Amidst the fears and everyday realities of wars and pandemics, the urgency to address global warming and the societal challenges of technological hyper-transformation the world continues to change at a mind-boggling pace.

Radical and once unthinkable climate-emergency measures like new carbon taxes (such as for airline tickets or  for buying meat) are becoming increasingly likely as consumers and concerned citizens around the world push for real and unheard-of change.

At the same time, Company CEO’s are touting their new commitments to stakeholder values, not just shareholder values. So how can we make The Good Future a reality?

Investors and the media is buzzing with excitement as businesses and individuals alike are starting to tap into Generative AI models like Dalle2, ChatGPT and many others. ChatGPT churns out unique texts that often have a disturbingly human-like quality.

Already being utilized in customer service, content production, paper-writing, coding and so on, it appears that generative AI is getting ready to transform the internet as we know it – with Google entering into ‘Red Alert’ mode and Microsoft investing 10 Billion US Dollars into OpenAI. But their impacts on society could be just as vast, in many good ways and in many quite worrisome ways.

How can these tools – and AI in general – help us to achieve what I call ‘The Good Future‘?

Here’s what’s so exciting about ChatGPT: It’s a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text. This makes it useful for a number of natural language processing tasks. Because it is based on OpenAI’s GPT architecture, it can also be fine-tuned to specific tasks and domains.

On the other hand, ChatGPT‘s potential to perpetuate bias has sparked concern as it is trained on ‘random’ internet texts that may include biased or deceptive information.

This raises worries about its use in education, employment, law enforcement, and healthcare. ChatGPT can also to be used to generate deep fake texts, so it could be used to spread misinformation and disinformation, influencing public opinion and elections.

It could be heaven or it could be hell – how to get it right

“The metaverse is a hypothesized iteration of the internet, supporting persistent online 3-D virtual environments through conventional personal computing, as well as virtual and augmented reality headsets” (Wikipedia).    

“The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world” (Facebook’s Meta briefing).

On the one hand, the Metaverse could be ‘the Internet we’ve always wanted’: Immersive, real-time/feel, 3D… and that could be great for business, commerce, retail and of course technology companies:)

On the other hand, it could end up to be more of a MetaPERverse, replacing human relationships and experiences with deep surveillance and a bizarrely monetized simulations, reducing complex human life to data feeds, fancy graphics and AI-fuelled convenience: Consensual hallucinations sold as ‘human empowerment’?

Imagine social media’s aberrations and abuse – but x 1000!

In this talk, I outline both the ‘heavenly’ possibilities of the Metaverse as well as the more troubling aspects while depicting possible ways forward, based on my motto of ‘embracing technology but not becoming it‘

• GREEN IS THE NEW DIGITAL: THE SUSTAINABILITY REVOLUTION
• EXPONENTIAL CHANGE: DIGITIZATION, DECARBONISATION, REFORMATION
• THE NEXT 10 YEARS (BEYOND THE PANDEMIC)
• THE 10 MEGASHIFTS OF EXPONENTIAL TRANSFORMATION
• AWESOME HUMANS AND AMAZING TECHNOLOGY: WORK & EDUCATION
• WHY AND HOW THE FUTURE IS BETTER THAN WE THINK