Checkmate humanity: Responsible Metaverse Alliance founder talks ethics, safety and governance

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti podcast, where we explore big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide, and today, we’re going into the metaverse. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti and I’m happy to be joined by Dr. Catriona Wallace, founder of the Responsible Metaverse Alliance. Dr. Wallace is a specialist in the fields of AI, the metaverse, and the responsible use of technology and has been recognized by the Australian Financial Review as the most influential woman in business and entrepreneurship. She is an international advisor on Interpol’s metaverse expert group, focused on policing in the metaverse, and also an adjunct professor at the University of New South Wales and co-author of the 2022 book “Checkmate Humanity: The How and Why of Responsible AI.” Dr. Wallace, thank you so much for joining me today.

Catriona Wallace: It’s such a pleasure, Joe.

Kornik: So, Catriona, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about you, your background, and what led you to sort of founding the Responsible Metaverse Alliance?

Wallace: Yes. Well, there’s a couple of streams to the work I do. So, one is as an entrepreneur and I have built a number of companies, but specifically in the artificial intelligence field. So, I was one of Australia’s first AI startup founders, but ended up running the business I head, a machine learning company out of New York for four or five years, and then sold that business in 2020. At that stage, I had experienced selling to large multinational companies, selling AI to them, and recognized that they were not particularly aware of ethics and responsible technology strategy. So, I started to work in responsible AI and just published a book called “Checkmate Humanity: The How and Why of Responsible AI,” and then the world changed. The world’s changed for us, I think, twice, Joe, in the last year. Once was when Zuckerberg announced that Meta was investing $10 billion in building the metaverse, and the second time was the OpenAI’s announcement of ChatGPT. And so at the time when Zuckerberg announced Meta was changing their name and he was investing in building the metaverse was the time I knew I needed to switch out of AI into metaverse and build an alliance that was an international movement to hold the tech giants accountable for doing responsible tech rather than… and the pretty difficult experiences we’ve had with Web 2.0.

Kornik: Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about the Responsible Metaverse Alliance, what it does, what its goals are, why you sort of founded it? I think you’ve touched on it a little bit there, but if you could expand on sort of its main goals and why it exists.

Wallace: Yes. So, our focus is to work with policymakers around the world. So, this would be politicians, government leaders, regulators, legislators, to get ahead of the metaverse coming when it’s mainstream. So, we think in three to five years, the metaverse will be a very predominant way that we are interacting as humans in work and life, and then within 10 years it will be a mainstream way that humans do things. So, we’ve learned a lot from Web 2.0 and social media that regulation and legislation was way behind this era of technology, which is from 2004 to now is Web 2.0, and now with Web 3 and metaverse coming, there’s a number of us around the world who experienced that first big move into Web 2.0 and saw all of the pretty atrocious things that that technology brought with this. Also acknowledging the very good things it brought, but we know that there’s been a lot of dangers and harm caused to, particularly women, children, and the vulnerable. So, this time, we want to be ahead of the game and educate policymakers, because we do know, Joe, that most government people are not really super technology-oriented and government tends to be about five years behind where the tech companies are.

Kornik: Right, and you had mentioned early on that you’ve got your background in AI, but you sort of used Facebook’s name change, right, Meta, as a way to sort of leap into, essentially move over to the metaverse. So, how do you sort of see the role of AI in the metaverse and do you sort of see them as intertwined so tightly to the point where they’re essentially one and the same?

Wallace: So, AI is one of the foundational components of metaverse. So, let’s look at what we describe the metaverse as. So, the metaverse is actually a construct. It’s a concept. It’s actually not a thing itself, and the metaverse was coined, the term, from the 1990’s when Neal Stephenson wrote a book called “Snow Crash” and talked about the concept of metaverse. So, there are different definitions of metaverse, but our definition is that it’s a construct that describes the existence of immersive technologies creating virtual worlds where people come for social interaction, and so that means it includes augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, extended reality, and the core technology sitting underneath that is probably the infrastructure, one of the core technologies is AI. And importantly, now that we’ve had generative AI released to the world, the world literally changed last November again, then we’re going to see a strong use of metaverse-related technology, such as avatars, in augmented or virtual reality pulling or interfacing into ChatGPT with their automated avatars generated from this powerful AI technology.

Kornik: So, you had mentioned earlier that you thought that—you gave us some sort of a timeframe, some three to five years before you think it’s sort of mainstream, and I think it was a decade before you think the metaverse will be really embedded into our daily lives. What does that look like? What does that mean to you as far as our personal lives, our work lives? How ubiquitous will the metaverse be? Let’s start with five years, and then move out to maybe 10 years.

Wallace: Yes. So, the best way to think about it is that we now currently have three worlds. So, there is the physical world that we’re in, which is our face-to-face experiences; the digital world that we’re in. So, you and I are in the digital world now and your listeners to this podcast are listening through digital means, but we now have a virtual, the third world. The trick is with this virtual world, people don’t really know it exists, because you need to have some sort of equipment normally to access it. So, that would be a virtual reality or augmented reality headset to get into the fully immersive experience, but if you do have a headset, then you know that this world is extremely well-developed. So, there are—if we think of even the children, so Roblox is an early metaverse for children. Now, it is 50 million users of children under the age of 16 on a monthly basis of that platform. The metaverse itself across all the virtual worlds—and we believe there’s something like 160 virtual worlds now that we would put in the metaverse construct—is around 470 million users is the estimate of that. So, it’s here. We’ve got big brands.

So, a lot of the big fashion labels—Gucci, Prada, Ralph Lauren, a number of… Nike—like all of these brands are now positioning in the metaverse in what we call a “phygital” way, which is physical and digital, or that probably should be “phyrtual,” physical and virtual, but that actually sounds terrible, where they are partnering with organizations like, I think, Gucci has a partnership with Roblox, selling their NFT-related products in the virtual world. Huge opportunities for businesses to rebrand and position. Huge opportunities for brands to be selling NFT, non-fungible tokens. So, again non-fungible token, fungible means replaceable, non-fungible means it’s not replaceable. So, they’re unique digital assets. So, I know that Nike at the moment can sell a physical shoe and then an NFT shoe that a person can wear in the metaverse. So, we expect within three years that most of the big brands will have a presence in the metaverse, and within 10 years, you and I won’t be doing the podcasts in a digital form, we’ll be doing it in a virtual form. In fact, I’m already doing a podcast in the metaverse, which is called “Metaverse: What Matters?” about a woman out of London. So, I’m assuming she’s in London in the metaverse, and we’re doing this podcast. So, it will be invasive and I believe things will change in the next 12 months when Apple—we expect them to release their augmented reality software and hardware, and then things will shift again.

Kornik: Right, and what is your sort of ultimate vision of what the metaverse could become or what it should be when you think about it through the lens of the Responsible Metaverse Alliance?

