The Metaverse in the Eyes of Liu Qing and Four Other Scholars: A Runaway That Started with "Boredom"

Author: Daguantianxia Zhi

Zhang Xiaoyu: The Origin of the Metaverse is Human "Boredom"

The metaverse is one of the hottest topics today. I would like to share my perspective on the metaverse and the birth of the virtual world electronic consumption industry. Many people say that the metaverse was born from cyberpunk and the advancements in the electronic industry in the 1970s. However, from our perspective, the origin of the metaverse has a sociological foundation: it is human boredom.

I am not joking. There is a scholar named Zygmunt Bauman, who wrote a book stating that after the advent of automation technology in the 1970s, humanity entered a universal era of boredom.

Image | Zygmunt Bauman

Why? The first two industrial revolutions not only brought about industrial development and economic progress but also formed a work ethic. As long as a person mastered a skill and worked hard, they could earn a decent job, gain respect from colleagues and the company, and lead an enviable life. However, after the emergence of automation technology in the 1970s, our economic growth rate far outpaced the rate at which individuals received wage increases. More and more workers were eliminated by machines, by technology, by computers, and the original work ethic began to falter because one never knew when they would be "optimized" out of their job. Everyone became increasingly caught up in technological and economic competition, and no one believed they could work for twenty years or a lifetime in one company; everyone turned into gig workers. A popular concept today is "slash youth," which actually became popular in the West back in the 1970s.

As the old work ethic collapsed, a new ethic naturally arose: consumerism. Living in this society, no one would affirm your work, but people would affirm your consumption, guiding you to spend money and chase various trends. What is the greatest demon within the consumerist ethic? It is boredom. Because of the fear of boredom and the fear that one's value would not be recognized by others, some people would spend money to purchase external "recognition" of themselves, and such ideas would be welcomed by all capitalists. Therefore, in the age of consumerism, an excellent person is someone who keeps up with trends, who knows which new electronic products will be released today, and what trendy brands will launch new items tomorrow.

Now we have entered a virtual age, where the consumption we pursue in actual products has transcended the material level and entered the spiritual level. Today, I chase a new game; tomorrow, I pursue a social platform; the day after tomorrow, I hope to become an internet celebrity on a short video platform. This has become a good thing; we all feel that whoever does this is ahead of the times, the trendiest person, the most fashionable person. If everyone thinks and hopes this way, where else can we go in the future besides the metaverse?

The metaverse, although it sounds grand, even Facebook has renamed itself Meta, but from the perspective of us social scientists, its beginning is simply two words: boredom. However, we also cannot underestimate the "boredom economy" because this world is not a test paper with standard answers. Perhaps it is precisely within this boredom that the hope for the next era may be born.

We can recall how the current wave of artificial intelligence, seen as a technological trend, emerged. Chinese-American scientist Andrew Ng published a paper in 2009 stating that in the 1980s, there was an artificial intelligence algorithm called Deep Learning, which could not run on the hardware of that time. However, I successfully ran this algorithm using GPUs produced by NVIDIA, achieving a hundredfold increase in efficiency. That is how artificial intelligence became popular. But what kind of company is NVIDIA? It is a gaming hardware company.

Since its founding in 1993, it never intended to become an artificial intelligence company or lead human technological progress; it simply aimed to serve the needs of gamers. Yet, inexplicably, its GPUs drove a new wave of technological revolution in artificial intelligence.

Image | NVIDIA Founder Jensen Huang

Thus, the relationship between technology and civilization is very interesting, rich, and often surprising, sometimes even embarrassing. We did not expect that an economy born out of boredom would ultimately become the driving force of technological revolution. If we carefully observe history, we may find that about 80% of technological issues in history are rooted in civilizational problems, while every significant advancement in civilization, every transformation, may have been initiated by a few technologies that unknowingly set new historical processes in motion.

Because of the complexity of the relationships between these two fields, which have not been previously imagined, yet are so important to us today, we believe this is a topic we must engage in, allowing those who understand technology and those who understand civilization to participate together.

Li Jun: In the Technological Era, How Should We Understand Relationships Between People?

The road to the future has never been smooth. Whatever technology emerges will affect the relationships between people. However, as technology develops, what happens to our relationships? Can they automatically improve with technological advancement? I believe not.

Historically, there was a phenomenon called the Luddites movement, where British workers spontaneously destroyed machines as a means of opposing the oppression and exploitation by factory owners. They believed machines took away their jobs, so they had to destroy them. This may sound ridiculous today, but there is a deeper logic behind it. The fault does not lie with the machines or technology; getting angry at it is useless, and smashing it does not solve the problem. But this is a repeated questioning of the relationship between people as technology develops.

