Case: Metaverse

Jika ada adalah CEO Mark Zuckerberg, apa yang akan

anda lakukan?

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/26/meta-
plans-to-lose-even-more-money-building-
the-metaverse.html

Meta plans to lose even

more money building
the metaverse while its
ads business shrinks
CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated his commitment to spending billions of
dollars developing the metaverse amid investor concern about the health of
his company’s online advertising business.

On a call with analysts as part of Meta’s third-quarter earnings report,

Zuckerberg and other Meta executives fielded a number of questions from
analysts who sounded increasingly frustrated with the company’s rising costs
and expenses, which jumped 19% year over year to $22.1 billion during the
quarter.

Meta shares tanked 24% Thursday morning, the day after the company
reported weak fourth-quarter guidance below analysts’ estimates. The
Facebook parent’s revenue slipped 4% year over year to $27.7 billion in the
third quarter while its profit plummeted 52% to $4.4 billion.

Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which is responsible for developing the virtual reality
and related augmented reality technology that underpins the yet-to-be built
metaverse, has lost $9.4 billion so far in 2022. Revenue in that business unit
dropped nearly 50% year over year to $285 million, which Meta’s chief
financial officer, Dave Wehner, attributed to “lower Quest 2 sales.”

“We do anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow
significantly year-over-year,” Meta said in a statement. “Beyond 2023, we
expect to pace Reality Labs investments such that we can achieve our goal of
growing overall company operating income in the long run.”

Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies, said during the earnings call that investors
are likely feeling as if there are “too many experimental bets versus proven
bets on the core” and asked why Meta believes the experimental bets like the
metaverse will pay off.

“I just think that there’s a difference between something being experimental and not knowing
how good it’s going to end up being,” Zuckerberg said in response. “But I think a lot of the
things that we’re working on across the family of apps, we’re quite confident that they’re going
to work and be good,” he added, citing the company’s work improving its TikTok-like Reels
short-video service, its content-recommendation algorithms, business messaging features and
online advertising technology.

Although Zuckerberg said he “can’t tell you right now how big they are going to scale to be,”
each improvement is “kind of going in the right direction.”

Zuckerberg said that “obviously, the metaverse is a longer-term set of efforts that we’re working
on” and that he thinks “that that is going to end up working, too.”

Sounding flabbergasted, Zuckerberg said “there are a lot of things going on

right now in the business and in the world, and so it’s hard to have a simple
‘we’re going to do this one thing and that’s going to solve all the issues.’”

Meta is facing a number of challenges like the poor economy, the lingering
effects of Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update that made it harder for Meta to
target ads to users, and competition from players like TikTok, Zuckerberg
said.

Long-term investments into the metaverse are “going to provide greater

returns over time,” he said.

“I think we’re going to resolve each of these things over different periods of
time, and I appreciate the patience and I think that those who are patient and
invest with us will end up being rewarded,” he said.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that part of the reason his company is developing

the metaverse is to ensure that it owns a platform in the future that won’t be
adversely impacted by the decisions of its rivals, like Apple. But the bigger
reason Zuckerberg is developing the metaverse is because technology
companies can be more innovative when they build both the software and
hardware that underpins a computing platform, he said.

“A lot of this is just you can build new and innovative things by when you
control more of the stack yourself,” Zuckerberg said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/
2021/10/25/facebook-pours-billions-in-
metaverse-as-ad-business-falters
Facebook pours billions into ‘metaverse’ as
ad business falters
The company’s total revenue, which primarily consists of ad sales, rose to $29.01bn in
the third quarter from $21.47bn a year earlier, missing analysts’ estimates of
$29.57bn.

Facebook Inc said on Monday that it will break out its division focused on hardware and
virtual and augmented reality into a new reporting segment, as its main advertising
businesses face “significant uncertainty”.

Facebook warned that Apple Inc’s new privacy rules would weigh on its digital business
in the current quarter, after the social media company reported quarterly revenue below
market expectations.

Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said Facebook expected its

investment in Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) to reduce its overall
operating profit in 2021 by approximately $10bn.

The financial commitment by the world’s largest social media

company to building the metaverse comes as the company is swamped
by coverage of documents leaked by former Facebook employee
Frances Haugen, which she said showed the company chose profit
over user safety.

Facebook has said Haugen mischaracterised its work.

Shares of the company were trading up about 2 percent at $336 in

volatile extended trading on Monday. Facebook, whose shares have
gained about 20 percent so far this year, is about $85bn away from
regaining a spot on the $1 trillion club and joining new entrant Tesla
Inc.

The company expects fourth-quarter revenue to be in a range of

$31.5bn to $34bn. Analysts had forecast $34.84bn in revenue, or a
24.1 percent jump, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Its third-quarter revenue too faced the brunt of Apple’s privacy rules
that made it harder for brands to target and measure their ads on
Facebook.

