Facebook Horizon

This is my goto:

First, at scale, if an engineer can think it, statistically speaking there is an engineer who will do it.

So let's pick a theoretical: Imagine you have all these photos of people with their faces - at the club, hugging at the pub etc. Then you can track who has a criminal record, due to what they post, key words, etc. And then you can track who statistically speaking, has a high chance of having a criminal record (but may not have). Then you can track these individuals moving around in various social circles. And then you look at peoples group photos, and raise a flag when there is cross-over between the circles. This is vastly interesting of course, but... who said it was cool to examine me and the people I meet to make that judgement? Even if FaceBook are not doing it now, who said it was cool to amass all this data so they CAN make this judgement, at anytime in the future.

This behaviour in a person is called being "a bit judgey". When facebook do it, it's "a bit judgey"...with parallelized computing and machine learning.

I'm not a criminal. I'm a totally chill guy. It literally wouldn't make me worried for myself if Facebook did this. But, I just find the whole role they can play...annoying.

> it should take time and effort to talk to people all over the world

No, it shouldn't, that was the whole point of the global Internet (ignoring its origins), to drill into people's thick skulls that in the end we're all very similar, that most of the "local culture" crap it's just that, CRAP, and deep inside we're all driven by the same fears and desires. That ANY kind of war means just fighting against other people that are just like you and that in the end it's not worth fighting. That we can have the global village, and keep our special tribal/nationa/race identities too, there's no contradiction there.

Hope AR, VR and later neural implants get implemented and deployed in ways that empower this vision instead of the opposite, that they manage to push further in the one-world-interconnectedness direction of the 90s internet.

I used to dislike corporations like Facebook... but now I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a globalized world ruled by such corporations, than in a separated and restricted one ruled by governments representing "nations"! I'd swallow the AI-powered-corporate-surveillance part as a minor inconvenience if it manages to deliver the "one world" dream... I'm just afraid that most corporations aren't truly powerful and globally distributed enough, in the sense that they could at least in theory overpower the governments of most of most of their base countries if push comes to shove and they need to fight them for more freedom and connectivity. Maybe if they'd drop central control and organize themselves more into "cells" or something similar... there's got to be something in the whole Ethereum and distributed systems experiment that can become successful and power this. Heh, maybe once Libra gets traction more can be built on top. Go Facebook!

Google is, with Stadia

At OC1 (possibly OC2, my memory is a bit vague) they handed out copies Ernest Clines' book Ready Player One. It was pretty clear this was the direction they were going to head, even if they seem to be blissfully unaware that they're closer to the antagonists in the story (IOI) than Gregarious Simulation Systems.

Note: I have nothing specific against Facebook

Virtual worlds are socially acceptable as long as you are killing people in them.