A 15-minute report broadcast nationwide on La 1 and on the 24 Horas channel on 4 June 2022. Pedro Mujica opens by defining the Metaverse, with several more interventions in the final minutes, closing the program with a conclusive phrase: «Yes to Technological Progress, but with Reflection and Restraint».
Metaverse is the buzzword ever since Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, fired the starting gun on the race to dominate the evolution of the internet, with a stop in Spain: his new number two, the Spaniard Javier Oliván, has announced the construction in Madrid of the world’s first Meta Lab and a large data center in Castilla-La Mancha to develop the priority project of the company, now renamed Meta.
In the virtual universe we are being promised, it will be possible to play, work, meet friends, go to concerts and travel without leaving home, just by putting on a pair of virtual reality glasses. Advances in virtual reality and augmented reality, the possibility of certifying ownership of a token or virtual object through the new blockchain technology, and the expansion of 5G have made the metaverse a shorter-term project than was thought. It was the star of the return of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where it became clear that mobile phone operators have jumped on the bandwagon of a business that, according to international financial analysts, will move more than 750 billion euros in 2024, and a trillion in 2030.
Billions of euros have also been invested in buying plots in these new virtual worlds, to the point that experts warn that the next real estate bubble may burst in the metaverse. But there are still many unknowns about the metaverse: Will it be an open digital ecosystem or an oligopoly? Will it widen the digital divide? Will it cause addiction?
To answer some of these questions, Pedro Mujica took part, as a Humanist Technologist and promoter of the IANética Project. As we have set out in our technohumanist manifesto, the Metaverse can be one of the great revolutions of Humanity as long as it is placed at the service of people and not only of investors.
Technohumanism is the union of Thought and Technology, arising from the application of the ideas and theses of the Human Disciplines to the Disruptive Emerging Technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Ensuring that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is, first and foremost, HumanoCéntrica (Human-Centered) means that policymakers, technology leaders and citizens must collaborate and co-create systems based on shared human values. The Metaverse, as the new evolutionary form of the Internet, must be developed following these principles, without which any artificiality we create will make no sense.
Link to the full report «Rumbo al Metaverso» by RTVE Informe Semanal: https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/informe-semanal/rumbo-metaverso/6575721/
Originally published in Spanish on IANética (2022). English version prepared for TecnoHumanismo.
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