Clearly, he hasn’t seen Black Mirror.
In an interview on Wednesday, Microsoft president, Brad Smith talked about the importance of the tech industry taking people’s and governments’ concerns seriously. “Tech is going to have to lean in…with real concrete ideas…even make concessions, so that we can all compromise and build a common platform that better protects people than … the internet as a whole has in recent past,” said Smith.
Smith also mentioned how he wasn’t seeing any proper changes or shifts in the tech industry to solve the real-world problems as much as they would need to in the coming decade and it is more or less paying “lip service to regulation while opposing every government measure.”
With the recent topic of Facebook’s dramatic name change and the headlines surrounding the Metaverse, Smith didn’t seem quite impressed with the hype around this concept of overlaying digital and physical worlds. “We’re all talking about the metaverse as if we’re entering some new dimension. This is not like dying and going to heaven. We’re all going to be living in the real world with people,” Smith observed, before calling for collaboration and interoperability in the metaverse’s development. Well that escalated quickly.
Talking about the recent interest in technological vision, Smith noted that it was important not to let the “hype” obscure the longer-term technology trends. “I think (the metaverse) will be very big… and quite important,” Smith said. “We have to ensure that it protects privacy, digital safety and protects against disinformation, manipulation. We have a lot to clean up,” added Smith.
While early adopters of the virtual reality technology are now criticizing Facebook for rebranding it as the metaverse and taking credit for a concept they did not create. Smith believes that it wont be long till other tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Apple would develop their own versions of the metaverse.
