really prosaic answer but I think it's a a ux problem a user interface design problem I was thinking about this this morning when some warning came up on my iPhone that um I can't even remember what it was but it was one of these like vague security warnings you know and I was trying to track it down I'm Googling you know who else has gotten this warning lately and I get a list of um of people going back like 10 years um most of that information is obsolete um so I'm left in a state of kind of low-lying dread and anxiety and it's probably not based on any real security threat it's based on bad ux which is um uh not giving me the answers I need and not really giving me a transparent view of what which of my data is being is being exposed on the the internet and what isn't um and so um um just the the more complicated these devices and these systems get the the harder those problems become and um you know just having a a screen where you can check a few boxes isn't good enough uh anymore where as these things get even more complicated and harvest all kinds of additional data we're going to need better uh ways to know what's being shared who's being shared with and how to control uh how to know that and how to control it I think I think in addition to the um data sharing Frameworks already even in as it is today it's already complex and so if you think about it in the metaverse I think it gets even more complicated but I think to add on to um what the rest are saying there's also the Privacy aspect and even the way you simplify consent uh what data am I giving for which experience and for where because I think even today when we look at some of the data protection and privacy laws that are in place and the way they are being implemented whether it's uh within Banks or insurance companies or whatever it is it's very complex you have a very long 24-page consent form that no one wants to read Because in that point in time they really need a service and so all they do is just to check a box so how do we simplify it so that people are more comfortable and they understand it's not just about the risk but also they're comfortable with what they are putting out there then the other one I'd like to add is around interoperability because at the end of the day back to ux and the user experience you don't want to have siled use cases where I'm going to be punching in the same data points for almost everything that I want to do in the metaverse and so how do we make it interoperable but at the same time cater for this data sharing nuances that will exist in the middle so we need a fully interoperable totally open Multiverse it's easy to say that would be great the difference in the details what about truth right one of the things we you know everybody's been talking about Chachi PT and large language models and one of the obvious implications for the metaverse is that you're going to have fake characters that look pretty human and you have emotional connection to you talk to say all kinds of and you're not going to know whether it's a real person or whether it's General and they'll be easy to make how Chris how are we going to solve that yeah I mean I think you'll probably have different spaces with different rules um so if you think about the software on your phone like in some contexts you expect in you know I'm in a company context I can trust that people are who they say they are um or I'm out on the open internet and the rules are different I mean my expectations are different what I share is different um I use a pseudonym in some cases and if you just look at these what's up how open are we going to get and that's probably I think how this will play out and I think the key thing to make this work is you know what space you're in and you're never confused about the context yeah so you know if you're in a private thread that's encrypted you know you can share whatever you want you know the person who's operating that service has certified and has sort of made the contract with you that that's encrypted and it won't be shared all the way to a completely open experience you know people learn quickly and can make judgments when the context is consistent and when sort of the signposts are clear yeah I think for new experiences is where you really want to be you really want to over communicate and I think that's how we want to think about some of these experiences on The Meta versus like being really transparent and clear and offering a lot of controls yeah you know as people come into experiences to sort of tread gently into anything that's new Enrique and Neil does that sound right to you yes and and a debate who are having this modern in another station is do we self-regulate ourselves and come together with a certain set of values that we all agree that we are going to follow or will govern governments have to regulate I think that's going to be a big debate over the coming years and I think most of us are on the first on the camp of the first night how do we self-regulate ourselves but we should learn from the mistakes that we have made today so we don't make them again because the danger is much much higher I'm just going to wave vaguely in the direction of zero knowledge proofs which is heavy crypto research area that um sort of impossible to explain uh in our five minutes and 52 seconds but um but people in this room or people who are watching this might want to kind of keep an eye on developments in that space because at least in theory it offers a way to attack some of these problems um it's it's a it's a way to cryptographically divulge some information in a provable way but not all of your information and if you use it right I think it can be a layer in solving some of the the problems that we're talking about fascinating all right well we have as Neil said five minutes left so let's talk about where we see this going in the next five years or ten years why don't you give your most optimistic scenario for how this improves value for humans Paula do you want to start I think I see and particularly if I look at Africa I see a lot of potential when we're thinking about Healthcare in terms of how we provide more targeted Precision medical interventions so there's a lot of potential right there but also even just thinking about the demographics of the African