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He coined the term Metaverse in three decades ago but he’s
not impressed by Mark Zuckerberg. Author Neal Stephenson is also far more concerned
about climate change and wonders if billionaire big tech will ride to the
rescue and at what cost?
In conversation with Kara Swisher of the NYT Stephenson discusses the perverse relationship between personal wealth and
climate survival.
He is dismissive of Meta’s conception of the metaverse –
just as VR pioneer Jaron Lanier had been in recently also in the pages of the
NYT.
“The idea of holding virtual meetings where everyone’s
represented by an avatar,” Stephenson says. “The idea of playing a board game
with somebody virtually across the table from you who’s actually far away. That
stuff is really old hat. And so it’s hard for me to make out what they claim to
be doing that’s new, other than maybe implementing those old ideas on a larger
scale for a broader audience.”
While Snow Crash, his 1992 novel was a satire on a virtual
world owned by corporations he thinks the metaverse today is kind of neutral.
“I mean, it’s certainly part of this dystopian world, but in
and of itself, it’s just an entertainment medium. It’s not inherently bad.”
What is bad – and a view he shares with Lanier – is the
business model behind social media today
and tomorrow.
“Every time you input data to a social media site, you’re
giving free I.P. to whoever runs that site. And that can mean clicking on a
‘like’ button or something like that. But even if you choose not to log on for
a day and you don’t interact at all, that’s data in and of itself. And AR/VR
devices are going to have much more sophisticated ways of extracting
information from your usage habits. So they’re tracking your eyes to some
extent, your pulse, all of that stuff.
“A better system is one that would look kind of the way
manufacturing looked after labor unions entered the picture, where the people
who have been contributing their free labor have some kind of collective
bargaining power. And, as such, are part of the process, and helping to improve
the product as opposed to just throwing their data over a blank wall.”
His latest book Termination Shock describes a world
overrun by the effects of climate change and how geoengineering might pull us
back from the brink of armageddon.
Geoengineering is a form of technological interventions in
the climate to blunt the effects of having too much carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere. In theory that could include artificially generated volcanoes which
would spew ash into the atmosphere to block the sun’s radiation and lead to a
worldwide decline in temperatures. Stephenson imagines a billionaire building a
special ‘sulfur gun’ in Texas to achieve the same effect.
“Geoengineering doesn’t get talked about very much because
it’s quite controversial - So that’s kind of where I’m starting from. I’m
saying, what if there was somebody who just didn’t care and kind of came at it
with a classic kind of mentality of big oil, gas, mining, and what would be the
geopolitical fallout from somebody doing that? Because if somebody were to
intervene, it would affect different regions of the Earth’s surface in
different ways. And some countries are going to do simulations. They’re going
to ask themselves, how is this thing going to affect temperature in our
country? How is it going to affect rainfall, and then as all nation-states do,
they’re going to act in their own national interest.”
The billionaire he portrays is purposefully not modelled on
Musk or Bezos. “Realistically, I doubt that it would be an individual
billionaire just unilaterally taking action. But a decade or two down the road,
I can easily see a country making a decision that they’re just going to do this
because it’s going to make things better for that country.”
Even if someone were to geo-engineer the earth’s climate to
materially make a positive difference, the author thinks this is a last resort.
“Geoengineering is just like the tourniquet that you put on
the patient’s leg while you’re driving them to the emergency room. You don’t
apply the tourniquet and then declare them healed. So they’re both important,
but this business of trying to extract unbelievably huge amounts of carbon from
the atmosphere and make it scalable and economically realistic, [needs to] have
that degree of glamour that might start drawing some good brains into it.”
What may be changing with the whole climate debate is the
possibility that the situation that already exists is so dangerous that the
dangers of doing nothing may overbalance the hypothetical dangers of taking
some kind of action.”
His belief is that the short-term consequences for the
planet over the next 50-100 years will be disastrous, but that there’s a
glimmer of longer term hope.
“I’m afraid that we may start seeing those or similar
climate disasters happening. So that’s going to be bad, no question about it.
What I choose to believe is that, eventually, we’ll somehow come up with the
business plan or the set of incentives that will make it possible to realize
your idea of the carbon capture trillionaire, or what have you. And that people
will turn their creative energies and talent for building institutions and
creating things into that all- important project. I hope that 100 years from
now, the CO2 level in the atmosphere will be back.”
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