Image | Luddites destroying factory machines

In this rapidly developing technological era, we have actually experienced many instances of disharmony in relationships between people. I wonder if anyone has encountered such conflicts, where we are willing to spend time on mobile apps, enjoy interacting with people on our phones, yet often neglect those around us. It seems that with the advent of new technology, each of us must face the question of how to adjust our relationships with others.

If phones or other electronic products cause tension in our relationships with friends and family, should I throw away my phone? That seems unrealistic; isn't that akin to the Luddites smashing machines back then? If these new technologies inevitably change our lives, then how to realign and sort out relationships between people is the homework we must do next.

Many people may have seen Michael Sandel's public lecture "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?" He begins by discussing the trolley problem, asking if you are driving a runaway trolley and at a fork in the road, would you crash into one person or five? If you are standing on a bridge witnessing a tragedy about to happen, and there happens to be a heavy person next to you whose weight could stop the trolley, would you push the heavy person off the bridge to save the five lives? The moral choices he discusses between deontology and utilitarianism are choices we face in our daily lives.

Image | Michael Sandel

You might say that today, high-speed trains are highly automated, and this problem does not exist; however, this issue has now shifted to autonomous driving. Suppose you can sleep while driving, and suddenly a child runs into the road. When the car must make an automatic decision, should it choose to hit the child or swerve left and crash into an oncoming truck? Can Tesla solve such an urgent problem? I don't believe so.

Some decisions are ones that no matter how intelligent the machine is, it cannot make for us. Such decisions, which must be made and are heart-wrenching, are actually a fundamental state of what it means to be human and the basis of our ethics. We cannot expect machines to solve the most complex and entangled problems in our lives; we cannot push them onto machines, and in reality, we cannot escape them.

As new technologies proliferate, we say that autonomous driving will have ethical issues; what about low-carbon environmental protection? Genetic editing and AI robots are even more so; these new technologies harbor a plethora of difficult ethical dilemmas. The intensity of our inner confrontations with significant choices may be greater than that faced by the ancients in Plato's or Confucius's times, which is a tremendous test for us.

I have no answers, and I believe Sandel does not either. However, these answers may lie in a group of people who have rich, direct, and painful experiences of this era, gathering together to openly discuss and even debate, sharing various scenarios, ideas, concerns, and the good and bad consequences. Together, we can approach this new world brought about by new technologies, discuss how people should interact within it, and reach a consensus on the computational and mechanical power brought by technology. Only then can the harmony between people be properly accommodated; otherwise, the immense power will only become weapons that harm each other, rather than our blessings.

Shi Zhan: The True Metaverse Must Be Based on Blockchain Technology

Teacher Li Jun discussed how technology changes the relationships between people. As relationships between people continuously aggregate, they form a larger order that transcends any individual. We usually understand this order as the state. However, if we look back at the entire history, we find that human order has a long evolutionary logic. Moreover, every technological advancement causes the organizational mechanisms, conceptual systems, legal systems, and so on to evolve accordingly.

In the agricultural economy era, due to the relatively small scale of social wealth, if wealth were to be evenly distributed among people, each person would only receive a very limited amount. Furthermore, this society would no longer have the capacity to gather enough wealth to establish public order.

Thus, the agricultural economy era would correspond to a state of extremely unequal wealth distribution. The lower classes might be impoverished, while a small number of nobles would accumulate vast amounts of wealth. At first glance, this situation may seem very unfair; why must the lower classes work while the nobles enjoy a life of luxury? The problem is that without the nobles accumulating wealth to establish public order, it would be impossible for those below to achieve a secure living state.

Conversely, for the nobles, the vast wealth they accumulate is not something they can spend however they like. This wealth comes with a series of obligations and responsibilities, which include caring for the lives and deaths of their vassals. If they fail to fulfill these responsibilities and obligations, people will feel that they are unworthy of being nobles.

When we reach the industrial economy, the scale of wealth expands dramatically, and survival is no longer a significant issue; people begin to consider how to improve economic development efficiency. To enhance economic development efficiency, there must be sufficiently clear property rights boundaries. To achieve clear property rights boundaries, the responsibilities and obligations that nobles had towards their vassals disappeared in the industrial economy era.

In the digital economy era, the entire logic further changes. Problems that you could not have imagined in the past may now emerge in various ways. Just like what Xiaoyu mentioned regarding the metaverse. Recently, I published an article on my public account "Shi Zhan World," discussing the metaverse. I said that the true metaverse must be driven by blockchain technology at its core, and it must be a public chain; this is the only way to create a truly distributed world.