Wallace: Yes. So, the happy part of the metaverse would be that it is a highly accessible place, and this is the thing that I love about the metaverse, even though that I’m always kind of like checking on what will go wrong with it, I’m also like a big fan, a huge fan of what is right about it. So, accessibility, Joe. So, if you are able to access a headset, and a headset now in US dollars is as low as $300, so if you can get a headset, then you have access to all sorts of services, and this is what I love for people that perhaps have not been able to buy physical land in the physical world, then you can buy virtual land. And last year, 2022, $1 billion of virtual real estate was sold in the metaverse. So, you can buy virtual land. You can have a virtual home. I also think for people with disability, then this is also an accessible form where they can potentially go and be able-bodied in the metaverse, because they can present as whatever avatar they like. So, we know the top use cases for metaverse are entertainment, and we have examples like Travis Scott, regardless of what we like think about him, did a metaverse concept and had 12.5 million people attend his concert, just sitting with their headsets in their own lounge room, vibing away. Those people would not have been able to access that if it was a physical concept. So, entertainment.<> 

Second big use case is education, and so I’m doing a lot of work with school principals at the moment, who are so important in this story, Joe, because it’s the young ones who are the predominant users of it. The parents have got no idea that it even exists. So, the teachers are going to play an important role, and a lot of the schools are now looking to bring virtual reality in as a way to educate the children. So, imagine putting a headset on and walking through the streets of ancient Greece or looking at the stars and understanding the movement of the planets, all in a 3-D immersive environment. Fantastic. Then the third one is about virtual health. So, we’re seeing extraordinary leaps in using virtual and augmented reality for healthcare.

Kornik: Right, and some of those possibilities are being echoed by other experts that we’ve talked to. Education has come up time and time again as we’ve explored this theme with some of the metaverse experts and big thinkers. Really exciting things on the horizon, I think, in that space and others, as you’ve mentioned, healthcare has come up quite a bit. The metaverse sort of in its current state—and you kind of touched on this a little bit, right? So, the metaverse for all, or equity is a big sort of—I know it’s a big, key pillar of the metaverse and sort of the platform. In its current state, it transcends borders, countries, and governments—I mean, sort of—and regulators. So, I guess I’d ask you, is that a good thing? Do you think that we need more oversight and regulation in the metaverse?

Wallace: So, I think the fact that you’re absolutely right, that there are no state boundaries, national boundaries, international boundaries in the metaverse, because it’s a completely different jurisdictional concept, is extremely worrying, because let’s think about it, Joe. Who is building the metaverse worlds, the virtual worlds? It’s predominantly the tech giants, or young startups who are building various types of applications with the metaverse. So, we have now a new world that is essentially ungoverned, no rules, no regulations, very few standards, and I think that’s an extremely dangerous place for humans to be in. We’ve already seen some of the hugely controversial problems that the tech giants have around social media and their, in my view, irresponsibility around keeping people safe in Web 2.0. Put that in a fully immersive way at scale with no policing, no rules, no regulations and governance, and there are going to be some very, very dangerous and risky things happening in the metaverse.

Kornik: It’s interesting that you mentioned policing. I understand that you were asked to sort of be an international advisor on Interpol’s metaverse expert group, which will be handling sort of international policing in the metaverse, which I think is a fascinating topic. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and tell us a little bit about that role that you’re undertaking?

Wallace: Yes. So, it’s a very brand-new initiative from Interpol, which I think is fantastic. So, it’s the Interpol metaverse experts group, so bringing here the international experts to sit on a group to acknowledge that the metaverse is the next big shift in technology and how will it be policed? So, I’ve just started on that path with Interpol, but also I’m working very closely in Australia with the Australian federal police, and also with New Zealand. So, we’re about to launch a policing think tank. So, we’ll do two think tanks which will be—first one will be let’s identify the crimes in the metaverse that can occur, because, I don’t know, who has a comprehensive list of these? And what we’ll see is the crimes that are in the physical world and the digital world will also probably exist in the virtual world, but then there’ll be new potential crimes that we haven't even thought about, and I’ll give you an example of this.

So, in talking to the federal police, they’re aware now that on the dark web, there are bad actors who are using avatars, potentially pulling from AI generated content, to groom children to get children to perform explicit sexual acts that are then recorded, and then these bad actors extort money from the children, and so the metaverse-related technology is very powerful in the hands of bad actors, and particularly for the vulnerable, which, at this stage, are children mostly. So, these are some important things. We also see the virtual world as a place for potential organized crime and organized terrorism when those groups have been counted in the physical and the digital world, but here’s a whole new environment and world for organized crime and terrorism, and extremist rightwing groups, for example, to set up again. The New Zealand Government is right on this in educating all their policymakers around metaverse, because of course, they have a group called “Christchurch Call,” which is put together after the Christchurch massacre, and if you remember the terrible massacre that happened in Christchurch was livestreamed through social media platforms and so New Zealand is right on that that that never happened again; so brought through this  extreme violence. So, that’s kind of the worst-case scenario and with no—as we’ve mentioned before, no governance, no policing, then this could be an area where all of this happens.

We do know the worst that we could possibly imagine, including, as I’ve mentioned, extortion of children can and possibly will happen in the metaverse. So, in order to counter that, we actually have to hold the tech giants to account, and that is my life purpose at the moment, Joe, to call out all of the big tech giants and the startups who are in the space that they must be building this in a responsible and a safe way, and at the moment, their business models do not have ethics in them; they’re not driven on that. So, this is a big problem and, yes, we do need regulation—and look, I’m an entrepreneur. I would’ve not wanted regulation when I was a startup entrepreneur. Now, I’ve learned it’s absolutely imperative that this new world is regulated.

Kornik: So, what steps is the Responsible Metaverse Alliance taking? Are you making inroads? Have you had much success with governments or politicians or business leaders on this? Is there some consensus? Are we reaching a consensus of opinion about this?

Wallace: Yes, we are. So, what I’ve been very, very impressed with is that there are a number, and particularly in this part of the world that I’m in, human rights commissioner, e-safety commissioner, information commissioner, intellectual property commissioners, all the police—the federal police, state police, Department of Home Affairs, Department of Internal Affairs across New Zealand and Australia are very, very active in this space. So, they get it and now they want to do something about it, agitating for regulation. But what is really interesting, Joe, it has been more those who are interested in serious crime who’ve come out to say, “We need to get onto this.” I’m very impressed with that.

And so we’ll be running these policing think tanks with the view that later in the year we hold a global think tank on policing in the metaverse. We’re also going to hold educators in the metaverse, and we’ll do that again. We’ll do it locally in this part of the world, then we’ll set it up into international, because I think that the teachers and principals of schools are going to be big participants and hugely influential. We’ve also partnered with a company called the Gradient Institute to write the New South Wales Government’s metaverse strategy. So, we’ve got governments actually starting to write strategy and build their capability. And I think that’s an important note, Joe. In this government strategy we wrote, we recommended services for the government to put in the metaverse, but mostly we talked about governments need to become metaverse-ready. They need to get their capabilities built, so that in three to five years’ time, they’re not caught by surprise at this massive virtual world that everyone’s in and they’re even further behind than they already are.

Kornik: I have one more question. You’ve been very generous with your time, and you’ve kind of touched on this throughout the course of our conversation, but I just was curious if you could sort of take a look out to like 2035, let’s say, that’s quite even more than a decade, and just talk to me about what you see, where the metaverse will be, and really what I’m trying to get at is will we be better off? Will we live in a better world in 2035 because of the metaverse?

