Ghosts you can only see when interest rates are below 1 percent and companies need somewhere to throw all the free money to attract investor attention.

Am I the only one that got "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" vibes reading the headline?

So I think Facebook in particular had pretty grand plans for meta verse that were likely more inspirational than practical. The technology is cool, but it isn't something you'd want to use for more than an hour AI has a lot of potential, we are exploring the possibilities of AI in a lot of places, I think it can change the world in ways we don't understand similar to how the transistor changed the world in ways we didn't comprehend at the time. But, like Meta, we need to practical and not science fiction i

Smartphones (when the iPhone was released I think) took of like crazy, and people who got in early made a lot of money. I think this is because a majority of the US, and significant portion of the world, population had cellphones. So going to smartphones was a simple evolution of something everyone already had. AR requires people walking around with goggles that are nothing like anything we already have. AR may grow into a major thing in the future, but it does not look like something that will jump into the mass consciousness like smartphones did.

You can still find idiots who pay to "own" one or several of a million pixels. Why do people work at all?

Metaverse combines the disadvantages of physical stores with the disadvantages of online shopping. It is like an online store with stare cases: absolutely pointless.

I really don't get why everything thinks it is a "great opportunity". It does not solve a problem that people have.

by chief automation officers. Whose job is to periodically assess the automateability of various tasks within the company.

Those of us who helped make the metaverse possible have mostly stopped working on it. Neil's vision has been buildable for decades, but the hardware gatekeepers are more interested in building the IOI version of it from Ready Player One. Until that changes there are a few great games, but no new commons...

The invention of the personal computer and internet created vast amounts of wealth and profoundly changed society, both for good and bad.

Investors got addicted to the search for "the next big thing".

Pundits, futurists and hypemongers played their part, sometimes honestly believing their predictions, sometimes just stoking the fires of the hype train.

VR has been a fertile ground for speculation.

I remember a time, years ago, when I worked on a well funded VR project for a major corporation.

Our initial attempts were mediocre. I remember the president of the company saying this after one of our demos, "don't show this to anybody else, it makes us look bad". We persisted, and after millions of dollars and many, many hours, released a small, mediocre result.

VR is hard, really hard, even if you believe it's hard, you still haven't uncovered the deeper layers of difficulty, and the layers below that.

I suspect that someday, VR might work and be useful, but the metaverse is yet another expensive, laughably absurd failure

Even to me as a VR enthusiast, the Metaverse is completely unappealing. And VR/AR itself has very little to do with it.

The internet would not be where it is today if it was managed by a single company that dictates everything that happens in it. It took millions of independent people and entities decades of work to develop personal computers and the way they connect to each other into a form where the value of an expensive box of computer chips becomes undeniable and even your grandparents can't live withou

Once they get to a certain size, they all want to swallow the whole of human life and be the "one-stop shop" where everything you do pays taxes to them. The problem is that's really hard to do well enough to justify even a tiny fraction of it, and strategies based on arrogance are rarely quality-focused, so they tend to implode sooner or later. Guess this bullshit was just especially transparent.

This is the same thing that happened with Second Life. Big companies got suckered into believing that there was a future for digital versions of their products. Almost nobody cared and everybody lost money. Itâ(TM) happening again with The Metaverse. Even kids who are used to spending their allowance on digital clothes for video game characters donâ(TM)t care about The Metaverse. How is there nobody at Meta who watched this happen the first time trying to keep it from happening again?

To greener pastures. These people deliberately capitalized on a hype train that they should have known was a flash in the pan. If your company is looking for a new executive, and they have CMO on their resume, you might want to steer clear. If they're willing to risk tons of money and energy on such crazy side shows, they'll do it again, to your company.

These people clearly have a vivid imagination. Surely, they now believe that AI will take over the world, becoming the next Metaverse. It only makes sense that they would gravitate to such positions.