Mark Zuckerberg has some bad news for us all: the Metaverse is more of a point in time than a place.
In a new interview with tech podcaster Lex Fridman, the Facebook now Meta CEO dropped this nugget of wisdom when questioned about the possibility of a metaverse "singularity moment," he delivered an, uh, intriguing remark.
"A lot of people assume the Metaverse is about a place, but one definition is that it's about a period when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time," Zuckerberg said in the two-hour video. "I believe that is a reasonable framework."
Is Mark Zuckerberg claiming we should give up on reality and welcome our virtual reality overlords inside a Facebook-controlled dystopia? His answer certainly seems to suggest just that.
Meta’s Metaverse, a VR playground filled with legless avatars, has come under increasing scrutiny, with early adopters already reporting cases of sexual harassment, among other issues.
Of course, Zuckerberg isn't the only one who sees a future in which we spend more time in virtual reality than we do in real life.
Melanie Subin, director of the Future Today Institute consulting firm, predicted in January that "a high proportion of individuals will be in the metaverse" by 2030, and that many "would spend the majority of their waking hours 'jacked in.'"
For the time being, Zuckerberg's Metaverse forecasting appears to be comically galaxy-brained — but if his projections begin to come true in the coming years, it may not be so amusing.
