Читать книгу Step into the Metaverse онлайн | страница 20

With this book, I aim to give you the tools to create an open metaverse so that we avoid ending up in a worse version of today. I hope it will help you navigate the immersive internet, and, more importantly, it will discuss how we can build a metaverse that is open, inclusive, decentralized, and not controlled by Big Tech.ssss1 After all, we should avoid making the same mistakes as we did when building Web 2.0. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, he envisioned it to be decentralized and open, with data to be controlled by the user, but we ended up with silos controlled by Big Tech.¹⁰ Now that we are entering the next phase of the internet, and with the technology ready, we can fix what we did wrong. After all, a closed metaverse controlled by Big Tech or the state will very likely result in a dystopian nightmare that we should avoid at all costs, as we will see.

We will also discuss what can go wrong in the metaverse. Not to scare you from entering the metaverse, but just as cybercriminals are active on the current internet, hackers and scammers will also constantly patrol the metaverse, on the prowl for their next victim. The metaverse will be hacked, and everyone must be aware of how the metaverse can damage society, organizations, and individuals. With more and more devices connected to the internet—it is expected that by 2030 there will be 125 billion devices connected to the internet, with 7.5 billion internet users—there will be ample opportunities for cybercriminals to hack you, your business, and the metaverse, inflicting damages totaling $10 trillion, already in 2025.¹¹ As described in the fictional story, it will be relatively easy for cybercriminals to pretend to be someone else in the metaverse; if someone looks like your sister and sounds like your sister, we are quickly to believe that she is your sister. But even this problem is relatively small compared to a metaverse flooded by harassment and toxic recommendation engines that create immersive filter bubbles, further dividing and polarizing society and harming individuals.