In the real world, we are monkeys restricted by the rules of physics; in the meta-universe, we are the code, the god of God.
Original title: “”Meta Universe”-Exodus in the 21st Century”
Written by: Wu Xiao
Looking back over three thousand years, human beings today possess countless abilities that looked like gods in ancient times.
We observe the natural universe, discover, learn and imitate, and constantly improve today’s natural sciences. Mathematics is called the science of infinity (Hermann Weyl (1968). “Gesammelte Abhandlungen”), and it is the most important formal science created by mankind. Mathematics is not part of nature, but it can create four-dimensional, five-dimensional… and even infinite-dimensional spaces. We can imagine, understand and even simulate, but we can never reach it.
To this day, the meta-universe is an important technology to help humans complete the ascent from the natural universe.
The 21st century is the century of human migration towards the virtual world.
The meta universe will reconstruct the dimensions of the world
The origin of the meta-universe comes from the novel “Avalanche” written by Neal Stephenson in 1992.
In “Avalanche”, the real world is a cyberpunk scene, while in the meta-universe, it carries human knowledge, entertainment and the entire spiritual civilization. Our physical universe today is three-dimensional, bound by countless physical rules. Based on our knowledge of the physical world, we have all of today’s science and today’s material civilization.
However, the arrival of the meta-universe will reconstruct the dimensions of our world. We can do a lot of things that violate the physical rules but conform to the logic of the code . In today’s physical world, time is irreversible, energy is conserved, and life is based on negative entropy. These are all right, at least today.
However, in the meta-universe, we can create our own spiritual civilization rules through code. In the meta-universe, time can be a state, a process, and a value. All objects can be defined with the attribute of time, just like the apple in Doctor Strange. The apples in the meta-universe, in addition to the normal apple characteristics, believe that we can completely increase the definition of time. For the code, it’s just adding an attribute in the structure. However, for the natives of the meta universe, time is reversible. The time acting on Apple is like a progress bar, which can be dragged at will.
Breaking through the limitations of physical rules is a sparse and common thing in the meta-universe. We cannot imagine what happens in the metaverse through our inherent cognition. We need to think about the dimensions in the metaverse from the perspective of the natives in the metaverse. For the next generation of programmers and designers, they will be the aborigines of the meta universe. Just like the aboriginal people of the Internet, the way of receiving information and the speed of understanding the world will grow exponentially. All objects in the meta-universe naturally have countless primitive attributes, and they will be the group that can best adapt to such an environment.
Meta universe and incremental market
In order to obtain an incremental market, mankind has made various efforts in history.
Starting from the great geographical discovery, from the 15th to the 17th century, European fleets appeared on the oceans around the world, looking for new trade routes and trading partners. Although I have not found a golden country where all Europeans can live happily, I did find that the trade route has been greatly expanded and new increments have been obtained in the era.
In the 21st century, we have discovered that the Internet and computer technology can provide services at very low marginal costs. “Internet colonization” has enabled a group of multinational Internet giants to gain new increments on a global scale.
In recent years, with no major technological breakthroughs, the world has gradually fallen into a shadow of anxiety. Political tensions and economic turmoil all imply that we are gradually returning to the situation of mutual separation of stocks.
Today, on the one hand, we are exploring the great geographical discoveries longing for the interstellar age, looking up at the starry sky, and looking forward to exploring the sky full of stars and the sea. On the other hand, we gradually began to build our virtual space through VR/AR, brain-computer interface technology, and digital twin technology. The meta universe was born precisely in this most suitable time and space.
Why do we go to the virtual world? On the one hand, it is because in the meta-universe, we can obtain an infinitely incremental market. We can experience a variety of interesting services in the virtual world just like the movie “top player”, without any consumption in real life. With the birth of brain-computer interface technology, we may lie in the dormant cabin in the future, experiencing a high-dimensional life experience. It will neither consume too much resources in the physical world, nor reduce any of today’s abundant activities, such as eating, drinking, playing, and having fun, all of which will have the same experience and service in the meta-universe. Through brain-computer interface technology, even if we are feeling eating big fish, in the physical world, we can still use nutrient solutions to ensure our health. In this way, you can experience the pleasure of fried food without worrying about body distortion and the risk of cancer.
