You've probably seen the news just a few weeks ago. Facebook announced that they're changing their company name to meta because they're planning on building something called the metaverse. I don't think enough people are talking about this. The metaverse is going to change my life. It's gonna change your life. So we need to understand what it is, why people are excited about it, and then also how it has the potential for society. As we know it, the concept of the metaverse is this through our history, we have constantly been moving towards more and more engaging mediums. We've gone from text to photo to video. We've gone from reading books and papers to now spending most of our spare time watching on the internet and the metaverse is what comes next. Internet that you are not just looking at through a screen, but that you are inside of taking anything you could think of doing right now.
Shopping, chatting with friends, meditating on ASMR videos on YouTube. And now imagine that in the time it takes you to just snap your fingers. You could be doing that thing in a way that feels real with other people who feel present in a setting that whatever you want it to be a living shared everlasting virtual universe, that's Meta's vision of the metaverse achieved through a combination of augmented reality and virtual reality, which they've said that they will subsidize the cost of to get as many people on this planet to be a part of the metaverse. And in case I wasn't clear is pretty cool. Then there are some undeniable positives, like just to get the obvious out the way the meta will allow you to live out your fantasies. In one single evening, you could be slaying enemies in hand, hand combat.
You could be playing a quiet game of chess on the streets of New York and surfboarding across the tropics of The Bahamas, all with incredible realism. But at this same time, the reassurance that you are safe at home. And on a similar note, there is also a comfort to the idea that you'll also be able to express yourself. However, you want to you. Now, you have a profile picture for your social media accounts, the kind of image that represents you to other people. Well in the metaverse, you won't just have an image. You will have a tar, a fully three-dimensional living depiction of you, put you in the way that you would want to be, did you ever wish you were three into taller? Now you can be, did you ever wish you had a bigger forehead? Now you can have one. You can be any gender you want.
You can be any race you want. You can be any creature you want. Yes, my thought, I choose you. And to be very clear, longer-term, your avatar is not gonna look like these cartoon people. Uh, I think they just use them to make it seem a little bit less creepy. The truth is though matter is also working on the tech to create completely lifelike avatars, fully rendered with every hair on their head. And if we pour on their skin, this is not a game. This will feel like real life. And what I'm saying is that this realism combined with the sheer amount of choices you'll get will allow you to feel like you're not being constrained by the body that you are physically born into in real life. You could be someone with a severe disability in a wheelchair, but in the metaverse forget walking, you could be able to fly.
And if you are enjoying this video, then a sub to the channel would be uplifted on the subject of flight though. You know, I've always dreamed about the idea of teleportation because I'm always trying to be as efficient as possible. My time being stuck in traffic jams kind of horrify me, but in the metaverse, there's gonna be a Relic of the past. Each person will have their own home space. You create the aesthetic that you want others to see, and then you can invite people to just appear within it. Wait, what the teleportation will be the equivalent of just clicking a link in your browser now, practically instant. And you, if you compare that to the concept of real teleportation of literally deconstructing every atom in a person's body at one point in time and then recreating them somewhere else. I think one of those two options is more likely to be the future of transport.
And it's not the real one. Besides if we are moving towards the metaverse and if all interactions are gonna happen virtually anyways, we wouldn't even want to physically teleport. We want to be at home with our headsets. Oh my God, I'm lost, man. And it does not just travel. That will speed up massively. It's also learning, you know-how now we look at libraries as really old fashioned, because like, why would you try and find out info from a book when you can Google exactly what you want? Well, the metaverse is going to make Googling. It seems just as old-fashioned, you'll be able to learn about things by just touching them or even hell looking at them. And to be able to obtain that information in a more visually interactive way than we've ever seen before, you'll be able to travel, not just to any place, but also to any time the industrial revolution, ancient Rome, the dinosaurs, being able to experience living with the dinosaurs.
Can you imagine, and Hey, if you can learn faster, you can also do things faster. I think the better we are going to make us even more productive. Take the current situation. A lot of us now are working from home. I mean, to be honest, I never really had a proper job, but you know what I mean? Well, in the metaverse we'd still be doing that, but it could also mean that you could always be in your most optimal environment, whether that's surrounded by others or completely alone, whether that's in an office in outer space or sitting in a magical jungle, whether you're surrounded by Beethoven symphony while you work, or just like the sound of silence, it's up to you. Plus the tech with allowing us to input faster. A lot of us have grown up writing everything with pens. Nowadays, people are shifting to tapping things on keyboards in the metaverse we'll be using voices, gestures, and even making things happen by just thinking about them.
