This reminds me of a gem of a comment from about a month back, about a dead simple Russian guidance system from a Cold War-era missile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389285
> Third, that AI technologies won't be perfect substitutes for actual human-to-human contact.
I'm not sure this assumption holds true enough: incredible numbers of humans have already substituted vast swaths of direct human-to-human contact with the gigantic text-only condoms provided by the internet. We've already traded in superior quality human contact for inferior quality contact--for the bonus of more specialized content which we probably wouldn't get if we knocked on our neighbors' doors.
This doesn't necessarily invalidate many of the proposals in this article. But what about the dimensions in which AI provides or will eventually provide a superior substitute to human-to-human contact?
> You wouldn’t say that Facebook or Google are building their own Internet
Of course not; buying up competitors is much more practical (why build what you can buy?). So this is presumably the same strategy Facebook plans for any competing companies that make successful use of whatever open systems underlie "the metaverse".
Compared to what??