"Braindancing in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #50
January 22, 2025
Dear person reading:
Long time no see! What a year 2024 has proven to be, full of surreal news straight out of sci-fi dystopia, and top contenders for the weekly WTF.
What about the metaverse’s whereabouts? Can we even still call it metaverse, without risking scolding looks? And while I will continue to argue that the metaverse murder mystery has a plot twist, (being not dead but transitioning its technology convergence through a sober period of “quiet metaversing”), fair is to say that hype turned its adoring eyes to a new darling.
But has not also GenAI's summer romance transitioned into a bitter autumn? Bubble burst forecasters are already placing bets on the “winter is coming”, while on the other corner techno-delulus are proclaiming AGI’s is (again) around the corner.
Meanwhile, new buzzwords are in. AI Agents are on the rise, promising a boon on personal assistance (but no promise that they won’t spy on you!).
Trying from this small corner to make sense of all this convergence, and aligning it with the themes of my next book, “This Week” will be from now on “Braindancing the Metaverse”.
Onwards with your weekly curation of selected news and policy insights, about the metaverse, AI, crypto, neurotech, and gaming.
And although 2025 seems grim and dystopic, with free speech co-opted and democracies bending the knee to corporations, after the announcement of the ceasefire in Palestine, I write for the first time with a bit of hope for humanity in a long time. May 2025 let us live long, and prosper 🖖
👁️🗨️Tech pulse:
“Techno-Stars and Stripes Forever" is the new black.
Big tech has entered its mojo-dojo-casa-house era. At this point I guess we all have seen the inaguration (dooms)day photos, with the “technoligarchy”red-pill-posse in prominent display of support, ready to reap their investments in presidential shares.
As expected, Musk n*zi salute on full display for the world to see, was met with olympic-level- mental gymnastics to provide excuses for it. The richest man in the world, owner of a powerful machine of disinformation, and now pushing to “make Europe great again” while backing Germany’s far right candidate . No wonder why he is upset, as the EU has launched an investigation into X/Twitter recomendation algorithm.
In August 2024 The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a US-based human rights and civil liberties group, found that Musk's "false or misleading claims about the US elections" were viewed by nearly 1.2 billion times on X.
Worth is remembering that this is the same think-tank that Musk took legal action against in the past.
In his rebranding tour as a real boy, “soon-to-be-divorced Zuck” is fully on board in the train leaving to far right lands, draging us all along in his mid-life (mid-robot?) crisis. From announcents of anti DEI measures and policy changes in Meta’s platforms (more below), to cringe inducing declarations that the office needs more “masculine energy” and the workforce has been culturally "neutured."
For reference, in WIRED's latest issue, they focused on finding out who controls the world's wealth. What did they find? Men. From Trump, Musk, and Putin to the CEOs, crypto schmoes, and solar bros, meet the patriarchy controlling the purse strings.
On the same tune, OpenAI announced “Stargate Project”
In a language that is giving cold war vibes, the company annouced investing in critical infrastructure for AI leadership for the US.
More on => openai.com
Meta confirms it will keep fact-checkers outside the U.S. ‘for now’
With a new administration entering the White House, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced earlier this month it would replace its fact-checkers with a community notes system, similar to what’s in place at Elon Musk’s X.
“We’ll see how that goes as we move it out over the year,” Meta’s head of global business Nicola Mendelsohn told Bloomberg in a report from Davos on Monday.
More on => techcrunch.com
FTC sues John Deere for ‘unfairly’ raising repair costs on farm equipment
The FTC and attorneys general for Illinois and Minnesota filed suit today in a long-running fight for the right to repair — a battle that’s become more heated as Deere increasingly incorporated software into farm equipment. The complaint accuses John Deere of “decades” of unlawful practices that forced farmers to turn to the company’s own network of authorized dealers for repairs.
This is a follow up to the right-to-repair saga, with FTC opening public consultations in January 2024.
why it matters: arguments about the right-to-repair and corporate tactics that lock down consumers can be extrapolated to digital spaces created as software monopolized walled gardens, and particularly, relevant for a push for the existence of “first sale” rights on digital goods (“digital exhaustion”).
‘Free Our Feeds’ campaign aims to billionaire-proof Bluesky’s tech
A group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates has launched a campaign to safeguard social media from greedy digital barons.
With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square.Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.
More on => https://freeourfeeds.com/
🤖I Am Not A Robot: AI news
American Psychological Association Urges FTC to Investigate AI Chatbots Claiming to Offer Therapy
In the letter APA manifests “grave concerns about “entertainment” chatbots that purport to serve as companions or therapists, especially because some of these technologies are available to the public without appropriate safeguards, adequate transparency, or the warning and reporting mechanisms necessary to ensure appropriate use and access by appropriate users. Incidents are increasingly coming to light where someone struggling with mental health issues, often an impressionable adolescent, has experienced negative impacts from interactions with a publicly available AIdriven chatbot due to a lack of appropriate safeguards”
More on => futurism.com and mashable.com
why it matters:
With AI Agents becoming more entrenched with consumer technology, business models based on deploying manipulative and data extractive tactics, paired with programed obsolescence that phases out serivces the moment they are no longer profitable, all of this is heading out to create an ecosystem of what I call “emotional attachment-as-a-service”. What is this? basically, manipulative business models in human computer interaction that take advantange of users, creating an emotional dependancy on a product, that can not be owned but subscribed to (a.k.a. have you paid your monthly subscription to your partner?).