population where you a lot of them you know are in the youth brackets what you see is also the creative industry having a lot of potential in terms of how it can transform that but also how it creates value uh for for many of our youth and I think we've seen so many statistics around what the potential looks like what is key is how do we provide those foundations that are critical to making sure that as a continent we don't remain behind in this Revolution and so you can play a crucial role in making it one of the things we learned from web 2 is the more people are involved in making it the better it is yeah Chris 10 years you can yeah let's do 10. I mean for me it's something as simple as just taking a walk with an old friend or you know your parents in Chicago my parents in Chicago just like actually having them there in front of you instead of making that call having experiences like that to me if you look at if you look at the most important experiences you have on your phone a lot of them are the basics of just like reliable good communication with the people you care about I think bringing those into some more physical experiences is going to be powerful and um it's something obviously there's many steps between here and there you go for a walk you walk down the Promenade your parents are with you on the Promenade or you're you're both you're sort of just you're both out walking wherever you're walking and you're in some shared space Oh I'm imagining you're taking a walk wherever you actually are in real life and instead of the video conference you have somebody there with you who's alongside you or we could go for a run together Nick [Laughter] Enrique I think they're gonna be tremendous changes in many of the key things that we do today from education that's what I was saying communication providing medicine or access to medicine to remote locations all of these experiences are going to be transformed on the other side what we don't know today yet is what is going to be the impact on the Society of all these changes yeah in the same way we have to Todo hata is having still a lot of implications in how kids communicate what are going to be the implications of these new experiences I think it's something we'll have to learn yeah I'm looking forward to being surprised I think anything I can sit here and predict is going to be outstripped by um by by new kinds of creativity that are going to begin showing up um and um so to that point um a lot of times it seems like the internet and the web are just like a big machine for finding incredibly ingenious ways to screw artists and um the uh uh just when I thought we had sort of turned the corner the whole uh uh the AI art thing uh uh up here that I saw just yesterday Getty Images is uh is filing a big lawsuit um to uh uh prevent the further use of its image library from um by those kinds of programs so um so what I'm hoping is that um we can we can find a way to to support the people who do who are needed to do the Creative work uh that'll surprise us all and and create a metaverse that as I said millions of people will want to visit and spend time in let me ask you a question on this so you say anything you imagine will be outstripped by a reality but it's also the case that you imagine the reality we're in 30 years before most of us did so tell me something that you're thinking about not metaverse related but a change to the world that you're seeing coming through Taco that you imagine that might come so we're no longer talking about the metaverse we're talking about everything talk about everything you've got one minute to give us Everything Neil we've got you on stage we need the answer um in order for everyone to not die we have to remove carbon from the atmosphere on a scale that is completely mind-boggling even to people who consider themselves really well informed about this issue and that's going to be the biggest engineering project in the history of the world and I think we'll do it and will succeed um but it's going to be it's going to be a big adventure and it's it's going to be it's going to lead to mind-boggling results I hope not plastic well thank you so much thank you to this fabulous panel thank you to the audience thank you to everybody for watching online I would like to before I wrap I'd like to hand the microphone over to Kathy who has a few things to say where is she there we are all right thanks everyone first of all a big thank you to our amazing moderator Nick Thompson and wonderful panelists Paula Chris Enrique and Neil my name is Kathy Lee I had the immediate entertainment and Sport platform The Forum which houses the defining and building the metaverse initiative that this panel is associated with so we want you to know we're not just talking about it we're actually doing things so we launched the initiative back in May last year with the goal advancing of advancing um consensus among diverse stakeholders and focus on you know two tracks one is much of its governance and the other one is economic and social value creation and today actually we just published the first Outpost by the community that focused on interoperability in the metaverse which this panel discussed a lot about and also consumer metaverse applications and the work will continue to explore industrial and and uh Enterprise metaverses privacy security safety uh identity among other issues so the last thing I wanted to say is the Metros will present significant challenges but at the same time it could be useful immense good as well especially when driven by purposeful and ethical public-private Partnerships so if you're interested please do come and talk to us and enjoy the rest of your time in Davos thank you thank you all right thank you Paul that was so much fun

Channel: World Economic Forum

Views: 24,817

Keywords: sustainable global goals, climate change, sustainability, davos agenda, World Economic Forum, Davos, politics, finance, economy, news, leadership, democracy, education, 4IR, technology, tech, AI, automation, work, future, world news, economist, world, forum, economic, world news today, worldeconomicforum, recommended for you, globalization, robotics, bloomberg, documentary, meta, metaverse

Id: e7l0cJRRPx4

Length: 46min 40sec (2800 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023