Ahmed Shareef

Internet 3.0 the metaverse

The simplest way to understand the metaverse is to view it as the next version – or augmented reality version – of the websites we have today. We are just moving from web 2.0 to web 3.0 – AKA Internet 3.0, which is called the metaverse.

In this article, we will briefly look into what are the pros and cons of a few topics of the metaverse, insha’Allah.

Games

Some games pay real money for the winners. The pay is really good. Much better than a normal government employee’s pay.

To get paid, you have to play it for an insanely extended period of time, or you have to buy characters that are worth a lot of money to take part in the game. And the character you buy won’t stay with you all the time. It will get retired or unusable after a certain time. That means you have to win that many games to reach the money worth you spent on it before it retires.

Jobs

You can find jobs from the metaverse. People have different businesses in the metaverse. They will be looking for employees and if you are hired you might have to work from morning to evening in the metaverse.

Unlike normal remote working, where you can go on and off, in the metaverse you have to be active all the time. Even more, you might not be able to interact with people at home as well. That depends on the job description.

Lands

People are investing billions of dollars in purchasing lands in the metaverse. These lands can be used to build whatever they imagine they want. However, spending billions on land, means they would have considered a way to make a profit out of it.

Different places can be developed in these lands. For example, parks, museums, cities, offices, game stations, etc. Currently, most investments are going towards gaming. People are earning much more money than they can earn from a government office job.

Events

Some are purchasing these lands to place live events, and they are simply calling in millions of people to that place from around the world, which actually will be a great benefit in that sense.

However, all the money is spent on making a world that is yet quite limited to rich people. The majority are unable to afford a device that can take them to the metaverse. This means it is worth considering before investing at the moment.

Meetings

Everyone learned about online meetings during the pandemic. It stayed as a new normal for many offices post-pandemic. Metaverse is going to take this for the betterment with much more improvement.

In the metaverse, online meetings are not limited to boxes. People will be present in the same place while they are connected remotely. It feels more like a real scenario than the Google Meets and Zoom meetings.

With this, I don’t see a big disadvantage, except that in my opinion, a physical meeting is always better and more productive for big discussions while I prefer online meetings (not metaverse type) for little discussions.

Depression

As you can imagine from what we have discussed so far, the metaverse is going to be the next cool thing.

People will have their avatars. The avatar can be however they wish. It doesn’t have to be anything similar to real life. For this, people will be spending whatever they could, to stand out in the metaverse community.

Hence, people will start preferring the virtual world over the real world, which might cause an addiction. This leads the user to depression and eventually will start hating real life and family.

Cyberbullying

Currently, with Facebook and other social media platforms, users are increasingly under pressure of being a victim of cyberbullying, leading to suicidal attempts. Metaverse is going to take this to the next level.

Emotion

In the metaverse, people feel their avatar as themselves. They have an attached emotion toward the avatar. Once, a gang raped a woman’s avatar and she was complaining about the emotional pain she was suffering due to that. This happened a few months back.

This is not the end. As people can become anything they can imagine via their avatar. Men can be women and vice versa. This will lead to an increase in homosexuality.

Parents

Nowadays, screen time is a big deal for most responsible parents. They are looking for alternatives to replace and replicate the screen time of their children. In this hard time, we are now going to face the ultimate level of entertainment moving from their hand to their eyes (i.e with the oculus).

We should be extra careful if we are letting our kids play in the metaverse. It can open the path to destruction or even creativity and disruption. It can open opportunities for future careers or complete ruination. Monitoring metaverse activities will be harder than monitoring current social media activities.

If you have a piece of advice please at mail@ahmedshareef.com