The launch follows a summer of hype for the Metaverse, an immersive online experience across tech platforms, which Mark Zuckerberg told Verge in July was Facebook's overarching goal on FB. Jensen Huang, who said a month before, a Nvidia NVDA CEO, said that the Economy of the Metaverse will someday exceed that of the physical world.
However, the metaverse raises a scary question about surveillance, since participants will conduct everyday conversations and activities in a company-owned setting online, says Kai-Fu Lee, an artificial intelligence expert.
In a new interview, Lee — who worked as an executive at Microsoft MSFT, Google GOOG and Google AAPL — acknowledged a lot of excitement about AI technology in the metaverse. He warned that the new frontier could compromise user privacy.
In the metaverse, there is a scary and maybe a little bit tricky question, says Lee, Co- Author of a new book entitled AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. The programmer of the metaverse, the company that builds the metaverse, will actually listen in and watch every conversation. That on the one hand can make the experience very exciting because he can see what makes you happy and give you more of that, he adds. Privacy concerns associated with AI have risen to the forefront as a major issue across the world. On Wednesday, the United Nations Human Rights chief advocated for a moratorium on the use of AI, citing applications like government deployment of facial recognition software.
AI technologies can have catastrophic, even negative, effects if they are used without sufficient regard to how they affect people's human rights, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said Michelle Bachelet
Kai-Fu Lee has been at the center of artificial intelligence development for decades, since he helped develop speech recognition and automated speech technology as a student at Carnegie Mellon University.
Since 2009 he has been the CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a tech startup in China with more than $5 billion in assets under management.
Despite privacy concerns, Lee said the use of artificial intelligence in the metaverse will help achieve a real life simulation — while adding otherworldly elements that boost entertainment value.
In the truly natural metaverse, we will be conversing using our body language and our language, and AI can of course provide an ability to understand that, he adds.
There will be people that are themselves, but there will also be other beings that you know, animal friends and aliens and games and other people, he says. None the Facebook Board's Trump decision shows Big Tech is 'way too powerful': Elizabeth Warren has come up with a big tech strategy that is already in production, but not true: "Not...