The Metaverse & the Environment | Amelia Kallman | TEDxWoodLane

Transcriber: Ilayda Gokgoz Reviewer: Yiğit Sarp Erdemli Hello. I am a futurist. As a futurist, my job is to learn about the latest new and upcoming technologies and their potential impact on the future of business and our lives. As a naturally curious person, asking annoying questions is my forte and I've recently been trying to get to the bottom of this one. Is the

metaverse

bad for the

environment

? And if it is, why doesn't anyone talk about it? I've been talking about the

metaverse

since about 2017, and while I'm a big fan of the metaverse, it was him.

Finlay recently named one of the top 25 women in the metaverse. Today I'm not going to stand here and tell you how wonderful it is or how it's going to change our lives. Instead, I want to focus on this question about

environment

al impact. It's a question that's getting so little attention, study, and discussion that it's actually made me wonder if I'm the only one who has these concerns or if we're just late to this party. And it's actually something we should debate today. I don't come from a technological background. I grew up as a child actress. I owned an illegal speakeasy in New York and opened the first burlesque and cabaret nightclub in China.

Then I was expelled from China and ended up here in this beautiful country. And it took me two years to get a work visa, during which time I wrote my first book. But as soon as I got the visa, I needed a job, any job. I did not care. And I had a friend who was going to an innovation conference. And I said: Let me go to all of you. Organize your booth. I will network. Maybe someone will hire me. And I go and there's a booth next to ours, and it has all this really cool technology.

It has tables with touch screens and virtual books and holograms. And I had never seen anything like it. And I kept reviewing and asking a lot of questions and then bringing my people in and explaining to them what they had explained to me. And finally someone says: Do you work for us? And I said: No, but I should. And a week later, I was hired as a marketing assistant at a creative technology agency. And there I worked my way up to becoming their global head of innovation. I opened innovation labs in London, Dubai and Scotland for some of the largest consultancies in the world.

But after several years, something didn't seem quite right. I always felt a little compromised being in a situation where I had to market and sell these technologies when I really understood that while they pose equally great opportunities, they pose new risks and no one was talking about that. So in 2017, I went independent as a futurist and began working with insurance companies, banks, retailers, and even our government researching, writing reports, advising, and speaking on how we can implement responsible technology strategies today that will have the greatest impact. positive impact in the future. So when I started researching this question, I was surprised at how little there was about it.

This is one of the challenges in my line of work. I often try to research something that is so new and futuristic that there are no studies to turn to. That's why I like to start with something we already know and see where it takes us. And in this case, that is playing. So raise your hand if you're a gamer. Well. A couple of people. Well. Now raise your hand if you know someone who is a gamer. Good. Well. That's practically everyone in the room. Therefore, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that 77% of millennials and 81% of Generation Z consider themselves gamers.

Gaming has surpassed pop music and Hollywood to become the largest media sector in the world. And in recent years, we've seen these gaming environments change to become immersive, persistent, and social 3D. And this is the model for the metaverse. This will be the future of the Internet. We are going from something 2D to something 3D that is immersive, persistent and social. So you may already be familiar with the metaverse, such as obstacles or in sight, or sandbox or decentraland. And although we mainly interact with the Metaverse from our PCs today, we know that all the major technology companies are currently working on headsets and smart glasses that will offer us a new way to interact with these 3D environments.

One that engages the brain in an even more stimulating way. And its main objective, its business model, is to change the perception that these technologies are seen as a shared technology to become a personal technology like a smartphone. So I don't know how many of you have tried virtual reality or mixed reality or augmented reality glasses before, but although they are getting better, they tend to be a little big, heavy and uncomfortable. But this is going to change and it will change largely due to advances in networks. So as soon as we can start moving headset processing and computing to the cloud, headsets will get smaller.

They will become lighter and more fashionable. More importantly, the cost will go down, making everyone's goal of one day owning a pair of these glasses more attainable. So what does this have to do with the environment? Well, I'm glad you asked. So we know that navigating these 3D environments generates massive amounts of data. And then you add headphones to the mix. And the amount of data is expanding exponentially. And with terms like cloud, it's easy to imagine data as something so abstract. But it actually addresses the world in a very real way because of the energy it takes to store it.

And this creates a carbon footprint. So the more data we create, the more places we will need to store it. Today, between 2.5 and 3.7% of our global greenhouse gas emissions come from our data centers. A worryingly small number of these data centers are powered by renewable energy. And this will have to be improved and prioritized in preparation for what's to come, because companies like Intel project that we will need a thousand times more computing power if everyone embraces the metaverse. And we think our energy bills are high now. One of the hypotheses I kept coming across when researching this topic is the idea that if we all start using virtual reality, that will actually reduce our carbon emissions because it means we'll travel less in cars and planes.

But this doesn't take into account the large amounts of data and energy required to navigate these metaverse environments through our headsets. So to try to figure out what we're looking at, I again turn to the metaverse model. And this is what I learned. The average individual player emits £2,000 of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. And this is due to the energy required to navigate these 3D environments. That's equivalent to driving 2,250 miles, which is the distance between the UK and Libya. And that's without headphones. If by 2030, 30% of gamers move to cloud gaming, which involves streaming content rather than storing it locally, we're talking the same thing about the future of smart glasses.

This would result in a 30% increase in carbon emissions if 90% of gamers moved to the cloud. This would result in a 112% increase in emissions. Now think about those numbers and then imagine that they not only apply to gamers, but now they apply to everyone who uses the Internet. And I haven't even mentioned or begun to take into account the high energy consumption of supporting technologies like AI and blockchain. As we compare what we know about games with the unknowns of the metaverse. It is not an exact science. It's good enough to confirm my suspicions that we are looking at a significant risk, and that risk is that the adoption of the metaverse will lead to huge and unprecedented energy demand, and this could result in a significant increase in carbon emissions . emissions.

Now I say good for a reason. And that's because while this revelation, this admission that yes, the metaverse could be very bad for the environment may seem scary to me, it gives me hope because we still have time to act. Ignoring the big virtual elephant in the room is not only irresponsible, it's also self-sabotaging. We must begin to include these conversations in our ESG agendas and our evolving net zero emissions goals. Next time you're at a conference and someone stood here and told you how amazing the metaverse is. Raise your hand and ask them the carbon footprint question.

The more people who ask these questions, however annoying, inconvenient and uncomfortable they may be, the less this vital topic can be ignored. I personally believe that we are going to find a way to make the metaverse sustainable because it is necessary. Many wonderful things will emerge from the metaverse, but we can't be afraid to identify and talk about the risks from the beginning. If we care about this planet as much as our ESG and net zero emissions and statements on social media say yes. So we must take a stand and make it known that we cannot and will not sacrifice our physical world for a virtual world.

Thank you.