While it may seem strange to believe -- unless you're a longtime reader of this blog -- all the wild forecasts and grand pronouncements about the Metaverse that you're reading now across the media have been made before, over a 15 years ago. (Maybe even wilder!)
Back in 2006, I was part of a "Metaverse Roadmap" conference which brought together a who's who of tech experts including virtual world pioneer Randy Farmer and professor/Internet activist Ethan Zuckerman, who all gathered at the famed Silicon Valley think tank SRI International thinktank. The website as still online.
To be sure, many of the great minds gathered there (Ethan notable among them) were skeptical that the Metaverse would be as big and transformative as quickly as the rest of us imagined. But looking at the pronouncements we made back then is a nice exercise in humility. Here are some of the metaverse predictions we made, charactered in terms of future news headlines:
Future headlines from 2011-2016:
- Metaverse citizens secede en masse from nation states
- 50% of US patents based on metaverse collaborative projects; first application of international IP rights regime
- ITU demands influence over metaverse naming system on behalf of developing nations
- Organized crime destroys 10% of virtual wealth from exploitation of protocol; well-known avatar arrested
- 5% of GDP of developing nations based on metaverse economy
That last prediction, cringeingly enough, was made by me. None of these have come to pass, though I suppose you could make the case that a variation of "Organized crime destroys 10% of virtual wealth" has happened with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency.
Speaking of which, many of our Metaverse Roadmap predictions did pretty much bear out:
- Anshe Chung makes 1 million US" -- That prediction from Randy Farmer happened (more or less) just a few months after he made it.
- Leading nations demand taxation on metaverse transactions" -- The IRS posted a policy on that very thing in 2009.
- Al Qaeda cell discovered in Second Life; NSA creates Metaverse Counter-Terrorist Strike Force".
That last prediction was also by me. No Al Qaeda cells revealed in Second Life as yet, but then again, an Al Qaeda expert told me in 2007 that there were indeed salafi jihadist sympathizers in SL. And as the Snowden leaks revealed a few years later, the NSA did indeed have an undercover metaverse team. (Or more likely, still has.)
Read all our predictions here. Looking back, I guess the lesson to take away (along with humility) is it's wise to keep one's forecasts grounded in reality -- even if that reality's virtual.
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