Serendipity35

I have already written several essays about the metaverse and multiverse here. This past weekend, I wrote about those two ideas on another blog that is broader in scope than the technology and education here. Here is another take on those things for a broader audience.

Much of the talk (and hype) about the metaverse has been around Mark Zuckerberg's ideas, especially when he changed the name of Facebook's parent company to Meta because the metaverse is where he expects Facebook and a lot more to be going to in the future. Who will build the metaverse? Certainly, Meta wants to be a big player, but it would have been like asking in the 1980s "Who will build the Internet?" The answer is that it will be many people and companies.

But some people have suggested that rather than the metaverse - an alternate space entered via technology - we should be thinking about the multiverse. Metaverse and multiverse sound similar and the definitions may seem to overlap at times but they are not the same things.

If all of this sounds rather tech-nerdy, consider that most of us through of the Internet in that way in its earliest days, but now even a child knows what it is and how to navigate it. The business magazine Forbes is writing about the multiverse and about the metaverse because - like the Internet - it knows it will be a place of commerce.

I particularly like the more radical ideas that the metaverse might be viewed as a moment in time. What about considering that we may be already living in a multiverse? I have wondered about when education would enter the metaverse.

To add to whatever confusion exists about meta- versus multi-, there is an increasing list of other realties that technology is offering with abbreviations like AR, VR, XR and MR.

I am not a fanatic about the Marvel Comics Universe and its many films, but I am a fan of the character Doctor Strange (played by Benedict Cumbernatch). The new film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness takes him and some "mystical allies into the mind-bending and dangerous alternate realities of the Multiverse to confront a mysterious new adversary."

There are people in our real world who find the idea of multiverses terrifying, so madness and nightmare might be good words to attach to it. The Marvel version of the Multiverse is defined as "the collection of alternate universes which share a universal hierarchy; it is a subsection of the larger Omniverse, the collection of all alternate universes. A large variety of these universes were originated as forms of divergence from other realities, where an event with different possible outcomes gives rise to different universes, one for each outcome. Some can seem to be taking place in the past or future due to differences in how time passes in each universe."

The film may not be science-based but theoretical scientists have been theorizing about multiple universes, alternate universes, and alternative timelines for almost as long as science-fiction writers have been creating them. Probably everyone reading this (and definitely the person writing this) has thought about the idea of how changing some events might create different outcomes. the "writers and filmmakers may think about trying to stop JFK's assassination or what if the Nazis had won WWII, but you and I think more personally. WHAT IF I hadn't gone to that college, taken that job, married someone else, or not married at all? For now, multiverses exist in our minds, but someday, perhaps, they will be real. Or whatever "real" means at that point in time.

You know VR (virtual reality) and probably know AR (augmented reality) but XR (extended reality) may be new to you. Extended reality is an umbrella term that refers to all real-and-virtual environments generated by computer graphics and wearables. Besides VR and AR this umbrella term also includes MR (mixed reality). 

It seems that AR is already a kind of mixed reality since it has digital content and real-world content which sounds like mixed reality. But MR has even more, for example, it might include holographic meetings.

When the term XR is used it means that the human-to-tech moves from a screen to an immersive virtual environment or augments the user’s surroundings or both things. I thought the XR term was new but it actually appeared in the 1960s when Charles Wyckoff filed a patent for his silver-halide “XR” film. It is very different in its usage today.

To further add to the abbreviation confusion, this field also uses BCI to mean brain-computer interfaces which may be the next computing platform.

Confused?  Read on

weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/future-of-the-metaverse-vr-ar-and-brain-computer/

xrtoday.com/mixed-reality/what-is-extended-reality/

hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/what-is-xr-changing-world
 

When I first think of federated learning, what comes to mind is something like a college federated department. For example, the history faculty at NJIT and Rutgers University-Newark are joined in a single federated department offering an integrated curriculum and joint undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

Having worked at NJIT, it made sense to combine the two departments and collaborate. Each had its own specialties but they were stronger together.

In technology, a federation is a group of computing or network providers agreeing upon standards of operation in a collective fashion, such as two distinct, formally disconnected, telecommunications networks that may have different internal structures.

There is also federated learning which sounds like something those two history departments are doing, but it is not. This federated learning is the decentralized form of machine learning (ML).

In machine learning, data that is aggregated from several edge devices (like mobile phones, laptops, etc.) is brought together to a centralized server.  The main objective is to provide privacy-by-design because, in federated learning, a central server just coordinates with local clients to aggregate the model's updates without requiring the actual data (i.e., zero-touch).

I'm not going to go very deep here about things like the three categories (Horizontal federated learning, vertical federated learning, and federated transfer learning). As an example, consider federated learning at Google where it is used to improve models on devices without sending users' raw data to Google servers.

For people using something like Google Assistant, privacy is a concern. Using federated learning to improve “Hey Google,” your voice and audio data stay private while Google Assistant uses it.

Federated learning trains an algorithm across the multiple decentralized edge devices (such as your phone) or servers that have local data samples, without exchanging them. Compare this to traditional centralized machine learning techniques where all the local datasets are uploaded to one server.

So, though federated learning is about training ML to be efficient, it is also about data privacy, data security, data access rights and access to heterogeneous data.

MORE at analyticsvidhya.com...federated-learning-a-beginners-guide
 

Even those people who are involved in creating what they believe will be the metaverse have trouble defining it in a way that makes sense to the average person. I think that's because we don't know what the metaverse will be.

Most of what you read about it is about technology and created places. Lots of talk of VR and AR devices and uncomfortable goggles on your head. Places like Minecraft, Roblox, or whatever the Facebook/Meta will be.  

I recently encountered the idea that metaverse might be a moment in time. That idea was posted on Twitter by Shaan Puri. His idea - and it's just that for now - is that while people are thinking of the metaverse as a place - like the book and movie Ready Player One - it might be more like another idea of "the singularity."

The singularity is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. "Singularity" has been used in several contexts but John von Neumann was first to use it in the technological context. Some people fear the singularity seeing it as a point when AI becomes smarter than humans.

Does it frighten you to think any digital life could be worth more than a real physical life? It frightened Stephen Hawking. It frightens Elen Musk. How can it be a timerather than some tech invention or one place someone created online? That idea of a moment is decieving. It won't be a moment that can be marked with a pushpin on a timeline. When did the Internet begin? Was it a moment in time or a gradual process of change? Have we been moving to the singularity of the metaverse for a few decades?

Do you feel that our online identities, experiences, relationships, and some assets already exist in some digital world?

Maybe the metaverse will not be a technological invention or a place but a point in time only observable after it occurs.