(This article may be a bit long, so please be patient.)
The just-concluded Two Sessions "promoting the development of the digital economy" was written into the work report. It was mentioned that the digital economy usually refers to integrated circuits, artificial intelligence and 5G communications, etc., as well as the concept of the metaverse that is being speculated at home and abroad. The concept of the Metaverse was very popular in 2021. I didn't join in the fun. We were not a fan of the popularity, but as everyone calms down, we can talk about what the Metaverse is, and whether this concept is a pit or a hole. What does the future trend have to do with us? I did some research and reported to you.
Let's talk about the conclusion first, the metaverse is currently a concept, and it is difficult to be bragging about it. It is likely that the complete results will not be seen within a few years. Perhaps we will not talk about some capital speculation needs. At present, the main role for ordinary people is to help understand some technical directions and understand development trends.
What is the Metaverse? New word or old concept?
The term metaverse itself is not new. It dates back to the end of the last century when American science fiction writers used the term. However, you may have also discovered that many words become very powerful when the word "yuan" is added, such as metadata, meta-knowledge, meta-learning, etc. It seems that the word "yuan" has a kind of magic power. Going far, let's talk about the metaverse. This concept is now endowed with a lot of connotations. I read various encyclopedias and famous people's statements, which probably means that the world we live in will be virtualized as a whole, and we can get along with each other. In the same virtual space, and this virtual space can control the real world, there is a feeling that the spiritual world is materialized.
To say that this matter itself is not new, because the early years of QQ space can be regarded as a kind of metaverse, a social network, a place where everyone communicates together. The newly added content after the recent popularity is mainly in VR, virtual control, and even brain-computer interface. The scenes predicted by these concepts are depicted in many film and television works, such as The Matrix, Number One Player, etc.
This wave of detonation started from Roblox, a foreign listed company that makes games. This company has made a game development and sharing platform. Players develop a business model for making money from games. The valuation has soared, and then Facebook boss Zuckerberg put the company The names have been changed to meta, and all kinds of bigwigs have been blowing up all the way. In fact, there have always been concepts in this area in the academic circle, such as digital twins, parallel worlds, computer simulations, etc.
It can be said that the current speculation is the vision of the Internet industry for its own future. The development of the traditional Internet is gradually approaching saturation, and the appearance of the next Internet era needs a way that is easier for people to understand. The metaverse itself has little value, but if it can be linked to the real world and have the ability to promote, or even control, the real world, it will be of great significance. Such as digital RMB, virtual driving, industrial control, digital design, digital experiment, etc.
Is the Metaverse a hype or a general trend? What does it have to do with your life?
From this point of view, the metaverse and the digital economy mentioned in the work report of our two sessions are basically the same thing. Everything has two sides. What my country advocates is to use digital technology to make social life more efficient and beautiful, to improve the transmission efficiency of information and logistics, to improve the efficiency of information processing, utilization and production, and to improve all aspects of people's livelihood.
Moreover, the metaverse has a deep idea of decentralization, which is very similar to the real world, but both centralization and decentralization are relative, and it is difficult for an absolute center and decentralization to exist, so the supervised metaverse is It is a high-probability event, similar to blockchain technology, which can be done casually in a small area, but once it has a relationship with most people, it must be under supervision. At present, Shanghai and some higher-level industrial planning and policy documents have begun to mention the Metaverse, and there will be many actual layouts in the future.
Related industries include high-fidelity virtualization technology, high-speed communication such as 5G and light, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and computing power infrastructure. Virtualization technology has improved people's experience of cyberspace qualitatively, and all kinds of popular old man rings and fitness rings can be seen, to the point that what is seen is not necessarily true. The infrastructure of 5G communication and wired network makes the connection of cyberspace more efficient. It does not have to be abstracted into characters that only professionals can understand, but can convey richer and more concrete information, and the human-computer interaction is very friendly. . Artificial intelligence makes many modeling and interaction tasks easier. Brain-computer interface is the forefront of human-computer interaction. AI has inherent advantages in processing visual, sound, and 3D information with huge amounts of data. be more efficient. And computing power makes these computationally intensive things possible that otherwise wouldn't work at all.
