5 questions for Zvika Krieger

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Welcome back to our weekly feature, The Future in 5 Questions. This week I spoke with Zvika Krieger, a consultant who’s spent years thinking about the intersection of tech and governance — most recently as Meta’s former director of responsible innovation, as well as with the World Economic Forum and as an “ambassador” to Silicon Valley from the Obama administration’s State Department. We discussed governance in the metaverse at it evolves, the ideas that online world-builders can take from gaming, and why VR technology might be, at least for now, overhyped. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What’s one underrated big idea?

One of the main places the metaverse is emerging from is gaming, which is not an area where people are really concerned about “freedom of speech” — there is no foundational assumption of it; people do not come to gaming platforms to express themselves as a primary purpose.

Particularly for metaverses that start from places where children are centered, there is no pretense of freedom of speech.

You’re not optimizing for speech there, you’re optimizing for safety, and positivity, and a positive environment where kids can thrive. So as those spaces try to expand out to include more grownups and become more mainstream, they’re [still] coming from this place of, how do we optimize for safety and for a positive culture? I’m very interested to see which direction the metaverse goes in — more in the social media direction, or the direction of the culture of gaming, or are we going to see a range of metaverses emerge where people can opt into whichever kind of space they want to be in?

What’s a technology you think is overhyped?

What initially comes to mind is VR. I don’t know if overhyped is exactly the right characterization, but it’s a technology whose time has not arrived yet. The adoption curve is going to be longer than people expect it to be. I think it will arise, and I think that there will be a time in the not too distant future where it becomes the primary computing platform, but it’s going to require a deep cultural shift that is going to take a long time.

It will take having a generation of younger kids who grow up deeply immersed in VR technology, so when they become grown-ups, that becomes the primary way in which they engage. That’s a generational shift — so I think that the people who are investing in VR are onto something, and the fact that it hasn’t caught on yet doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, but it just means that they’re playing a long game.

What book most shaped your conception of the future?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry of the Future.” There are very few people who write at the intersection of speculative futures and Geneva-based bureaucrats, which is where I spent the earlier portion of my career [at the World Economic Forum].

It’s not quite science fiction, and it’s not so far in the future that it feels like you can put the book down and think it was just a fantasy that’s never going to happen. It happens in a world that is very familiar to the world today, and is about the sort of slow creeping way that the climate crisis is going to start to manifest itself, and how that will play out in terms of geopolitics. It describes the cultural fabric and how things are going to unwind like a frog in boiling water, as opposed to having like one cataclysmic event. It makes the climate crisis feel very real and present, rather than something that is abstract and far out in the future.

What do you think the government could be doing regarding tech that it’s not?

I’m very interested in tech companies’ efforts to create their own governance mechanisms, like Meta’s ethics advisory board, or when you look at Elon Musk, one of the first things he did when he took over Twitter was to announce the creation of an external advisory board.

People think the people who run these social media companies are ideologues, and they want to retain control over decision-making and content moderation because they want to impose their ideology on the world. This is not true. Based on the tech companies that I’ve worked with, they will gladly hand over decision-making authority about all of these issues. They are happy to offload that to an outside organization, and I think it is a failure of government not to step in and take responsibility, which I believe is government’s rightful role in society.

What has surprised you the most this year?

There is this narrative, particularly when it comes to responsible innovation, that when companies make cuts the first things to go will be trust and safety, content moderation, AI ethics, and other things like that. I’ve been surprised — not just with Meta, which I’ve been very plugged into, but also talking to friends at other companies where there have been big layoffs — that companies are not cutting back in those spaces, you know, or if they are, they’re cutting back proportionally.

Companies see this work as a core business imperative, so that even at a time where they’re tightening the belt, you’re not seeing it as a luxury or a “nice to have,” but something core to the business model and even a source of existential risk.

Will meta really get to build the metaverse?

The FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta is officially underway, with potentially big implications for both the metaverse and the U.S. government’s approach to Big Tech.

POLITICO’s Josh Sisco covered the case’s first day in court yesterday, where FTC prosecutors laid out the case that by acquiring a virtual reality fitness app instead of developing its own Meta is causing palpable “harm to competition.” The FTC is arguing that by acquiring such companies so early in the development of the metaverse, Meta is positioning itself with its vast fortune to simply block out any competition.

Meta defends itself by saying via a spokesperson that the acquisition will be “good for people, developers and the VR space, which is experiencing vibrant competition,” and has argued that the FTC’s case is built on “ideology, not evidence.” That’s ultimately for the court to decide. But what’s clear is that there are two major questions at stake with the case: Meta’s role as a collaborative partner in metaverse development, with both smaller developers and other tech giants alike, and the Lina Khan-led FTC’s role as an agency willing to take on, and perhaps win against, said giants in court.

possible futures

The intellectual parlor game of the week: How could an AI deployment as easy-to-use and powerful as ChatGPT change society?

A blog post from the pseudonymous writer “Dynomight” posits a few fun (and not-so-fun) possible comparisons to other society-changing technologies. Like chess AI, which is more sophisticated than ever but has done nothing to diminish the game because of its irreducible element of human expression. Or the advent of mass manufacturing, which made cheap goods reproducible at a massive scale while creating a new premium market for artisanal (in this comparison, human-written) products. Or gull-wing doors on cars, which seemed cool at first, but were demonstrably unsafe, and therefore faded out of the consumer market.

“The closest historical analogy for this seems to be the printing press disrupting hand copying of books, or maybe computers disrupting paper books,” the author writes. “But it’s also possible that this shift is something fundamentally new and won’t play out like any of these analogies suggest.”

tweet of the day

(The whole thread is very much worth your time.)

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