Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork into people’s narratives, images, hopes, and fears about Artificial intelligence, this paper will lay out some of the historical precedents, risks, and opportunities for future anthropological research in the Metaverse and beyond.

Paper long abstract:

Large corporations such as Facebook/Meta and Microsoft have recently announced their desire to shape and control the impact of the ‘Metaverse’ – a networked, persistent online 3-D virtual environment – and the next iterations of the Internet, or ‘Web3.0’. Such virtual spaces will increasingly rely on ‘ambient intelligence’: “digital environments that are responsive and aware of a user’s needs” through AI agents including personified assistants or ‘non-player characters’. Anthropologists wishing to follow communities and individuals into these new spaces will encounter a blurring of the human and the non-human other. What tools do we already have as anthropologists to conceptualise these interactions, and what are the dangers involved in accepting the obfuscation of the human in the virtual domain? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork into people’s narratives, images, hopes, and fears about Artificial intelligence, this paper will lay out some of the historical precedents, risks, and opportunities for future anthropological research in the Metaverse and beyond.