Executives at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, believe that the metaverse can coexist with generative artificial intelligence and will bring “revolution” to pre-job training and vocational education and that Meta “can take care of both.”
Meta is reviving public interest in the Metaverse by using Metaverse technology as a tool to help train employees. This shows that even now that artificial intelligence is in the spotlight, Meta has not given up on its vision for the metaverse.
Speaking at the Future of Work Summit in Washington on Tuesday, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said augmented reality and virtual reality could play a “transformative” role in pre-job training and vocational education.
“I’m convinced that when it comes to augmented reality and virtual reality, one of the most powerful applications is the ability to dramatically increase the level of learning new skills,” Nick Clegg said, referring to Metaverse technology’s role in the skills industry, Applications in schools and elderly care.
Despite fading enthusiasm for the Metaverse and recent layoffs at Reality Lab, Meta’s Metaverse business unit that makes the Quest headset and Horizon Worlds virtual reality platform, Nick Clegg’s rhetoric remains optimistic. “It will take about 10 to 15 years before the technology is mature enough to be affordable enough for users to become truly pervasive in society,” Clegg said.
Interplay Learning CEO Doug Donavon uses Meta’s virtual reality headsets to train workers in industries such as plumbing, HVAC systems, and electrical services. The technology has helped the company develop a “boot camp-style” training that gets people ready for work in five to six weeks, rather than the months it previously took, he said. While more and more employers in related industries are committing to using virtual reality technology, there are still many obstacles to adopting this technology in practice. “People haven’t fully bought in,” Donovan said at the event. “It’s been a hand-to-hand battle to convince them that this technology has potential.”
At present, the generative artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT is popular all over the Internet. The latest advances in the field of artificial intelligence have attracted the interest of the technology community and spawned new startups. Nick Clegg said the ever-changing hype cycle helps the company achieve its goals in the Metaverse realm, not replace them. “We can do both. It’s not a trade-off,” Nick Clegg said. “The two are completely complementary. Without generative AI, people can’t enjoy the fun of the future metaverse.” As an example, he said, The time to build a virtual world can be shortened with simple verbal prompts. The surge in artificial intelligence has also reignited fears that people’s jobs could be displaced. For Meta, those concerns are also opportunities, Nick Clegg said, for the company to position Metaverse technology as a way to put more people in jobs, not replace them.
This selling point has won the support of some members of the US Congress. Last week, Democratic Representatives Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Republican Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan introduced a bill called the Immersive Technology for the American Workforce Act, a bipartisan bill to create a five-year grant program at the U.S. Department of Labor to support community schools and vocational education centers in the classroom Deploy augmented and virtual reality technologies.
Beyond job losses, AI raises ethical, legal and safety concerns. Even OpenAI founder Sam Altman called on U.S. senators on Tuesday for stricter regulation of AI technology, warning that AI is powerful enough to change the entire world in unpredictable ways. society.
Nick Clegg said Meta has had “multiple conversations” about how to regulate the Metaverse, and welcomes the establishment of a regulatory framework. “I think one of the things we’ve all learned over the last 15 years is that it’s not good to have a technology explosion and then have retroactive legislation,” Nick Clegg said, adding that artificial Intelligence is clearly more urgent for regulators at the moment. “The good thing about augmented reality and virtual reality is that we have time. We don’t need to rush to do this.”