Wallace: Yes. Well, the truth is, Joe, we don’t know. We really don’t know. But let’s look at sort of if it all went well and there was good regulation and the tech giants were held to account, and it all went well. Then I think we’re living in a fabulous time. So, the metaverse would be just the way that you and I get up in the morning. We put on our goggles. We do a yoga app. We do an exercise app. The children may not need to physically go to school, like, they go into their virtual worlds and be learning virtually. Your child is six, so you get a virtual consultation from the doctor, and this is all rich and really, really good for humans. So all of the things we talked about—accessibility, convenience, all of those things come with new beautiful services that really help humanity. So, that in 2035 would be the best-case scenario and that we—and also like the headsets and stuff are really cumbersome, heavy, and uncomfortable now, but we’ll have contact lenses that we just pop in our eye that have the mixed reality on it, and we will have—it’s most likely mixed reality is what's going to come, which is when there’s just a layer of the virtual augmented reality over our physical world, and our physical world mixed with the virtual world become really, really intertwined and in a beautiful and constructive way. And hopefully, we use this technology to help solve environmental crises, to help solve issues with humans, help solve war, all of these things are possible. So, that’s my hope, but I’m not sure that we’ve got the foundations yet in place.

So, also in 2035, what we’ve got to realize now is that we’re in the first stages of what we call “transhumanism.” So, transhumanism, to me, is the next real evolution of humanity, and that’s when we start to see technology embedded in our bodies, and so the metaverse, if we think about it, it’s wearing potentially haptic suit, which is a physical suit that you wear that gives you the sensations of what you’re experiencing, the augmented reality, virtual reality, contact lens with augmented reality in it, very soon then we’ll have this technology embedded in our bodies. So, Elon Musk is working on Neuralink, which is a brain chip, which essentially then communicates with your computer. We have prosthetics that are now 3-D printed and AI-driven. We’ve got a lot of things where we now are going to see the software embedded in our bodies. For me, Joe, I’m actually super excited about it. I would love an ear piece for my mobile friends. They’re not fussing around with them headsets all the time. I would tomorrow, if I could, have an earpiece embedded in my ear, like I’m all for that.

So, we might see the bifurcation of humanity, because we know that as species, we would go extinct if it doesn’t bifurcate, right? And I’m going to predict now this is a bifurcation into those who are interested in and want transhumanism where we become inmeshed with our digital selves, and then the others that I call organic experiences. So, I live half my time in Byron Bay, which is like the consciousness community of Australia, and they would go, “No way. Like, no, we don’t want anything to do with technology.” So, I think there’ll be these two paths that emerge and both paths need to support each other, but again by 2035, we will be willing to trans—being transhumans.

Kornik: Wow. Well, that’s a bold prediction and certainly thank you for that. I asked you to think big and you certainly delivered. So, thank you so much, Dr. Catriona Wallace and thank you for your time today on the podcast.

Wallace: Thank you, Joe.

Kornik: Thank you for listening to the VISION by Protiviti podcast. Please rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and please check out our metaverse content at vision.protiviti.com. On behalf of Dr. Catriona Wallace, I’m Joe Kornik. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

Making the most of the metaverse moment with tech futurist Cathy Hackl - video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview, where we look at how big topics will impact global business over the next decade and beyond, and today we’re talking about the metaverse future. I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, and I’m thrilled to welcome globally recognized metaverse expert, tech futurist, and top business executive Cathy Hackl. She’s an author, speaker, and media personality who has been featured on 60 Minutes, CNBC, and in GQ, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal; and she is the host of Adweek’s Metaverse Marketing podcast. BigThink named Cathy one of the top 10 most influential women in tech, and she’s on Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers most likely to shape the future. It’s no wonder she is commonly referred to as the Godmother of the Metaverse.

Cathy, thank you so much for joining me today.

Cathy Hackl: I’m excited to be here.

Kornik: Cathy, I talk to people on both sides of the aisle and when it comes to the metaverse future, many say it will be sort of a revolutionary game changer. Others are not so sure, so we’ve been in this sort of wave of positive and negative news cycles now for the last year-and-a-half or so. Where would you say we are right now in the metaverse moment and how should we feel about this?

Hackl: Yes, I definitely agree with what you’ve seen, as well. I feel like we’re in this moment we’re coming off of a hype cycle, right, a lot of hype around the term metaverse, a lot of confusion around the term metaverse, a lot of hype, but now we’re at this moment where people are like, well, taking a step back. Yes, I think we’re coming off of a hype cycle for many different reasons or many issues right now with the market.

I feel like we’re at this moment of disillusionment. People are a little bit skeptical, thinking, “Well, what is this really?” You know, what I find funny though is whenever I read an article that says “the metaverse failed” or “the metaverse didn’t happen,” so to your question where are we, we’re still building towards that future so we’re not there yet. Something that hasn’t been created fully can’t fail, at least yet. But yes, I think we’re in a moment of confusion. We’re in a moment of skepticism and rightfully so, but also I think for the people that are in the space, that are building, it is an exciting moment, to be what I call in the trenches, right? To me, personally, these types of market downturns coming off of a hype cycle are the best moments to build and create new things, and that’s going to give us the innovation that’s, in my perspective, the tech jargonauts of the future.

Where are we in this moment? Really, despite the downturn, despite the hype cycle, the end of the hype cycle, we’re at this moment for me of creativity being unleashed with new technologies, new opportunities, and with all the layoffs and all the people leaving, being laid off from these tech giants, some of them are ready to take a chance and create something new, so I’m excited. As crazy as things are right now, it’s a really exciting moment I think for anyone in metaverse, Web 3, and emerging tech.

Kornik: Yes, that’s interesting, Cathy, and that disruption, those layoffs you talked about could create sort of a cascading effect of innovation, which I hadn’t thought of, so that’s interesting.

Cathy, I do think business leaders and executives are confused about the metaverse. I think they’re maybe a bit skeptical, maybe a little bit cautious. I think they’re being asked a lot about strategies and timelines. Are we too early? Are we too late? How should business leaders approach the metaverse? What would be your advice to them?

Hackl: My advice to them is, I feel like a lot of the marketing machine already did what it needed to do, that hype cycle where all the marketing people wanted to do something, to launch something. I always say, scratch that metaverse itch. They did something to get the PR. We’re seeing a little less than that because the more metaverse marketing activations happen, they’re getting less coverage, so their initial idea of ROI is changing. That’s actually a really exciting moment because it’s when companies can be like, “Okay, we did this. We did the marketing activation, but what does really mean for us and what is the long-term strategy?”

I think that has to do with the fact that there’s this skepticism, this lack of clarity because if you have 10 metaverse people at the table and you ask them what the metaverse is, you’re going to get 10 different definitions, in reality. But most people do agree it is the successor state in some ways of the internet. Many people have different opinions on how that happens, but I think that’s kind of the agreement. If you take that as the basis of what this is potentially, then, the marketing has been done, now, it’s time to really think about, what does this mean for us as a company, as a brand in the long term?