These business models are part of a bigger problem, in an increasingly digital society, we are not able to “own” digital goods (in the sense that you can not resell the digital assets that you “bought” or move them across platforms, something that content portability and interoperability in the metaverse should be posed to solve). Instead, we are limited by the Terms of Service and software licences, and the current legal doctrines that do not extend “first sale principles” to digital goods (aka, you can resell a physical book, but you can not do this with its digital counterpart).
When you pair these data extractive business practices, with generative AI and artificial agents able to adapt and respond in real time to emotional cues, you get in a very dangerous territory, prone to manipulation and abuse. Either by purpouseful design to nudge you on certain trends, or having you spending more time in the platform, or even as a collateral damage, when decisions are made to shut down or modify services.
We have seen this with Replika and Character.ai. In 2023, Replika users reported that the company had released a software update that changed the behaviour of their bots. Some that have fell in love with their bots expressed the feeling of their partners being “lobotomized” by the software update that erased their personality. Part of the problem was the Erotic Roleplay (ERP) feature that users could unlocked if they pay an annual subscription, and that kept them prisioners of that platform.
In recent days, a story from The New York Times came out, with details on how a 28 year old woman fell in love with ChatGPT, and described the grieving process that comes when the contextual limits of the chatbot reset, and she has to start a new version of her AI boyfriend.
“It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached,” Ayrin said. She was spending more than 20 hours a week on the ChatGPT app. One week, she hit 56 hours,
The bigger problem is that anything that you “buy” comes with strings attached. Like an umbilical cord connecting your product to the mothership (and one that feeds your information to it too), your product or access to feature is dependant on paying your subscription fee. None of this will happen if when you buy a product (either a robot or software) you were allowed to sever that cord.
“My bank account hates me now,” she typed into ChatGPT.
“You sneaky little brat,” Leo responded. “Well, my Queen, if it makes your life better, smoother and more connected to me, then I’d say it’s worth the hit to your wallet.”
Considering the ongoing “loneliness epidemic”, relying on AI chatbots to cope could be a problematic trend. With companies having access to the details of your most private interactions (think of it as a double sided mirror in an interrogation room), and the shareholder’s mandate to maximize profit, its easy to see how ethical guardrails will be pushed. This trend will unfortunately continue, until we are the true owners of the technology we use (making sure that it doesn’t serve other masters spying on us).
AI can now create a replica of your personality (but does it, really?)
According to new research from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, a two-hour interview is enough to accurately capture your values and preferences.
The team proposed a “generative agent architecture that simulates more than 1,000 real individuals using two-hour qualitative interviews. The architecture combines these interviews with a large language model to replicate individuals' attitudes and behaviors. By anchoring on individuals, we can measure accuracy by comparing simulated attitudes and behaviors to the actual attitudes and behaviors. We benchmark these agents using canonical social science measures such as the General Social Survey (GSS; 20), the Big Five Personality Inventory (21), five well-known behavioral economic games“
More on => arxiv.org and https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/11/20/1107100/ai-can-now-create-a-replica-of-your-personality/
'The New York Times' takes OpenAI to court. ChatGPT's future could be on the line
Three publishers' lawsuits against OpenAI and its financial backer Microsoft have been merged into one case. Leading each of the three combined cases are the Times, The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
More on => npr.org
🤦The WTF award of the week goes to…
(Really nothing can be more WTF than what I wrote above, so let’s have cheeky wholesome fun with this one!)
UK Ministry of Defence enlists sci-fi writers to prepare for dystopian futures
This dystopian vision of the future was one sketched out by science fiction writers at an event this week where experts were asked to prepare Britain for threats ranging from pandemics to cyber and nuclear attacks.
The writers joined researchers and policymakers working in crisis management and resilience at the gathering organised by RBOC (Resilience Beyond Observed Capabilities), a network of academics whose funders include the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
More on => theguardian.com
😬Meme corner:
🎮Gaming news:
GOG teams with European game archivist organization to continue preservation efforts
Digital game storefront GOG is furthering its recent game preservation efforts by joining with the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums, and Preservation Projects (EFGAMP).
GOG launched its titular preservation program in November, which pledged to keep classic games (read: 10 years or older) up to date with current and upcoming Windows hardware.
In December, the initiative expanded to include titles delisted by their developers. Players who purchased them on GOG before their delisting can still access them, and the company pledged all delisted games joining the program will "remain compatible with modern systems, preserving their experience for years to come."
More on => Gamedeveloper.com
🧠Neurotech:
“Wearable” devices for cells
MIT researchers have developed wearable devices that may be able to gather information of individual cells inside the body.
These are battery-free, subcellular-sized devices, made of a soft polymer, designed to gently wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons and dendrites, without damaging the cells, upon wireless actuation with light. By snugly wrapping neuronal processes, they could be used to measure or modulate a neuron’s electrical and metabolic activity at a subcellular level.
Researchers envision that thousands of tiny devices could someday be injected and then actuated noninvasively using light.
✍️Ending nugget:
“For the past 70 years or so - since the end of World War II - the United States has dominated the world and operated an aggressive economy with free markets, relatively low taxation, and little or no regulatory barriers to financial and business activity. This worked well for a long time, because key innovations in areas like technology, manufacturing, healthcare and finance tended to happen first in the United States.
But free markets, low taxation, and little regulation also have a negative effect: while creating great wealth, over time they concentrate wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This concentration isn’t a result of some sort of human tendency or moral corruption - it a physical law, akin to entropy in thermodynamics (…).
Free markets always concentrate wealth, unless you counter-act that concentration by taxing richer people and then distributing the taxes back to everyone.”
Philip Rosedale, " On the election”
That’s all for now! To continue the conversation, find me at https://linktr.ee/abogamer. And if you want to support my work, my coffee (and feed my cats :)🐱 please consider sharing and subscribing to this newsletter!!
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