Infinitely progressive technological singularity
If it is only virtual food and game experience, it is not enough to summarize the meta-universe. If the meta-universe is only for the leisure and entertainment of mankind, it cannot help everyone see the infinitely possible future.
In the future, more than 90% of human activities will be carried out in the meta-universe. Almost all production activities of our scientific research, art, teaching, development, and design will be in the meta universe. Many people may ask, how is it possible? It is possible for me to go to the meta-universe to play games and lose weight, but it is impossible for us to put all the production in the meta-universe. That is not a real world.
I will not make some idealized explanations here, but rather use production efficiency to give an example in a more utilitarian way. If the production efficiency in the meta-universe is 10 times or even 100 times that of today, how would we choose? Once the production efficiency can be increased exponentially, it will soon allow most humans to accept this new thing. So why is there an exponential increase in work efficiency in it?
Because the meta-universe is a fusion of all the final fantasy of computer science so far. Our 5G, VR, AR, brain-computer interface technology, blockchain, artificial intelligence, Meta Universe is a new world that can carry all these technologies.
Taking brain-computer interface technology as an example, our brains can be deceived. We may feel a long time in our sleep, or just one night in real life. When you write 10 or 100 papers in the meta universe, you can only write 1 paper in reality. Would you choose to enter the meta universe? In the face of such a substantial increase in efficiency, we will accelerate to reach the technological singularity. Moreover, I have made a very conservative estimate of such efficiency improvement. Today, the amount of calculation of any algorithm and formula running in our cloud computing may be impossible to solve even if the memory overflowed in the past.
Therefore, all breakthroughs in non-basic science will exponentially accelerate with the arrival of the meta-universe. Ultimately, the world has an irreversible paradigm shift.
Blockchain and meta-universe rule design
Computer scientists today do not understand the potential of blockchain and smart contracts. Simply put, blockchain is the first technology born for the purpose of consolidating consensus. Smart contracts are different from any previous computer language in the sociological sense, even if they use the same grammar. The computer language for writing smart contracts is not a tool for communicating with machines in formal linguistics, but a way of dialogue with all computer scientists in the world, with all computers, and with the entire meta-universe in cognitive linguistics.
Language affects people’s thinking patterns, and in turn affects the way people perceive the world.
Most of the computer languages we learned before exist for computers/machines to achieve certain functions. Even if it is open source code on github, although we know that the code will be made public, we do not expect users to understand what we have done.
In today’s Internet world, users do not understand what the code behind any app is. One thing we often hear is that we don’t have to understand what the technology behind it is, I just want to experience what the function is. All previous computer programming languages were born to serve this purpose. We write programs to complete a certain functionality, to add an activity to the app, or to use artificial intelligence algorithms to distinguish which picture is a cat, then The picture is of human beings and so on. This is not the case with smart contracts.
Smart contracts are designed to execute logic and achieve consensus interaction in the blockchain, a network where everyone and all machines generate consensus. When we write a smart contract, we may be to prove our innocence, to clearly express all the rules in the contract, without leaving a back door; we may be for fairness and justice, everyone can see the logical rules and design schemes in the contract ; We may be to achieve consensus interaction, all developers can directly and conveniently interact with smart contracts, just as machine gun pools and aggregators can easily connect the depth of funds in the entire decentralized world; when we write a smart contract , We hope that developers and ordinary users can understand the logic and ensure the openness and transparency of the core logic. We hope to be able to achieve functionality, security, and consensus interaction when all core codes are disclosed.
We design a smart contract to make it easy for everyone to understand, the rules are transparent and at the same time to interact with our contract in the same way.
Learning to use language affects the way humans think. For ordinary people, snow is a kind of white crystals falling in the air. But in Inuit language, there are more than 10 vocabulary describing snow. After learning Inuktitut, ordinary people can distinguish many different abilities in snow. For example, they have a distinction between states: melting snow, falling snow, snow on the ground, and so on.