The company’s total revenue, which primarily consists of ad sales, rose

to $29.01bn in the third quarter from $21.47bn a year earlier, missing
analysts’ estimates of $29.57bn

Facebook said it repurchased $14.37bn in stock during the third

quarter and announced an additional $50bn in share buy-backs.

Facebook Misinformation Is Bad

Enough. The Metaverse Will Be Worse
Here's a plausible scenario that could soon take place in the metaverse, the online
virtual reality environments under rapid development by Mark Zuckerberg and other
tech entrepreneurs: A political candidate is giving a speech to millions of people. While
each viewer thinks they are seeing the same version of the candidate, in virtual reality
they are actually each seeing a slightly different version. For each and every viewer, the
candidate's face has been subtly modified to resemble the viewer.

This is done by blending features of each viewer's face into the candidate's face. The
viewers are unaware of any manipulation of the image. Yet they are strongly influenced
by it: Each member of the audience is more favorably disposed to the candidate than
they would have been without any digital manipulation.

This is not speculation. It has long been known that mimicry can be exploited as a
powerful tool for influence. A series of experiments (PDF) by Stanford researchers has
shown that slightly changing the features of an unfamiliar political figure to resemble
each voter made people rate politicians more favorably.

The experiments took pictures of study participants and real candidates in a mock-up of
an election campaign. The pictures of each candidate were modified to resemble each
participant. The studies found that even if 40 percent of the participant's features were
blended into the candidate's face, the participants were entirely unaware the image had
been manipulated.

Virtual reality environments will enable psychological and emotional manipulation of its users
at a level unimaginable in today's media.
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In the metaverse, it's easy to imagine this type of mimicry at a massive scale.

At the heart of all deception is emotional manipulation. Virtual reality environments,

such as Facebook's (now Meta's) metaverse, will enable psychological and emotional
manipulation of its users at a level unimaginable in today's media.

I have been working on problems of deception, disinformation, and artificial intelligence

for close to four decades, including two terms as a program manager at the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We are not even close to being able to
defend users against the threats posed by this coming new medium. In virtual reality,
malicious actors will be able to take the age-old dark arts of deception and influence to
new heights—or depths.

The very same features that make virtual reality environments so attractive as
communication environments—the sense that you've teleported into a synthetic world—
can also harm their users. When it comes to emotional manipulation, two features of the
metaverse are particularly important—presence and embodiment.

“Presence” means that people feel they are communicating with one another directly
without any type of computer interface. “Embodiment” means that the user has the
feeling that their avatar or virtual body is their actual body.

Even in virtual reality's current, primitive state, these two sensations are what make VR
so powerful. They are also what makes emotional manipulation in VR so dangerous.

In VR, body language and nonverbal signals such as eye gaze, gestures, or facial
expressions can be used to communicate intentions and emotions. Unlike verbal
language, we often produce and perceive body language subconsciously.

Virtual reality environments allow interaction among people that exploits the full range of
human communication. Person-to-person interaction at this intensity and scale has not
been possible in traditional social media environments.

That is both good news and terrible news. Good, because it will allow for better
communication. Terrible, because it will open users to the full range of deceptive
influence techniques used in the physical world—and to what might be even more-
intense, virtual versions of them.

The metaverse will usher in a new age of mass customization of influence and manipulation. It
will provide a powerful set of tools to manipulate us effectively and efficiently.
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The metaverse will usher in a new age of mass customization of influence and
manipulation. It will provide a powerful set of tools to manipulate us effectively and
efficiently. Even more remarkable will be the ability to combine tailored individual and
mass manipulation in a way that has never before been possible.
A user's virtual experiences as an avatar are expected to seamlessly meld with his or
her experiences, memories, and understanding from the physical world. This will almost
certainly change the way a person sees the world, understands it, and behaves in it.

We must not wait until these technologies are fully realized to consider appropriate
guardrails for them. We can reap the benefits of the metaverse while minimizing its
potential for great harm.

The first step toward designing these guardrails is to do a comprehensive study and
evaluation of the existing extensive psychology literature on uses and effects of VR, and
consider how it might be used for malicious, manipulative purposes. This study should
describe the types of emotional manipulation techniques that are possible today, but
also examine techniques that are likely to be possible in more-sophisticated versions of
the metaverse. This has not been done. We cannot guard against something we do not
fully understand.

The second step is to develop the technology to detect when these techniques are
being applied. For example, we could build a type of emotional canary in a coal mine—
an artificial character that could circulate in virtual reality environments, sense a broad
range of attempts at emotional manipulation, and send out a warning when one is being
deployed.

Society did not start paying serious attention to classical social media—meaning
Facebook, Twitter, and the like—until things got completely out of hand. Let us not
make the same mistake as social media blossoms into the metaverse.