The tunnel gets immersive and surreal – but will it open in a different Narnia land?
It’s a simple question. When we start spending more time in a Metaverse, would we help the environment or damage it further? Would we cut down on pollution because we travel less to physical offices, concerts and cities? Or would we add to E-waste, buy more stuff being provoked by in-verse advertising, churn more datacenter heat, waste more electricity in low-latency VR-led compute hungry bubbles and forget about climate change because we are so immersed in an alternate world? After all, is the Metaverse not dependent on compute-intensive processes?
But then, there is another tangent that cam emerge. What if we build more efficient algorithms and hardware as we get better with computing for a new era? What if more time spent virtually helps us to override the flip side of compute-hungry infrastructure (needed to run a Metaverse))?
What’s on the other side of the wall?
The penny can drop in any way – from here on. Metaverse can be equally powerful – in adding to the burden of carbon footprints as well as in lightening the laundry-load.
As per findings of a report ‘Advertised Emissions’ 2022 from Purpose Disruptors, the advertising industry would have been responsible for 208 million tonnes of Co2 emissions. Think of how an average single NFT transaction produces 48 kg of Co2 – as reckoned by Memo Akten. Well, a lot of Metaverse commerce hinges on use of Crypto and NFTs- dissed a lot already for their environment-reckless behavior. Consider how researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that training AI models could emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—roughly five times the lifetime emissions of an average car. That’s just the basic work- there’s more when we figure in fine-tuning and training a model for further evolution.
Yet, when we look at data from IEA, Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks, November 2021, it’s heartening to see that from 2010 to 2020, internet traffic went up 16.9x and data centers 9.4x, but power consumption grew only 1.1x. Also, Already, 21 per cent of consumers intended to buy fewer physical items in the future as they expect to do more things digitally, according to the EY Future Consumer Index. And an EY Teams whitepaper has shown that digital twins can reduce a building’s carbon emissions by 50 per cent and Improve space utilization by 15 per cent.
Red Bull or Kool Aid?
Seems like the metaverse can affect many facets of business, customer experiences and human interactions- as reckoned by Dr. Pramod Paliwal, Professor-School of Management, Pandit Deendayal Energy University, Gandhinagar-India. Dr. Paliwal weighs in that in some ways Metaverse can help – like with alternatives of resource-intensive areas that make us struggle on sustainability or by helping human confront deep-rooted patterns that hinder actual climate-change action.
Shahin Khan, Founding Partner and Analyst, OrionX points out these strengths too. In his opinion, we can expect digital tools to help advance our understanding and mitigation of the risks from climate change. “In general, metaverse implementations seek to be as realistic as possible, which means they will use actual physical data and physics-based simulation whenever possible. For climate change, this means a realistic digital twin of the globe with a focus on its atmospheric, oceanic, and geological behavior; playing what-if to understand the impact of novel solutions. It will be about accurate simulation of whole-earth climate modeling and prediction. And in that sense, metaverse technologies will be a leap ahead of current climate modeling and weather forecasting systems.
Of course, all this is addition to the reduction in air-travel, road-commute and other energy-hogging areas that will not be so pronounced in Metverse workplaces.
Sagar Mahurkar, Director of Technology at Findability Sciences avers that by increasing virtual activity, such as remote collaboration, Metaverse could reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions associated with commuting and office maintenance. “Realistic simulations of greenhouse-emitting machines will reduce training runs and test operations.”
Starboard or Larboard?
It can be a ‘reset’ button that we badly needed. Or it can be a ‘forget’ one. Experts caution about the many latent implications that we need to be wary of when embracing Metaverse. Like Dr. Paliwal who maintains cognizance of the flip side and warns about the possibility of higher engagements in a Metaverse space.
There are many who still believe that the very question is too early and irrelevant to ask right now.
David Gerard, author of “Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts” really doesn’t see any link between the two. “Climate change exists, and the metaverse doesn’t.”
Bhavana Mittal, Executive Director and Chief Growth Officer, Bert Labs echoes that sentiment – “We will not stop buying cars or eating food in a Metaverse world. The core problems of reducing energy consumption will not go away – they need innovative approaches and solutions.”
We can either spend time worrying about the problem or find some light – not at the end, but while being in the midst, of this new liminal tunnel.
Let it be a new verse, but let’s make sure it does not rhyme with the mistake we have made in the previous one.
Pratima H
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