The Metaverse has been infiltrating people’s minds over the last weeks, even if just unconsciously when we wait that millisecond’s fraction for our social media accounts to load. We know, however, that there’s much more to the Metaverse than a big corporate company changing its name.Will the Metaverse disrupt business models? I’m not sure about this. I would pose a more ethical question like, will people dive deeper into the metaverse like they currently do with social media. We believe that at some point in your personal development, this metaverse or social media really comes down to a network of 1. It’s just you and your thoughts contemplating life and you shouldn’t need points or likes to make you feel whole. The metaverse is already inside you, isn’t it?We recently asked our Anthropology advisor and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Russell Bernard, about his opinion on this topic and this is what he had to say about it…

The Metaverse – not a new conceptThe Metaverse is the latest in the history of games in which players create avatars of themselves and play as those avatars. This attempt to escape into alternative realities for a while is ageless. At ancient theaters (like Epidaurus, Ephesus, Jerash), grownups paid to watch professional thespians occupy an alternative reality for a few hours — what children do all the time, without any training. The summer Chorégies d’Orange opera festival in Southern, France, is held on the site of a restored Roman theater from 2000 years ago. People paying at the Globe Theater to watch other people create alternative realities made Shakespeare famous in his own time. And the story continues today on the West End of London, on Broadway in New York, and in towns large and small across the world.

The Universe of video games

“In 1974, Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing tabletop game, gave lots of people the opportunity to escape into an alternative reality and was a commercial success. Big-iron computers of that time made it possible for denizens of universities to play D&D and other adventure games. In the late 1970s, I played the original Adventure on an Adm3, 300-baud dial up. Then in 1979, the Apple 2e gave that to everyone and in the 1980s, 1200 baud changed everything.”Since then, it’s been one commercial success after another. Second life was a commercial success and died a graceful capitalist death when it no longer commanded a growing, paying audience.The Metaverse is now, and will continue to be an expanding universe of alternative universes, available at a price to the diverse segments of a market that potentially comprises all of humanity. Meta & Co. is the latest, but not the last, to define and cash in on those segments.

Is the Metaverse a utopia?

As an environment that consists of multiple realities, the Metaverse provides a level of immersion bound to change everything. The desire to escape this world is part of human nature since we have been walking the Earth. Literature, music, cinema, theatre and even video games – just to name a few – have always been intertwined with the ageless concept of escapism: the will to leave the present reality in some form and migrate to another space and time.With such heavy topics as artificial intelligence, the space race, and virtual reality in the last four decades, the Metaverse naturally emerges in the public sphere. Far out in the future or a mere utopia – it does not matter, because the general idea that a human being can exist and move through digital environments with its own digital counterpart is not as far-fetched as it may sound.

At Mind Bank Ai we believe that the Personal Digital Twins is an extension of yourself and a platform that will help us transform to a world of AI-enhanced humanity. It’s a transformation that will see benefits to humanity in this world, not in some Metaverse. Our technology is constantly evolving and many aspects of our lives are actually already going beyond what we thought was possible just a few years ago.The Metaverse has been here for millennia and it’s only getting bigger and more immersive but your digital twin is more than that. Mind Bank Ai is redefining what’s possible so that humanity can “go beyond” its current limits in this world. That’s why we think Meta is just another four letter word. Let’s fix the problems and issues we are facing on this planet and in our communities before we start escaping into other “digital ones.” Together we can all go beyond.