I'm not joking. Meta is working now on electromyographic or EMG input devices, which can do detect and intercept the impulses in your nerves. The signals from when your brain is telling, for example, what your fingers, what they should be doing and translate those signals to the corresponding actions in a virtual space. Or in other words, you'll be able to send a message to someone by just thinking about moving your fingers. You won't even need to physically move them. And this metaverse hardware, it's not as far off as you think. Fun fact next year, meta is coming out with a headset currently being codenamed project Cambria, which in one fell swoop will solve two of the biggest current barriers to the metaverse one that it will be comfortable enough, and the display will be sufficiently close to the resolution of your eyes that you won't feel like you're wearing a headset.
And two it'll be able to track your facial expressions in real-time, which if pulled off correctly will mean you'll be able to have conversations with realistic body language in a virtual space. So, uh, these are the obvious benefits from metaverse experiences, expression, teleportation, knowledge, and productivity, but there's also a couple of potentially unexpected ones like the environment. See producing real products is inefficient. The production of a real car, for example, can quite easily result in 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the production of a virtual car. You name a number one and that gap in emissions only gets greater. When you start to talk about potentially using that car, I get that the idea of a virtual car sounds very odd and not at all comparable, but think about it in the metaverse. We have teleportation, both virtual cars and physical cars are just as useless as each other.
You'd only drive on if you are specifically fancy to drive, not actually to get anywhere in particular. And so what I'm saying is that it's quite likely that the more users that join at first, the more we shift towards purchasing digital goods and digital experience. And so the fewer planes, trains, cars, ships delivery vans we're going to use, and thus our impact on the planet might well, nose dive. And the final kind of exciting thing is that the metaverse will also be a new economy. The meta is developing a store within it called horizon marketplace, which is not just them selling stuff to us, but a platform where anyone can be a seller. You could create virtual clothing, you could craft a new virtual experience, and charge people to try it. You could design a completely new world, anything, and you are no longer constrained by the physical materials.
You can get hold of only your imagination and your ability to code. And I've got no doubt that every forward-thinking brand will also make sure that they have a presence here. Because I mean, if we're spending all our time in the metaverse and that's where we're going to meet people and appear to others, then our virtual appearances and our virtual homes are gonna start to matter more than our physical ones. The point is in a new world, you will also have new opportunities to earn. And if you're wondering, well, how do you make sure people don't just buy one copy and then redistribute my, my creations, my best guess is that transactions will largely happen through cryptocurrencies. I've got a full video explaining those up there, but essentially the idea is that crypto is built with the ability to verify the authenticity of virtual goods, or in other words, it already has the systems in place to be able to trace the ownership of them.
So honestly, this whole metaverse thing has a pretty great sales pitch. The ability to be together with anyone, to be able to teleport, to anywhere, to be able to create and experience anything. But it's also pretty scary there, four key things that I think when need to be very mindful of like data, let's be honest. Facebook has had a pretty Rocky relationship with how it's handled user data in the past. And remember that's from an era where we were still somewhat separate from our digital selves, but in the case where we become our digital selves, where our profiles are not just a few holiday photos that we choose to share, but everything we do in this metaverse, we're going to have to put a whole new level of trust into a company that doesn't exactly reveal how they're using this information. We're talking about data collection on the level of measuring your brain activity.
You wouldn't even give your family that kind of access, but this is a future where you could be giving it to meta, but something potentially even scarier than the data problem is that we are talking about how companies will be able to create virtual experiences that feel indistinguishable from real ones, right? I mean, on one hand, that is a miracle but isn't it also a little bit alarming. We are already being shown predominantly only the content we agree with and the content that we want to see. But if you take, take that concept into the realm of the metaverse, we could completely lose touch with it. What's real, the power to curate, not just your newsfeed, but your entire world now means that if you hate seeing homeless people, well, your metaverse can pretend that they don't exist. If you didn't think COVID was real in your version of the metaverse, it wouldn't be you.
If you were only of one tech brand and hated the rest in your metaverse, that's all you'd need to see. You won't even really know if what someone is saying to you is actually what the person behind that avatar is saying. Or if it's just what meta wants you to hear, because it will keep you on the platform for the longest, or let's say one of your friend's accounts got hacked. You could be sitting in the same room as a cyber, and you wouldn't even know we'd, affectionately be surrendering control of our entire sense of reality to other parties whose incentives are nothing to do with our best interests. Just making sure that I guess you see as many adverts as possible, but there's more, you might not know this, but one of the biggest challenges of running a social media platform is actually in the moderation of it.
If Facebook already has entire warehouses filled with people who are just scanning for the absolute worst things, people are posting hate speech, terrorism, exploitation, and just trying to prevent as much of it as possible from spreading. But it's one thing to try and police written to X, where you can very easily scan for potentially harmful keywords. If you want to carry on this moderation in something as complex and as open as the metaverse, then they're gonna need to do it in an incredibly invasive way. They're gonna have to be watching exactly what tattoos people's avatars have, what the writing on their clothing is saying. Every single item you design or purchase for your home space, every action will have to be monitored if they don't want it to turn into chaos. Okay, these are all concerns. But do you wanna know what my most fundamental fear is about the metaverse it's that we talk about all the cool things that will enable our avatar, that they'll be able to do what they want.