My advice to any company is, if you’ve already done something public, great for you. Take a step back to really reassess what your strategy is and if you still haven’t done something and you don’t feel compelled to do something public, there are ways to experiment in private as well. There’s always though room for education. I think educating everything, everyone within your org is a really important moment for people to understand metaverse, gen AI, all the different things that are happening in this space.

Kornik: Right. Let’s talk a little bit about how some businesses are using the metaverse because some are already there, right? As you mentioned, some have already had some success. Maybe you could walk us through a few of those, if you don’t mind. I know you work a lot with fashion and luxury brands, and you spend a lot of time on marketing in the metaverse. Is that where the early innovation is happening? Is that where you’re seeing the most traction?

Hackl: Yes, so there are early test cases, use cases that are successful. I’ll give you an example. I work very closely with Walmart, a pretty giant company and brand, to advise them as a metaverse advisor and then help them launch their first steps into the metaverse, which was two giant world builds inside Roblox. I’ll speak specifically about WalmartLand which is in Roblox, like I mentioned. It has got over—I think it’s over 13 million visits, that’s in September, so that’s very, very, very good numbers. It has got more than a 50% approval rating. It has got constant traffic, people coming in and out, great sentiment. That was a case where you take a brand like Walmart and you don’t necessarily want to bring the same concept of the Walmart store into the metaverse. That’s not what people want to see. The idea was, how do we create a Walmart in a totally different way? This is not your grandma’s Walmart. It is the Gen Z, Gen Alpha, future of, a new way to see Walmart. We brought it into a gaming platform like Roblox, into the metaverse, let’s say, and it has been very successful for the company to engage with Gen Z, so yes. To me, it’s a case of bring in a brand that normally wouldn’t be mentioned in the same space as Gucci or something as Nike, Vans, but now it’s being mentioned in the same sentences in a lot of these brands and causing brand awareness and affinity, so that’s a good use case.

One of the brands that I did some early work with was Nike as well, and I think Nike has really been leading the forefront of things, both from an acquisition standpoint, acquiring a company like RTFKT a while back, and recently launching their new Web 3 loyalty program called SWOOSH and the things that they plan to do with that, so keep your eyes on those sorts of things. Yes, I think there are some leaders out there that you can look at, both from tons of things in luxury but also brands like Walmart.

Kornik: As you look out a little further, maybe even to the decade’s end, what are the ways and in what other industries do you think the metaverse will have some of its bigger impacts?

Hackl: I do a lot of work in the fashion space. I’m really excited about how that vertical is leading. They’re really pushing the limits and they have the appetite for it, but where I think we’re going to see really huge change, one of those areas is education. I think education is due for some disruption and I think the metaverse and those technologies are going to be part of disrupting the current way we do education. So I’m very thrilled about potential democratization of education and learning from the best and how that might change, so very thrilled about that.

With that obviously comes the training elements in whichever company, in the L&D departments and everything that’s happening, already seeing that with Accenture, everything, so education. I’m really interested as well, and while it’s not as exciting, I think the healthcare side is what I think we’re going to see a lot of change there in not only how doctors and nurses and medical professionals are trained, which we’ve already been seeing for a couple years in medical schools, but also I think for patient education, being able to go inside your body in a virtual way and trying to understand, if you’re going to have a brain surgery, what are they really going to do and those sorts of things. I think we’re going to start to see that from the healthcare side, and mental health as well, using these technologies to help with PTSD, trauma, just very powerful ways. Education and health I think are two of the parts that I think we’re going to see transcendental change beyond the retail and fun fashion side.

Kornik: Cathy, you’re not the first metaverse expert to tell me that, actually. We’ve had quite a few who would echo those same sentiments, so I think we’re really onto something there which could be exciting, right? I know you’ve teamed up with the World Economic Forum recently. Would you mind telling us a little bit about some of the work that you’re doing with them?

Hackl: Yes, so I am part of their metaverse initiative, part of the value creation group within the World Economic Forum. There are lots of different organizations and companies that are part of the initiative. We recently launched some white papers, some studies. One was on interoperability, the other one on value creation in the metaverse. They were launched during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos where I actually got to speak, but yes, I think the idea is to bring together different stakeholders to really think deeply about what this means. If this is the future state of the internet, what are the implications for society? What are the implications for a lot of different countries, for companies, for professionals? Yes, there’s definitely really interesting work being done there.

The World Economic Forum as an organization is also diving deep into the metaverse and creating their own virtual spaces. Yes, I think we’ll continue to see that but, it’s exciting. For me, coming from the tech sector and what I’ve been doing, I never thought I would get invited to Davos but this year, I did get invited. I spoke there. I had never gone because I didn’t have a reason to go but I feel like now that tech is at the forefront, we’re having these conversations, it’s important to have a seat at the table. So yes, I think it’s important for both industry but also professionals that might be in the community to have a seat at the table to discuss what does this mean for the future of society and the future of everything.

Kornik: I want to ask you about the positive and negative, and I’ll start with the negative and I’ll end with the positive. What are some of the things that potentially worry you? What could hurt adoption rates or limit some of what you think could be the most positive impacts of the metaverse?

Hackl: I think there are three things. One of them is that people tend to equate adoption with how many VR headsets there are, and that’s if you take the premise that the metaverse equals VR, which I don’t. Most people agree it’s not just virtual reality. When you read a headline like, oh, metaverse adoption is down or not enough headsets, you’re missing the mark. That kind of misconception worries me because then people think it failed, which it hasn’t, so that’s one.

I also think there is this moment of a bit of a talent war that’s slowly happening where there’s not enough people that are skilled in, let’s say, how to develop on Unity, how to develop on Unreal, how to do Solidity if you’re on the Web 3 space. There is that moment as well where companies are going to have to look and say, who internally has those skills? Yes, or who do we need to hire to come and help us lead in this space and understand these technologies? I think that’s one of the things we’re going to see, continue to see a talent war.

Then there’s something—this is a little bit more futuristic, right, but you did ask me to go a little bit into the future. Another thing that worries me is the concept of virtual air rights. Who owns the air around me? Who owns what I can see? Because eventually, if the premise is that we do move from our phones into some type of wearable, potentially glasses, then who controls what’s within eyesight and earshot of me? That is extremely valuable and I worry about that. I worry about who’s going to control that, like who’s going to control what I can see and what I can hear because those are the things I’m going to believe. I think from a societal standpoint, that worries me quite a bit as a mother of three kids. Yes, that’s what keeps me up at night, right?

Kornik: Right, who or what controls that information and how it gets in front of our eyeballs and into our brains is certainly something to think about going forward.<>All right, so I’ll end with this one. I promise to end with a positive, so what if we get this right? Take me out to, say, 2035. What is Cathy Hackl’s best-case scenario for the metaverse and what does it look like?

Hackl: I hope that my vision for then is, hopefully, we’ll have something that replaces the mobile phone, potentially glasses, so we might go back to seeing each other in the eyes. There’s going to be data overlaid over you, over your eyesight, but I think eventually going from here to here and looking back at each other as humans I think is very positive.