Image | The underlying driving technology of the metaverse must be blockchain

If it is a truly distributed world, then this space will differ entirely from all economic, political, and social logics we are familiar with today. However, for the metaverse to operate effectively, it requires a series of infrastructures, which are supported by specific hardware production processes.

When our children grow up, the world economic and political landscape we are familiar with today will certainly be different from the economic, social, and political realities they face. A characteristic of human history is that the evolution of ideas generally lags behind the evolution of reality. Often, reality has advanced far ahead while we are still trying to imagine and regulate this drastically changed reality based on the concepts of the previous era.

Therefore, in this era, facing a new world that is emerging, our previous conceptual and logical systems, as well as our understanding of international politics, may undergo profound changes. We must now enter a stage of iteration.

Zhai Zhiyong: We Are Experiencing a Spatial Revolution

If we acknowledge that we are facing a significant human transformation, I would like to invite everyone to think about the question: what is the greatest transformation humanity is experiencing today? I believe it is neither AI, nor big data, nor the metaverse, because relative to another larger change, they are merely one of the scenes.

So today, I want to share my understanding of transformation. My conclusion is simple: we are currently in an era of spatial revolution. Why do I say we are in an era of spatial revolution? Because the division of human space is very simple: land, sea, air, and outer space. I come from Beihang University, and when I first entered the school, I found the name of the school particularly cumbersome. Later, I received education and learned that "air" and "space" have strict distinctions in physics. The atmosphere is called air, while beyond the atmosphere is called space. Legally, aviation law and outer space law are two completely different legal systems.

But have you noticed that the division of land, sea, air, and space is our exhaustive imagination and classification of the physical world? Because outer space includes everything we know beyond land, sea, and air, we place it all in outer space.

In the earliest hunting, gathering, and agricultural societies, all these activities occurred on land, so all our production orders were based on land as our space. However, after 1500, due to the Age of Discovery, our living space expanded from land to the ocean. Think about the changes in human society in the few hundred years following the Age of Discovery in 1500; they far exceed the changes of the previous thousands or even tens of thousands of years. Why? Because our space changed; it was the Age of Discovery that reshaped our production, ushered in a commercial society, redefined our organizational forms, and led to the emergence of modern nation-states.

After World War II, humanity's expansion into space has actually developed in two directions. One direction is the development of aerospace technology, but we often overlook another expansion of space, which is the development of electronic information technology beyond physical space, which has actually shaped a completely new space. This space can be referred to in various ways, such as virtual space, cyberspace, or network space, but today I prefer to summarize it as digital space. The characteristic of this space is that it is not an extension of physical space but a new space created by technology.

If we think from the perspective of physical space, today there are about 192 member states in the United Nations. But have you ever thought about it from a different angle, considering it from the digital space? If we lived in digital space, we would see a few large technology companies and several major countries, while many small and medium-sized countries would have no presence in digital space; they would be insignificant.

As our lives become increasingly shaped by digital space, many countries on Earth become meaningless in this world because they do not produce or consume in digital space. Therefore, all the issues discussed by the three teachers earlier actually require us to replace the space in which we think about these problems.

If we believe that beyond land and sea, we have created a digital space, then when we think about all these issues from the perspective of digital space, many logics will change. For example, human production will certainly change. Shi Zhan often mentions that consumption data on Taobao defines what manufacturers will produce this year. I see that Nike is discussing the metaverse, and they plan to design a shoe specifically for the metaverse.

In fact, we can imagine that if the metaverse is a possible reality, the most popular shoe sold by Nike in the metaverse will certainly return to the real world. If you have such a shoe in the metaverse, you would definitely hope that such a shoe exists in the real world as well.

Image | Nike submits trademark applications related to the "metaverse" platform

Therefore, it is very likely that in the future, we will first create and define in digital space, and then produce it in the physical world. That is, it happens in virtual space and then returns to the physical world.

You don't need to worry too much about how the term metaverse is defined; the metaverse is an imagination of a new way of existing in digital space. In the future, there may be various versions of the metaverse, representing various possible ways for humanity to exist in digital space.

One thing is certain: in the future, humanity will no longer be purely carbon-based life; to a large extent, we will become a combination of carbon-based and silicon-based existence. That is, we will live half of our lives in a digital space, where we will be shaped, influencing our cognition, our lives, social production, and the way the world is organized.