Look, how, how we won't experience anything, but it all leaves a big question about what happens to us at the end of the day, right? As incredible as technology is, we are still people. We still need to eat healthily. We need to drink lots of water. We need to work out, meet a partner, have a family. And I'm not convinced that the metaverse is going to help us continue to do that. I think the metaverse is effectively the next generation of social media with all the positives and the negatives of those platforms taken to the absolute extreme you'll experience. The highs of immersive shared experiences like never before, but also harassment in a way that feels far closer and more uncomfortable misinformation, that's more convincing, and activities that are more addictive. There's being pitched to something that will sit alongside our real lives, to compliment them.
But I can't see a world where it wouldn't become our lives in a world where something of this power exists. You won't be able to just pop off your headset and carry on with your day as normal. The metaverse will feel no more optional than the internet does. Now. You'll need it for work to get the required productivity you'll need of social opportunities, cuz that's where all your friends are. You'll need it because relative to your life in the metaverse, your real-life will kind of suck. Can you imagine every night taking off your headset and going from this handsome prince, who's just won the approval of your entire clan on a lactic voyage to then seeing your actual self in the mirror and remembering that you are not that person, that you don't have the perfect face and body and that you can never do the things that your avatar can do?
The incentive won't be to start looking after our real selves because we can never get there. It'll be to put our headsets back on and spend even more time in the metaverse. And I think this will apply to jobs too. The metaverse video shows us an example of what I can only assume is an architect who in the metaverse can productively design buildings with his team. But if you think about it, assuming the metaverse becomes what it's setting out to, we are not gonna need the buildings that they're designing. Matter of fact, in a world where you can just tap a few keys and have whatever you won't appear in front of you. Surely most people won't jobs in the realm of technology. It's increasingly possible for more things to be done by the few people who know how you won't need engineers, you won't need gardeners.
You won't need window cleaners. You'll just need people with ideas and people who know how to turn those ideas into virtual goods. We talk about the future as driverless cars and hyper-connected cities. But if the metaverse takes over, we are not going to need cars. We're not going to need cities. All we need is a good internet connection and a seat. Okay? The last thing I'm gonna say about this is that the metaverse is not one thing. That one moment is not there. And then suddenly it is, it's not a question of if we're going to get there or how we're gonna get there. The metaverse is here, it's now. And it's only going to keep evolving towards what the company meta is talking about. Just take a fortnight. This started as a game, but it's now so much more than that. It's become the platform on which a whole generation of people hangs out.
They go shopping in. They even attend concepts. In the fun fact, I recently got some graphic design work done with my channel, and the guy I hired asked for payments, not in dollars, but fortnight V bucks, because to that person buying in-game items was more valuable than buying real-life items. The metaverse is not just a Facebook thing. It's the universe that all of these big tech companies together are slowly but surely pouring tens of billion dollars into creativity together. Facebook is just the first one to make its part in it official. I think it's an inevitable future, but there is one thing that I think could ease a lot of my concerns about it to keep the metaverse open source. I E to make sure that all the code of how it's working remains public. So that'll mean fewer concerns about your data.
Fewer concerns about spying. It'll be less about trusting us. Your personal information is safe. More like I can see that my personal information is safe. And while this will probably make development slower, because, with open source projects, there is much less of a profit incentive compared to keeping your secret source behind closed doors. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that will give us more time for the regulation and people thinking to catch up with the technology itself. Well, on the note of data though, you probably know the holidays are coming up on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We're all about to be buying gifts from lots of different stores, signing up to lots of different services, and handing out our data like it's everyone's birthday. But let me ask you a question. Do you have any idea how many companies hold this data more importantly, how to get it back?
A lot of people assume that at the point where they delete an app from their phone or deactivate, one of their social media accounts, that their data just disappears. But the truth is unless you specifically write to a company and exercise your, to be forgotten all your sensitive, personal data address, phone number, everything will just sit on a growing number of servers from every single thing you've ever signed up to. And while the more servers, the higher, the risk of a leak, and this is what mine is trying to counter the sponsors of this video and their app gives you a visual summary of exactly which companies know what about you and then how to get it back. So if I sign up with my email address on say, mind.com, I can see that, oh dear 751 companies have my data. So the idea is that I can just click on any one of these companies. It'll tell me what type of data they hold, the risk level, for a data breach. And then I can just hit reclaim. If I decide that I don't want them to have it any longer and that's it with mine, I can send the data, erase your request to that company from my inbox. So I'll leave a link down below to find out more it's completely free to use.