I think we’ll get access to information a lot faster. One of the things that, as scared as people are about generative AI and everything that’s happening in that space, to me, AI is the electricity that’s going to make the metaverse work. I give people this example, when you open your refrigerator, you’re not thinking about the electricity that’s cooling all your food. You’re not thinking about that. I feel like eventually… right now we’re at this moment where everyone’s like AI, AI, right? Eventually, AI is what’s going to run all the systems and optimize things and we’re going to have virtual assistants, all those sorts of things. They’re going to help run the back end of the metaverse. And I see this electricity. I think we’re in this moment where AI is as revolutionary as electricity was in its moment.

To that point, I’ll give you a really fun example. I learned during Davos that the first time the term CEO was used was for Chief Electricity Officer. It wasn’t for Chief Executive Officer because electricity was new. No one knew what to do. They needed people to figure it out. I think that that’s where we are right now with, I’ll say, Chief Metaverse Officer or chief whatever it is. We’re in this moment where we’re trying to figure out what all these technologies are and what they mean, what the future of the internet means, and we’re at that moment right now again, of trying to figure out what all these revolutionary technologies that are converging mean for our future.

Kornik: Cathy, thank you for the time. What a fascinating conversation.

Hackl: Thank you so much. It was a thrill to be here.

Kornik: Thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. For Cathy Hackl, I’m Joe Kornik, and we’ll see you next time.

Tech expert Wayne Sadin on how the C-suite and board can prepare for the metaverse – Audio transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview where we look at how big topics will impact global business over the next decade and beyond. Today, we're talking about the metaverse future. I'm Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti and I'm joined by renowned tech strategist Wayne Sadin. Who has had a 30-year IT career where he's been a CTO, CDO, CIO and advisor to CEOs and boards. Currently, he's the lead analyst covering C-suites and boards, IT governance, cyber and metaverse for Acceleration Economy. Wayne, thanks so much for joining me today on the program.

Wayne Sadin: Hey, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Kornik: Wayne, you focused on board strategy at Acceleration Economy, and I think there's some skepticism actually out there. Certainly, some uncertainty about Web 3 and the metaverse among that group, right, the board and the C-suite. Maybe there's some hesitation about perhaps being one of the first in the pool, especially if the water is a little too cold. What advice would you give them as they think about their metaverse future?

Sadin: Well, I think the first thing, Joe, is the board at that level needs to understand what do we mean when we say metaverse? That definition is so hazy and so all encompassing. Let's maybe start with that. So, when people think of the metaverse what they think of is the virtual reality headset. So, here is a state-of-the-art VR headset right now. I mean, this new one just got announced. This is what I wear when I want to play. Can you imagine your board director wearing this five-pound thing on their head for a board meeting? I can't. So, first of all, it's VR, it’s AR, augmented reality or XR, extended reality. So, all of these things that involve taking visual and audio and maybe one day, touch, your tactile sensation, and making them available to people at a distance. So, that's one view of it. Another one is cryptocurrency, which is a whole another discussion. Then the third part of it is the Web 3, the underlying technology of the metaverse. Now can you do metaverse without Web3? Yes. Can you do Web 3 without metaverse? Yes. What happens when you put them together is you get something bigger than either.

So, if you're a board, you want to be educating yourself on what is your business strategy relate to in AR and VR, XR all those R things? Are you a game company? Are you a consumer products company where the gamification of your interaction really matters, or do you make industrial widgets and maybe you need something to help train your people or guide the technicians when they're doing the repair. Or maybe you're just a company that wants to get more nimble and be able to react as the economy goes ever, ever faster and faster? Acceleration Economy, where I do a lot of work, is about the rate of change of the world. If the world is speeding up and your technology isn't, you're going to be left behind. So, the first thing you got to do as a board is understand what you mean by metaverse. So, get somebody, your CIO, your CDO, Chief Digital Officer, an outside person, read and learn what it means.

Kornik: Right. They're in a tough position certainly. I know you talk to them frequently and a lot about readiness and where they are in this process. In your opinion, are they ready? If not, what steps should the board be taking to get themselves ready?

Sadin: Boards are generally not ready for the metaverse. Now there are exceptions. Again, there were these digitally enabled companies. There's a whole lot of startups. But I tend to work with what I would call flyover companies or companies making things, whether it's financial services, or shipping, or manufacturing, or healthcare. They're not in the technology business per se, they just use technology. In most cases, companies are woefully behind in technology. The quick example from a couple of weeks ago was Southwest Airlines—technical debt sunk them. They were however many releases behind on a major piece of software, and that crippled them during a time of great stress.

So, my first message to boards—and Joe, it's a message I give boards no matter what we're talking about—is technical debt is an unfunded, generally unknown, off-balance-sheet liability. In many companies, it's bigger than what sunk Enron and WorldCom 25 years ago. If you are a board member, or a CEO, CFO, and you don't know what your company's technical debt is—I'll define it in the minute—you really are in for a world of disappointment. If you've got to respond to a competitive initiative, if you've got to do something around your M&A strategy, growth strategy, whatever it may be.

So, quickly the definition is, technical debt is the sum total of all the technology changes since you put the stuff in that you didn't apply. It's the 15-year-old server, running a piece of software that's 12 releases behind. It's the old mainframe system that is at the end of its life and nobody knows how to program it anymore because they all retired or died. It's the collection of things you bought because you've done 42 M&A acquisitions, and now you have 23 data centers, and you haven't rationalized it. All of those things are millstones around your neck, preventing you from moving into the future. Metaverse is the top-level thing that needs a lot of modern components but just about everything else you want to do, IT gets to say, “Hmmm, I need a couple of years to do that,” or they rush it through and quite frankly, screw it up. So, if you're a board, you should be focused, if you're looking at the metaverse, Web3, on where are we today, versus where we need to be to compete.

Kornik: How should executives be thinking about ROI? I mean, it strikes me that investments in the metaverse may be a long way away about seeing any return on that investment. Will they need to shift their typical timetable or their traditional thinking or metric around ROI for the metaverse?

Sadin: Well, no, I don't think so. Again, if you're a company that needs to be on the cutting edge of some game technology or something like that, you have an R&D budget, and that doesn't have an ROI typically. R&D is what you invest in the hope that you'll get something back out of it, just like the venture capital investments. So, if you're making speculative investments, keep making them. For most of us, if I'm investing in technology—let's talk about a particular thing, augmented reality. So, I'm in a business where I make something and have to fix it. What can I be doing to make my techs better at fixing things? How can I give them the power of visual representation? I've got a camera pointing at something. I've got an AI system behind it, or you know what? Maybe I have a 50-year experienced tech who doesn't want to go out in the field, looking at that camera. Then I take my junior tech and I whisper in their ear with a headset. Go look here first. Go look there second. I once was involved with a system, Joe, where we were inspecting an oil rig kind of thing. Very dirty, very dangerous for people, you have to have a lot of training to go do it. Instead of having to fly senior techs in helicopters, just didn't want to get the helicopter. Have you ever taken the training where you go to an offshore platform in helicopter where they’d throw you in the water upside down? You'll know why you don't want to do that. We could take a junior tech and give them, it was an iPad with a camera, and they could point it at the oil rig pieces and it would tell them what to inspect first, because it was a digital twin although they didn't call it that in those days. It was a digital twin of the platform. So, we made the techs smarter by giving them the ability to visualize the physical environment around them. Then when they got to the component that it said inspect, you could scrape the oil off and read the barcode and it would give you a schematic, “Inspect it this way.” So, there's an investment that creates a tremendous ROI. It also builds a capability because now you can do that, what do you do in your manufacturing lines? What do you do to enable your customers maybe to do that?