In 2012, the author happened to have the opportunity to enter the polar circle in the polar night environment, and deeply understood why snow is so important to their lives. A new way of perception and thinking will be born through learning to use language, and this is the same for programmers. The economic foundation, rules and laws in the meta-universe world are not the way of thinking suitable for computer programming in the traditional sense. Today’s blockchain developers happen to be the first batch of designers trained in this open-rule design thinking. They will become pioneers in the meta universe and contribute to the birth of this new world.
The Three Elements of Genesis of the Metaverse
The meta universe is a very interesting future, but how do we reach it? After all, we are all blockchain developers and computer scientists, not science fiction writers. We can’t break away from the basics of real technology and just provide a beautiful fantasy. I think that the creation of the meta-universe must be supported by the following three elements:
- PERCEPTION
- REGULATION
- MASSPRODUCTION
PERCEPTION is perception. Today our perception of the meta universe is still very weak. Even if I see many meta-universe projects, it still feels like a simple, even rudimentary 3D game. We need a lot of technical support in perception, including VR, AR, MR, brain-computer interface technology, computer graphics, etc. Without the support of perception technology, we cannot perceive the existence of the meta-universe at all.
REGULATION is the rule. For a world as big as the meta universe, it is necessary to have basic economic rules and rules for the operation of the world. What kind of behavior will require punishment? What kind of rules apply in the meta universe? What kind of economic infrastructure can provide support? These rules require blockchain technology to provide open and transparent automatic execution.
MASSPRODUCTION is mass production. We do not hope that all the input of computer technology and manpower and material resources will end up being a meta-universe the size of a room. We hope that the world of the meta universe can quickly expand to 10 times or 100 times the size of our universe today, providing a vast incremental market.
I used to think that mass production should be 5G, IoT, etc. However, in recent deep thinking, I found that mass production should be artificial intelligence. No matter how good a programmer is, he is not a first-class producer in the world of Metaverse. All programmers need to read and understand when looking at code and smart contracts, and when designing, they need to transform logic and make smart ideas. But the code of the meta universe is naturally readable by the machine. The speed at which artificial intelligence understands the meta-universe world is countless times faster than that of human beings. The meta-universe world is composed of 0 and 1.
In the future, more than 99% of our meta-universe world should be designed by artificial intelligence. Our programmers are more to guide and establish rules, design boundaries, and assist artificial intelligence to better produce the meta-universe on a large scale. Moreover, with the accumulation of data and the existing meta-universe library, the speed of artificial intelligence design will become faster and faster, and finally, according to certain rules, a meta-universe space that is constantly expanding is formed, just like our physical universe. .
The Sociological Significance of the Metaverse
The meta-universe can effectively prevent human beings from being involuted and ascend from a finite civilization to an infinite civilization. Looking back at this year, about 21% of the US dollars were printed this year, totaling 4.5 trillion US dollars. At the same time, in response to the new crown epidemic and the US release of water, central banks of various countries have also chosen a continuous water release strategy.
Where will this printed money go? It’s hard to go to real estate, because real estate prices in various countries are already quite high. It’s normal for young people to not be able to buy a house; they are also not able to go to consumer goods and necessities, because the price of a house is too high and they can still rent a house. If you can’t afford to eat, then a major event will be a complete matter; not to mention buying weapons and equipment, which is likely to directly lead to the Third World War. The only thing that can go is the meta universe. Because starting a business is the fastest way to burn money. Countless ideas, teams, and high-quality projects will go to the meta universe to explore, and countless capital and hot money will also dissolve in the meta universe. Because the money is burned in the meta universe, it is the best option for mankind and even this world. These ideas may bring us unlimited incremental market.
More importantly, there are really unlimited opportunities in it. Just like the Internet, these enthusiasm will quickly push Metaverse to a new peak. This not only circumvents our global involution today, but also allows us to explore the boundary in the new sea of stars in the meta universe.
In the real world, we are monkeys restricted by the rules of physics; in the meta-universe, we are the code, the god of God. Everything in the past is a prologue (Shakespeare, William, Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine. “The Tempest (Folger Shakespeare Library).” Washington Square (1994).). I have always believed that the greatest opportunity of our century will be born in the meta universe, and I look forward to seeing you in the meta universe!
