It is only human to treat the metaverse with scepticism – here's why

HARDLY a day goes by without some new claim promising to bring us closer to the metaverse in the not-too-distant future. Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) and Microsoft are both enthusiastically pushing virtual reality worlds and staking the future of their multibillion-dollar businesses on our receptiveness to the idea. Vodafone is predicting that smart devices could monitor our health and even our brains by 2030. And Elon Musk has claimed his Neuralink technology may be able to help people with paralysis walk and enable everyone to upload their memories to the cloud within the decade. On hearing about this, some of us will feel sheer excitement – but others will feel unsure, uneasy or downright opposed.