How BigTech will Monetize our Pandemic Isolation with AI Companionship
But will the Metaverse be good for our mental health?
This is an Op-Ed on the Metaverse and how the internet is increasingly toxic and what it means for our mental health at scale.
Funny how the metaverse is positioned well in a world with an endemic pandemic. What a grand coincidence. The Matrix movie is launching at the same time? You don’t say.
I’m ready to seek love and adventure in the Metaverse, how about you? Just kidding. Or am I? I’m reflecting on an article I wrote for Datascience Central, a company that promised to pay me and have a new website (neither eventually materialized, I got defrauded by a guy called Kurt Cagle).
So what’s changed? We no longer trust the internet and some of us in the Great Resignation, are more isolated than we have ever been in our adult lives. So AI companionship seems to be the star flower in the Metaverse.
How to Create and be the Solution of a Collective Problem
App and video game addition create people that suffer from ‘technological loneliness’. This is like a virus created in us to be hungry for something we didn’t know we need - AI companionship.
Both young people and seniors alike have been more isolated and more on their apps than ever before during an inflation and eviction prone pandemic.
This is like being the victim of a cybersecurity attack trapped in a loop with a digital-dopamine cocktail. We the consumer, are in a vulnerable position.
This is not your regular datascience topic, but funny how our jobs in technology intersect with the behavior modification at scale paradigm that is the evolution of surveillance capitalism.
With omicron we’ll likely be revisiting or staying remote, in our WFM pods. Another tip down memory lane until the summer. This will allow for that beautiful machine, the Metaverse, more time to flower as the solution to what ails us.
The Metaverse is indeed a Silicon Valley playbook. If that’s true, then I’m the last futurist and perhaps, the first Metaverse critic.
The Race to Monetize the Human-AI Interface
Think of how AI-human companionship models could scale in a WFM. There are literally too many use cases to count or imagine:
Improving consumer retail recommendations
Therapy; understanding our moods
More data about the mental health of users
Valuable health data
Augmenting interactions between coworkers in a WFM environment
Improving software integrations e.g. in Microsoft Teams
Improving predictive analytics around emotions and psychological profiling
Improving the recommendation of potential work buddies, mentors or valuable network contacts (integrated with LinkedIn)
Making mental health recommendations
Helping us regulate and improve our social lives
Improving our communication with managers and associates at our company
Improving our ability to find a mate by matching us with a better pool of candidates
Basically AI at the intersection of our mental health is having a breakthrough moment in 2022.
The PR about this trend has been set by Microsoft in 2021. While social or companion robots may sound like something one would only see in a science-fiction movie, conversational AI bots are becoming the norm in Asia, and are beginning to be commonplace even in the United States, the story goes.
Who guides us in the Metaverse? It’s not our peers necessarily, its AI agents. It’s even more immersive behavioral conditioning. It’s Silicon Valley lollipops and Amazon game New Worlds. But is it good for us?
Silicon Valley Dreams vs. Consumer Realities
The movie HER, has inspired a generation of engineers wanting to create a Metaverse that’s governed and led by artificial intelligence. Will it make us happier? Will it facilitate our Zoom like interactions with colleagues?
Will it be the Second Life for our new manufactured mental health ailments? Will it ease the burden of our profound isolation and loneliness? Or are we simply guilty of monetizing the escape from the real world?
Many enterprise businesses use AI chatbots for customer service and product inquiries, but for millions of users today, the AI chatbot is seen as a romantic partner or companion. BigTech must have been watching China and Japan to realize how big the AI-companionship industry would become.
AI-agents would also be the optimal way to data farm our most intimate personality profile, predictive analytics around our behavior and to be a surveillance tool for companies to exploit and profit from our tendencies. The Metaverse perhaps then is a precursor to the Matrix. Human habit is already prone to experience loops, as if we were trying to learn particular lessons of the course of one lifetime.
While the majority of AI digital assistants for the most part do not provide any conversational or companionship benefits today, will the same be said in 2025 or 2030? Advances in NLP are making our digital assistants in smart speakers more intelligent, we’re close now to them being more like friends than automated timers and alarms. As we opt-in to the Metaverse, these AI agents might get a lot closer and more personal.
A Tale of Two Metaverses
Smart speaker adoption in China is in many ways ahead of its adoption in America. Chinese startups such as Xiaozhi and Rokid have also been working on this sector since 2014. And Linglong Tech, a joint venture by China’s e-commerce giant JD and leading AI company iFlytek, released China’s first smart speaker brand DingDong in August 2015. With the bifurcation of the internet, the Metaverse China creates is likely to be more varied and interesting from a consumer perspective. Their advances in in-app services that promotes convenience is evidence of this.
The Metaverse is likely only a pretty name for how BigTech will monetize our technological loneliness. A world where even young people are laying flat and giving up on house affordability or even mating and children. The fall of global fertility is a signal that global consumerism may not work the way it was intended for the next generation. The pyramid scheme will have outplayed its usefulness.
The problem is a crypto metaverse or a VR metaverse has no signs it will truly help us or improve our productivity or optimism about our real-world future. The broader launch of Horizon Worlds is an important step for Facebook, but will the Metaverse be good for our own mental health? Meta is the poster-child for failing the mental health of its users, some 2 Billion on Instagram apparently.
We are turning to AI for the answers and for help finding the right products, will we turn to AI for companionship in the future as well? As knowledge workers, programming students and data science enthusiasts we may even be a part of that.
A.I. as Prophet, Guide and new BFF
A shift in not just a hybrid AI-human way of work, but counting more on AI agents for help in managing our lives and even self-regulating our emotions. AI-human companionship could improve the quality of life for entire generations as we age in an increasingly technological and automated world. That’s the bull case.
AI will definatley augment “talk-therapy”. Why would I need a person for that my GenZ friend tells me. She goes to sleep on her mobile phone, like so many on the eve of 2022 with a new tidal wave of endemic pandemic raging outside.
If the Metaverse is a manufactured AI zone, why are we so excited to live in it? It’s widely believed that Facebook adopted the new moniker (Meta), based on the sci-fi term metaverse, to describe its vision for working and playing in a virtual world.
But the amount of data harvesting possible in such a second life, both corporate and personal, will only magnify our technological loneliness, not solve the problem of our isolation in the real world.
To allow masses of people into a Metaverse, might be the worst mental health decision humankind will ever make.