So, I want to say, Joe, for a lot of these investments in metaverse—if it's augmented reality, if it's taking data, visual, and audio and superimposing them—there is a tremendous payoff if you have the right infrastructure.

The other thing I'll say is Web 3. Web 3 is about better communication. That's lower latency, higher bandwidth and better connectivity. How do I connect to my techs in the field? How do I connect to my construction sites, my factories, my ships, my trucks, my airplanes, and my drones? If I've got better connectivity, I can do all sorts of things—from telemetry, monitoring the performance, to control, to adding more data capabilities to these products. So, if I'm in making thoughtful investments, let me describe it this way. I call it a brick-in-the-wall strategy. If I want to build the Taj Mahal, I could draw the blueprint and say, 14 years from now, I’m going to have it built. I'd rather draw the blueprint, and then ask my business units to pay for the bricks. So, this brick has to be built before this brick before this brick before this brick, but I may not want to buy any bricks over there, because I don't need them yet. So, I'll say to the board, what is the architecture? What is the business architecture? What is the technical architecture that you're shooting for? And now, how do you invest brick by brick with ROI for the most part, or R&D spending on the other part, to get you where you want to be in a timely manner with manageable risk and decent-to-great ROI?

Kornik: Wayne, let's talk a little bit about those technologies that you mentioned earlier that will enable all of this, whether it's that headset that you showed us a few minutes ago or even generative AI which is getting a lot of press these days. Where do you think we are in sort of the maturity of these technologies, which ones are you most excited about, and when do you think they all come together to deliver what a lot of us think the metaverse could be?

Sadin: Well, until about two months ago, I wouldn't have told you AI was as close to being useful every day as it appears to be now. These multibillion-dollar investments made by the arms merchants, Microsoft and Google and I'm sure others are really changing the landscape on AI now. There's a lot of risk to this. We had the great excitement about generative AI and look all the things that it can do and then we discovered that ChatGPT can't do math. 200 plus 200 is 500. No, it makes mistakes on facts. It was trained weirdly. So, if you are a board or C-suite, and you're using AI, you've got to look at the risk of bias, or have you not fed it direct dataset. Have you fed it a slanted dataset? Have you not included your own information? Or maybe—here's another risk that I thought about—what if your information is leaking out inadvertently, inadvertent disclosure and winding up in some AI model that's letting other people know more about you than you want them to know? So, AI is clearly moving very, very fast. Dare I say maybe a little too fast? Because we don't want to be seduced by the hype.

Back to the solid technologies, it's communications connectivity. It’s Starlink, it’s 5G. It's building software-defined networks. Again, I hate to talk technical to boards and C-suites. Ask your IT department, “ Do we have a software-defined network?” which just means that I can pivot the network very, very quickly. In the old days we bought a thing, we put it into the forklift. When we needed a better thing, we got another forklift. With a software-defined network, if we do an acquisition in another country, we can build the rules into the network very quickly and go live very quickly, whether it's by satellite, 5G, or a hotspot in your hand. So, invest in your communications technology. Again, technical thing. Bandwidth is great, how fast I can push data down the pipe, but latency, how long it takes the message to go back and forth is even more important in the metaverse. If you and I are talking and our latency is very quick, you see my hands move, you seen my mouth move, you see the sensor reading. If latency is long, there's that lag and your drone flies into the wall. Your blade cuts the wrong angle, and your car drives into the pole. So, we got to be fixing latency. Again, a little bit geeky, but it's important to be building the right networks because everything sits on the network.

Then the other one is going to be cloud. Look, I don't want to say cloud’s the answer to all problems. The investments being made by the cloud companies, Joe, and the $50 billion a year and more range means for most of us, we can piggyback on what they're spending and buy a tiny little slice of AI or augmented reality or Internet of Things instead of having to build our own infrastructure ourselves. So, it gives you a tremendous amount of optionality and helps you remove a tremendous amount of technical debt. Because if Microsoft spends $10 billion on AI, which they just announced, guess what? We all get to use it for $1.98 a month per user or whatever the price is going to be. You can't do that if you have to build it yourself.

Then the technology, this thing I showed you here. Until we get away from this kind of stuff, and we start thinking about a projector on your desk that's holographic, or I envision something that maybe you’ll take your eyeglasses and put a thing on your chest with a battery pack that's not sitting on your head and then shine a light up into your glasses and use an interference pattern or do a face mask if you're in an industrial environment. When we can change the physical experience, I think that stuff will take off dramatically. Again, that's not where I'd be making my investment other than in the ability to use whatever technology comes out later.

Kornik: Sure. That teed me up for my last question, Wayne, which is, I'd like you as a visionary, a futurist, and a tech expert to take me out a decade or more. Take me out to 2035 or even 2040 and dream a bit and tell me what's the metaverse’s role and how will it impact our daily lives, our working lives. What do you see when you look out to 2035, 2040?

Sadin: What I see out there 10, 15 years out, is our interaction is going to be very different. Very natural. There'll be a lot of language recognition. There'll be gesture recognition. We won't be wearing these headsets because a little thing we wear stuck in our ear and the frames of our glasses will pick up sound perfectly, will do bone conduction. So, the user interface is going to become much more natural. We won't be getting carpal tunnel syndrome by typing all day. We'll be gesturing, talking, and moving, all the stuff you see in Minority Report is not that far away. The things that move when you move your hands and all that, it's there in some applications already. The communication networks. Again, I keep coming back to that, it's fundamental. If I can't connect, wherever I am, wherever I am, with low latency and high bandwidth, a lot of what I want to do doesn't work well. If I've got five million cars on the road, they have to be able to talk to each other. They have to be able to talk back to the infrastructure. So, we've got to be enabling individually, we've got to be enabling as companies, we got to be enabling quite frankly, as nation states good, effective communication, so that all this stuff can happen. I think it's going to be a life where we have intelligent agents that do a lot more, the Siris and the other products that make your life easier in many cases, and it's going to change the world. One thing we do know is we never know how it's going to change the world but it's going to make us probably faster, smarter, stronger, and more productive, even maybe at the expense of some other things.

Kornik: Thanks for your time today, Wayne. I really enjoyed this.

Sadin: It was a pleasure. Happy to have the conversation. I look forward to follow-ups. If people have questions, engage with me on LinkedIn and Twitter, please.

Kornik: Sounds great. Thank you so much. Thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview for Wayne Sadin, I'm Joe Kornik. We'll see you next time.

Matthew Ball on how the metaverse will reshape the future of everything – Video transcript

Joe Kornik: Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview where we look at how current megatrends will impact global business over the next decade and beyond. Today, we’re talking about the metaverse future.

I’m Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, and I’m joined by Matthew Ball, managing partner of Epyllion which operates an early-stage venture fund as well as an advisory arm. He is a leading global authority on the metaverse and you may have seen him interviewed on CNN, CNBC, VICE, the BBC, or in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and many more. He’s the author of the important and very influential book, The Metaverse And How It Will Revolutionize Everything.