Virtualization technology ushered in a huge space for development. In the past, virtualization was more about the transmission of data and text. Now, video is more popular. In the future, there will be more professional content virtualization. For example, self-driving cars need to be in the virtual world. Do lots of testing, cheap and fast. There are also many factories and complex equipment that can be virtualized for design, assembly and maintenance, and even control can be virtualized. Because the equipment that can be controlled by hardware can technically be controlled by software, but a lot of work needs to be done in terms of concept and reliability. In this regard, many technologies such as VR, AR, MR, brain-computer interface, CAD, and CAE have huge development spacIntelligent technology has a wide range of application scenarios. The huge difference between humans and animals is the ability to process information. However, in the era of data explosion, the processing ability of the human brain is obviously not enough. Machines replace humans to process more and more complex information. The problem will be the general trend, and the development of intelligent technology will not even be limited to the human brain's processing level of complex problems. Tough problems encountered in human computing, such as weather forecasting and turbulence analysis, may become easy for intelligent machines.
Computing power is an inevitable development track. According to statistics, the scale of computing power in 2020 will reach 429 EFlops. This EFlops refers to tens of billions of calculations per second. What is this concept? I asked a friend, this EFlops is probably quite Therefore, 5 Tianhe supercomputers, or the computing power output of 2 million mainstream notebooks, are of course not used by individuals, but they are necessary on large-scale commercial or public platforms, such as 12306, Tmall, etc. In the future, it is expected that the computing power demand will reach 3300EFlops by 2025, an increase of more than 7 times, mainly due to the demand brought by the Internet of Everything and intelligent computing.
The realization of this computing power is mainly supported by various integrated circuits and algorithm software. The hardware includes CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC, etc., and the software includes computing architecture and algorithm models. There are many opportunities for development here. my country's development needs in it are huge, the growth rate is also fast, and there are many opportunities.
There is also a huge demand in terms of communication and network. On the one hand, the requirements for communication speed and distance are constantly improving. The earth is a village. This wave of epidemics can also feel that the world is becoming more and more connected. The epidemic that could be isolated in one area is now It is estimated that we will have to wait until the world is under control. Therefore, the demand for the construction of networks such as 5G and optical fibers will increase. On the other hand, the construction of network nodes needs to be more extensive. In the past, it was enough to have a root server abroad. Now each country is making its own independent and controllable network. Very likely thing. Therefore, both the network server and the software system have a lot of room for development.
There is also a concept of decentralization behind the Metaverse. For example, UGC, that is, user-created content. We-media is this model, which is different from traditional centralized content creation. This method is also similar to the model of the universe. Whether God created the world or all things derived the world, we will not discuss philosophical issues, just from the perspective of phenomena, most of the things in this world are constantly evolving based on the same rules. A number of popular phenomenal products such as Taobao, WeChat, Douyin, and Station B are all UGC models.
Taking digital currency as an example, it is a typical existence in the concept of metaverse. It is supported by blockchain technology behind it. It is decentralized and cannot be copied at will. We often hear about various currency circle stories. It is to use blockchain technology for credit endorsement, and participants use this credit to exchange with actual currency. But there are also risks behind this thing, because after complete decentralization, Bitcoin will be used by many bad people to do evil, such as money laundering, underground transactions, etc. my country has also seen the opportunities and risks here. It is vigorously promoting the digital renminbi and taking the power of decentralization into its own hands. The digital currency in the future will undergo earth-shaking changes, which is also related to many major changes in the situation. It's related, maybe I feel a little bit now. We seem to be witnessing many historical events that happen once in a century or even a few hundred years.
What will the future hold? Will a symbiotic virtual world emerge? What will happen to us?
The development of the metaverse is essentially based on information, which is equivalent to building the spiritual world of our human beings, just like building a crystal ball in the material world, and compared to the material world, the situation of the virtual world is still very elementary, and the future can be There is also a lot to do.
Of course, the material world itself has a lot of room for development, but human beings may be using more and more machine power to explore the material world. After all, human activities and information processing capabilities are restricted by physiological conditions, and this metaverse It is both a virtual world for humans and a virtual world for machines. It may be a place for the enjoyment of human life and a place for the prosperity of machine intelligence.
But in the short term, few companies can make real metaverse products. Most of them borrow a concept and do something that can be done along the existing technology foundation, aiming at this goal and developing continuously. Leading companies in various industries are deploying related industries. The richer they are, the more they will play, and the more in-depth they will consider, from the underlying drivers, operating systems, modeling, interaction, blockchain, and content production. Layout, according to the Matthew effect, the final state may be a unified virtual world, but this should be a process of slowly surviving the fittest from many virtual worlds.
After we ordinary people understand the trend, we can let ourselves do some things that belong to the future trend as much as possible, so as to prevent the things we do from disappearing before we retire. In the future, the development of the world will be accompanied by the cooperation between humans and machines, and the scope will become larger and larger. Opportunities will not be reduced, but will also increase. However, in order to have the ability to match it, it is necessary to strengthen learning and follow the trend.