Liu Qing: The Allure and Danger of the Metaverse

I am not an expert on the metaverse, but I have recently read many books and articles and consulted some experts, and I have come to a conclusion. What is the metaverse? The metaverse is an escape. It is an escape from our current unsatisfactory spatial predicament. "Escape" is highly alluring but also carries significant dangers. Thus, as a concept, the metaverse is extremely tempting but also highly dangerous.

Some people say, great! We finally have a way to change those things in this world that I have to endure but cannot tolerate. You flaunt your wealth, I am poor; sorry, I am escaping. In there, I can have the same wealth or even more than you.

In this world, you are very attractive; sorry, in that world, I can also become a handsome guy or a beautiful girl. In this world, I must work 996 and bow down to my boss. In that world, I am the boss; I can even be a king. So in this sense, this is a realization of a very ancient human desire. Everyone knows that long ago, someone wrote about utopia, expressing dissatisfaction with the current situation and hoping for a better world.

Milan Kundera wrote about "living elsewhere," suggesting that one's real life is never truly lived; instead, one is merely preparing for an imagined beautiful life. Always preparing, but this beautiful life never arrives, so real life is not here but elsewhere.

Image | Milan Kundera's "Life is Elsewhere"

But why is it so dangerous? Some say it will lead humanity to a post-human society. What about the real world? Everyone has fled. You may have seen "Ready Player One," where the movie depicts slums, but it doesn't matter because I don't live there. My body lives there, but my spirit does not; my life is not there.

Image | "Ready Player One" poster

But think about it; this is terrifying because if everyone stops caring about the real world, how will the metaverse maintain the basic supply and security it needs? Will people still have children? Thus, a contradiction arises: on one hand, it is highly alluring, and on the other, it is extremely dangerous.

However, my view is that its allure is not as strong as imagined, and its danger is not as high as perceived.

This year is referred to as the first year of the metaverse because I believe two things are particularly important in technology. One is the maturity of blockchain technology, which is a true distributed ledger that allows for a decentralized authority, which is very important.

The second is NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. This means that a person's identity and the uniqueness of their property can be recognized. With distributed computing and ledger technology, along with specific identity markers for your identity and property, the metaverse will make a new leap. That is, it is no longer just the things we used to play in games.

The sense of immersion is currently not well resolved. But technological limitations are not fundamentally prohibitive; they may be resolved in ten or twenty years. But think about it: if you escape to a new world, what can you do?

You might say, I can do whatever I want. The real world presents many obstacles to us, and we lack freedom. But if you are given complete freedom, what can you do? Can we truly break free from all the constraints of the real world and gain complete freedom? Do not forget that obstacles are a component of freedom; without obstacles, there is no freedom. Therefore, there still needs to be friends, social networks, shared lives, principles, and values.

However, two points are changing. First, in the world of the metaverse, we may be entering an era where human intellect is far more important than physical strength.

Your physical abilities may become completely insignificant, while your intelligence, artistic creativity, and imagination become crucial. Thus, there will also be another hierarchy in the metaverse, one based on knowledge and creativity, so it will still have a hierarchy, ultimately leading to a world dominated by elites; you cannot escape this.

Of course, another characteristic of the metaverse is that it lacks centralized power; it does not have the violence of the state, and in principle, you can always exit. However, it does not completely detach us from this world.

We may somewhat return to what Yale University professor Christakis wrote in his book "Blueprint." He stated that in any good society, you will find that it ultimately has eight key elements: care for loved ones, friends, cooperation, social networks, loyalty within the tribe, gentle hierarchies, education, and learning, etc. Therefore, human discontent will be reproduced in the metaverse in another way; it will certainly bring us new imaginations and more freedom, but you are still human, not post-human.

Image | Christakis' "Blueprint"

The second issue is that the metaverse has a significant problem. Just as our spirit is the most important in the metaverse, we still need a physical body to sustain that spirit. The metaverse itself also has a body. It is a digital machine that still requires power, and this power cannot be generated within the metaverse; it is parasitic on the physical world.

The entire structure of the internet still requires real-world support. If we all escape and run away to the metaverse, who will maintain it? Thus, existing centralized power will still impose fundamental constraints on it. State power will not completely be absent. Because if you are too engrossed in the metaverse and escape too far, it can simply cut off your power supply.

In this sense, I believe the bad news about the metaverse is that it may not be as alluring as we think; it cannot heal and save us from all the problems humanity currently faces, especially those of the spirit. This is bad news. The good news is that it may not be as dangerous as we think; it will not lead us to a post-human era of destruction, but it remains a serious issue.

In fact, if you think about it, our interactions and communications as humans rely on perceptual concepts. Our first and ultimate metaverse is actually our real world. (Source link)