Matthew, thank you so much for joining me today.

Matthew Ball: I’m excited to chat.

Kornik: Matthew, let’s start with the title of your book, The Metaverse And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. You don’t see this as just a Web 3 but rather sort of a watershed moment with almost immeasurable impact.

Ball: That’s quite right. I understand the degree to which the title can seem bombastic. Certainly, it is backed by a number of different third-party perspectives. Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, estimates that roughly 50% of world GDP will eventually sit within the metaverse. Various estimates from Citi bank, Morgan Stanley, KPMG run from between $2.5 trillion to $16-trillion-plus dollars by the end of this decade as it relates to the world economy, in contrast to about $102 trillion as of 2022-2023.

Behind this is a fundamental distinction between how we often envision the metaverse—a giant video game, a virtual reality headset—and how the technologists who were pioneering it understand it. That is to understand it as a successor state to today’s internet, not fully replacing the internet as we know it today but much like the cloud and mobile computing era, it builds upon that foundation, TCP/IP forged in the late 70s-early 80s to produce new experiences, that leads to new devices, that leads to new software, that leads to new applications.

When we’re talking about the metaverse, to build it, we are therefore talking about fundamentally overhauling, re-architecting, transforming one of the world’s most important consequential technologies, one that itself has transformed almost every individual market, country, political culture, climate, and the individual—and that’s the internet.

Kornik: Right. For those trying to wrap our heads around its impact, you mentioned some of those forecasts and some of those various estimates. Some of them value the global metaverse economy could be as much as $15 trillion by the end of the decade, by 2030. Is that realistic?

Ball: The fun thing about these forecasts is that they’re really a question of allocation. You realize that we often talk about the digital economy, digital businesses, the internet economy, but no one really says this is the precise value. Why? Because it’s a question of allocation. The UN generally embraces an estimate and says 20% of world GDP is digital but, of course, allocation is the name of the game there. How much of AT&T’s revenues are digital? We know what percentage comes from mobile smartphone subscriptions but, of course, part of that is for voice communications.

When you purchase something from Amazon.com, is that a digital purchase? Is that an internet purchase? The internet is certainly the channel for the purchase but if you purchased my book, it’s a physical book that was manufactured physically. It’s distributed and fulfilled physically. It’s consumed physically. You might say, well, 90% of that is physical revenue, but what happens when it’s an e-book? Certainly, the allocation should change but what is it? What happens when you discover it through social media as opposed to an outdoor billboard?

What really matters about this is not whether or not the metaverse is $2.5 trillion or $10 trillion. It’s recognizing that almost all of the world economy runs on the internet. We may say 20% is digital but the remaining 80%—agriculture, energy, transportation—that certainly runs on the internet. That is certainly digitally powered and to the extent you’re an investor, digital is the growth engine, the opportunity for displacement-replacement. We’re looking at the metaverse as a game of allocation but more important is the transformation of value, both on the increase and the substitution replacement side.

Kornik: Interesting. How far away are we right now from the metaverse being mainstream?

Ball: I want to start by disabusing one of the challenges with the metaverse narrative today. This is an idea that has had a name for about 30 years. It has been varyingly described for close to a century. What’s new, of course, is that we’re talking about it all the time, most obviously because Meta changed its name from Facebook. When most people were building the metaverse a few years ago, they talked about it as a multi-decade transformation. That is my frame of reference. There’s a second cohort that talked about five to 10 years. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg and John Carmack, the CTO of Oculus, talked about it as a five-to-10-year transformation.

But there was another cohort, including Sachi and Adello or Bill Gates, many in the Web 3 community who talked about it as imminent, if not here now. The challenge of that last perspective is, it raised expectations, even though such as Mark Zuckerberg started to lose that battle where people started to say, “If the metaverse is here, why isn’t my life more different? Where are the revenues? What’s the product I can buy and how is it different?” I think of this as a transformation, but what’s most important here, and certainly relates to investors and entrepreneurs, is to recognize that the question of “when is a technology mainstream?” is a bit elusive. It’s actually not that practical a question. Certainly, the timeline matters, but all technologies about when is what available for whom, when, how, and why.

The mobile era began in some regard in 1973 with the first cellular call. In 1991, we had the first 2G network. That was the first digital wireless network. The first smartphone came in 1992. That was IBM, by the way. We had the Apple Newton in ’94, BlackBerrys in the late 90s, the first direct-to-consumer media services in the early 2000s in Japan, but we would really say that for the average person the smartphone and mobile cloud era felt present until 2007, 2008. We have the coincident launches of the iPhone, then Android, then the iPhone App Store.

But even if you say it began in 2007, 2008, the average American did not have a smartphone until 2014. The average human didn’t have a smartphone until 2020, and so for them, it would be wrong to say that the mobile era had arrived prior to, truthfully, 36 months ago. For you and I, Joe, I imagine the answer to the question when was mobile here was probably 1998, 1999, and so that’s how we think about it. There’s a technology question. There’s a demographic question. There’s an application question, and there’s a sector question.

Kornik: Right, and I think some of those, maybe those early predictions around timing and how long before the metaverse became mainstream, might have led to some of the skepticism right now that we’re seeing around the metaverse, some of the stops and starts, particularly among business leaders, I think, you have a challenge. They’re probably not engaged with the metaverse very much at all. How would you suggest they started to begin to map out a strategy around the metaverse?

Ball: I think that’s quite right. The immediacy to which the metaverse emerged as a buzzword, plus the learnings of internet and mobile disruption, led many to start asking themselves the question, “What is our metaverse strategy?”—if not demand outright that they establish one, that they start testing one. The challenges here are the intent is right, but often I found the business leaders didn’t have a good sense of what it was they were trying to establish. What were they trying to solve? What were they trying to answer? What was the problem that, what I would define as real-time 3D simulation technology, could answer? If the question is you want to start a think-tank, that’s a legitimate objective. If you wanted to make a signal to the market, to your peers, to shareholders, to perspective employees about the seriousness through which you are taking this transformation, about your willingness to experiment, that’s all valid. But the broader question is, if you go back to the question, the metaverse is not a when, it’s a when is what here, why, how, and to what end? Business leaders need to start from, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve for?

Often, it’s as simple as establishing a digital twin that aids industrial design and then potentially supplements live operation. That doesn’t require you to imagine a future state that’s that different. It doesn’t imagine or require you to deploy VR headsets. It just requires a focused exemplar and business case.

Kornik: You talked about Web 2.0 and mobile earlier. We saw some legacy companies, well-established brands disrupted to the point of extinction because of it, and we say we saw new companies emerge in that space. Do you expect a similar sort of fate for companies in Web 3 in the metaverse? Do you expect new players to emerge and old, more established brands to maybe go by the wayside?

Ball: Certainly. If you imagine that the metaverse is as transformative as I imagine it to be and the forecasts of third-party agencies are to be realized, then you almost have to imagine that there’s going to be widespread disruption in displacement because the technological platforms and software and services that we use today will change. I imagine this change in five buckets that we’ve seen throughout history. The first of those companies which will perish, they’ll be so significantly disrupted that their business model and going concern evaporate. Blockbuster is a famous example of that. You can think of web crawler as another, and the search engine space replaced by PageRank and Google.

