It's not a coincidence that two global multinational investment banks and financial services companies, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, agrees that the nascent metaverse market could be worth $8 trillion in the future. In its latest Technology Vision 2022 report, titled Meet me in the metaverse, multinational information technology services company, Accenture surveyed more than 4,600 business and technology leaders across 23 industries in 35 countries. Like an arms race, futuristic big tech companies Microsoft, Facebook (FB now Meta), and Apple Inc, Google (now Alphabet) amongst others, are scrambling to sweep up the metaverse. Facebook (now Meta) describes the metaverse as "a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you". CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is working on egocentric data, which involves seeing worlds from a first-person perspective.

Today, national security is defined by tech superiority – but despite Britain's best efforts, our adversaries are seizing the edge. Imagine the threats we could face if adversarial states managed to take advantage of emerging "metaverse" technologies: from disinformation, political subversion, money laundering, fraud and extortion, to surveillance, industrial espionage, the exploitation of vulnerable people and cyber attacks. China has already developed a deliberate strategy to employ artificial intelligence to increase the pace and potency of these threats. There is now evidence that China is harnessing various emerging technologies centred around the metaverse (a network of increasingly realistic online worlds), such as simulation, artificial intelligence, blockchain, social media and virtual reality – to further enhance its technological arsenal and develop a metaverse for war. Imagine if a nation state could faithfully recreate reality in a virtual world; where detailed computer models of the physical, human, information, economic and industrial domains are brought together, made available to up to thousands of interested stakeholders from scientists to government officials to military leaders in the same persistent, immersive and secure virtual space, to collaborate and ask important "what if" questions.