Raph Koster’s real talk about a real metaverse. “I’m here to just share some high level lessons, some mistakes that have already been made, in hopes that it saves you from making future mistakes. We’ve had online worlds for 44 years, and any vision of the metaverse is built on top of the idea of online worlds, whether you call them online worlds, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), virtual worlds social worlds — it doesn’t matter…I would urge everyone here because I do believe everyone is idealistic. Everyone has high level dreams about what this can be. I urge all of you who are listening to this, please go back, look at the history, learn from it. Find the ways to get around these key problems.”
Johann Hari: “You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That’s it. This is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years. It’s not going to change on any time scale any of us are going to see. You can only think about one or two things at a time. But what’s happened is we’ve fallen for a mass delusion. The average teenager, according to Professor Larry Rosen’s research, now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens when scientists get people into labs is they get them to think they’re doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover is you’re not. What you’re doing is you’re very rapidly juggling between your tasks. You’re going from, what did it say on WhatsApp, what’s this on Netflix, what’s that notification I just got? You’re switching, switching, switching…When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you’re trying to do much less competently.”
Jonathan, Lord Sumption: “Democracies depend on two things. They depend on an institutional framework, and they depend on a cultural background. It isn’t usually the institutional framework that fails. That’s still there. What fails is the cultural background, which is the desire of people to make it work, the desire of people to respect plurality of opinion, and to accept that sometimes they can’t get their way, however important the issue and however right they think they are. In most countries which have lost their democratic status, the institutions are still there, there are still elections of a sort, there are still parliaments—but they are largely meaningless because the culture that sustained them disappeared.”