The second or companies which actually do endure but they languish because they’re so far surpassed by another company in that space. Skype and ICQ exist but, of course, the leading instant messaging services of this era are tens if not hundreds of times larger than those services were even at their peak, and that’s partly because they reimagined fundamental premises. Skype was designed to speak to traditional telephony systems. WhatsApp does that, but Snapchat does not. Slack has no interest. In fact, it’s organized around enterprise APIs. Of course, Instagram reimagines it as a picture-centric medium.

The third category or companies which do port over and indeed grow because the TAM (technology acceptance model) in the digital economy has grown, Disney is not of the digital era but it’s larger and reaches more customers because of it. Apple was reinvented in mobile and is larger because of it. Facebook was threatened by mobile and, of course, predated it, but it reached 2 billion daily active users last quarter because of the lack of constraints that mobile offers in contrast to PC.

The last two categories, however, are my favorite. The first are those companies which are displaced in their core business but grow because of growth in what used to be their side arms. Microsoft is the classic example. Microsoft has never had a smaller share of computing operating systems than it does in 2023. At one point, market share was as high as 96%, including mobile. Today, it’s less than 10% in the Western world and 5% global. Yet Microsoft reached new highs because of its horizontal services which no longer reached just 100 million Windows users, but potentially billions of mobile users across multiple different operating systems. IBM is more valuable than ever, even though it has been decades since it held the dominant position in computing devices for the average person.

The last category are the new entrants who take advantage of this new platform and the new generational shift to displace some of the aforementioned companies. Right now, we see that most classically is Google in the PC era, Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, TikTok in the social and mobile and cloud era. Right now, we’re making hypotheses as to what the new metaverse services and platforms will be.

Kornik: Matthew, if I could ask you a best-case scenario and a worst-case scenario for the metaverse future, I guess what I’m asking is what could go right and what could go wrong?

Ball: When we talk about what could go wrong, there are really two different questions. One is to talk about the impediments to actually constructing the metaverse. The internet was commercialized after it was established and indeed, it was established around the premise of exchange. That is what the internet is. The term comes from internetworking. Really, we had a fleet of standards and protocols which supported myriad different use cases. The idea that AT&T, Telefonica, IBM, Verizon, Comcast, China Mobile can all exchange an email with the same structure, none of them actually managing the global system for email, is remarkable. Of course, many of these companies try to have their own de facto networking standard.

One of the things that can go wrong is not that the metaverse doesn’t happen, but the various for-profit initiatives and endeavors mean that where it is established, it’s limited and therefore, while we talk about the internet and the software layer on top of it, it’s perhaps possible that there’s very little commonality for the metaverse. This pollyannish ideal of an interconnected 3D simulation is not possible, just the limited exchange of information with highly siloed and comprehensive but for-profit kind of islands within it. You’ll see that from the 70s through the 90s, there was an expectation that’s what the internet would be, we’re very fortunate the internet was not, but that doesn’t mean that history will repeat.

The second thing that could go wrong is to understand that there are many downsides with the internet as it exists today and the metaverse will challenge many of them. Most of us are dissatisfied with the role of algorithms, the contribution of the larger social platforms to our state of mind or well-being or happiness. I would certainly say that data rights and data security aren’t what they need to be. More broadly, we still contend with harassment toxicity, mis- and disinformation, and radicalization on the internet. Going to a live shared, more global, 3D-immersive experience will not make those problems easier. It will make them harder, and it will also deprecate some of the best practices that we’ve established over the last decade.

In addition, some of the virtual reality and extended reality devices and technologies that we envision will produce very severe challenges. Right now, many of us contend with the fact that Siri listens to everything that we say, but Siri doesn’t see inside your home. It doesn’t see your tax returns. It doesn’t see your children running through the home. Trying to figure out how we progress, how we regulate, how we figure out what the requirements should and shouldn’t be, that’s going to be a real challenge, and I do think that there’s a way in which we can fear that outcome.

But if you ask me what can go right, look, the internet has been not perfect—far from it—but I would certainly argue it has done far more good than ill. It has certainly given voice to billions who lacked one before. It has made the global economy more competitive and fostered greater openness. But we discussed earlier that many companies may be displaced by the metaverse. That means their business models, their philosophies, and their leaders will as well. It’s very hard to affect change midcycle because of the entrenched leadership, but to the extent in which we’re dissatisfied with the metaverse as it exists today, I actually think that the swap to a next platform, plus the learnings we have as consumers, developers, users, governments, affords us a rare opportunity to reset the internet as we know it today to be a better one in the future.

Kornik: So interesting. Matthew, last one for me. Envision, if you could, 2035. Let’s go out more than a decade. Can you give me an example of something that perhaps I haven’t thought of that will just blow my mind?

Ball: Well, I can’t speak to what you haven’t thought of, but I can tell you that the category that I am most hopeful about is education. Education is a really important category for a few different reasons. Firstly, its value is self-evident but it’s worth highlighting that not only is it a substantial portion of the U.S. economy. You’ll note that it is actually the single sector of the U.S. economy which has seen the greatest cost increase since the internet was formalized in the early 1980s. Costs are up about 1,400% to 1,500%. In contrast, healthcare, which many consider to be an albatross on the economies, up half as much. It’s still crippling 600% or 700%, but education is twice as bad. That’s because, for all of the benefits of the internet, it hasn’t meant that we can actually teach cheaper than ever before. We don’t teach faster than ever before, and we don’t teach more effectively a larger number of students than ever before. If we want to solve for cost creep, we also need to find a way to change that dynamic. I’m further hopeful that we can finally start to address some of the longstanding hopes for what the internet might bring, which is not just better cost. It’s greater quality and broader reach.

Today, your access to education is primarily limited to the wealth of the school board, the geographic availability of that school board, and the teachers which happen to live there, and that we’re talking about a primarily American concern. Certainly, if you will live abroad in developing markets, really none of those three things are even questions, and we know that just on-demand video on YouTube or digital multiple choice does not really close that gap.

When I think about the metaverse, the idea of virtual classrooms with nearly infinite zero-to-no-cost marginal goods and experiences that have a sense of presence—you can see your teachers’ eyes; you can look to your right and see your peer; you can dissect a feral cat or a dog or an elephant while also going Magic School Bus and traveling in circulatory system. Test physics on the moon and Mars. Go into a volcano as it erupts into the atmosphere, and then be dispersed as particles to understand its impact on the climate. We’re talking about some things that we don’t want to do. Dissections, certainly of some animals we don’t want to dissect, ethics around that, but more importantly, just the availability of these resources. I think idea of making more personal, lower cost, immersive experiences that untether us to resources and geography, that’s what matters to me the most, certainly.

Kornik: Yes, fascinating. Matthew, you’ve given us a lot of think about here today. Thank you so much for the conversation. I really appreciate the time.

Ball: My pleasure. This is a lot of fun.

Kornik: Thank you for watching the VISION by Protiviti interview. For Matthew Ball, I’m Joe Kornik. We’ll see you next time.