PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – The Secretary General of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), Rodney Taylor, is urging the region not to relinquish all technological innovations to the developed world.
CTU Secretary General, Rodney TaylorHe told a webinar on the Metaverse organized by the CTU and the Barbados government that the Caribbean should not simply be consumers of technology products and services residing in a distant cloud.
“We have too much regional talent for that to be the case. Yes, we must build global relationships and collaborate, but we must also take ownership for and be craftsmen and women of our destiny,” he told the webinar with the participants acknowledging that the Metaverse provides an opportunity for Caribbean people to have an exciting, new and emerging digital space world to participate in.
Monday’s webinar on Traversing the Metaverse – A Caribbean Perspective, was attended by nearly 1,000 persons from across the region with presentations coming Hrish Lotlikan, the co-founder and chief executive officer of SuperWorld and Sebastien Borget, the co-founder of SandBox, a virtual space where players build, own and monetize their gaming experiences using tradable non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
SuperWorld is a metaverse where users buy, sell and curate virtual real-estate, mapped from the physical surface of the Earth.
Both Lotlikan and Borget described the Metaverse as essentially a network of 3D interfaces, enabling individual connection and access to a parallel digital universe through an avatar, potentially enhancing the work, play, and education of the individual. And because participants are owners of the content they create, there exist exciting wealth generation possibilities. Importantly, both speakers emphasized that anyone can get involved in either metaverse spaces completely for free.
Chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on the Economy, Professor Avinash Persaud cautioned that “technology on its own does not improve the condition of humanity”.
He said while technology is important for economic growth, data collected since the 1950s show that technology and technological change contributes a mere one to two percent growth per year.
Noting, rather, technology and the computer revolution “have been associated with increasing inequality, changing levels of wealth from one sector to another, and a concentration of wealth” in the hands of a few.
He noted also that “while there has been the creation of Internet billionaires, there has been no concomitant lifting of others out of poverty.
“Society must therefore think about how it structures these initiatives for the benefit of all,” Persaud, said indicating that the Barbados government is exploring how the Metaverse can be used to improve communication with citizens and residents as well developing a single regulatory space providing opportunities for its citizens to be content creators for the digital space by providing them with the appropriate tools.
The Geneva-based Internet Platform Diplo’s expert, Vladimir Radunovic, pointed to a number of critical issues surrounding governance that must be addressed as the new digital space emerges.
He said the Metaverse is being built on existing technology, specifically the Internet, for which governments are still trying to come to grips with how to manage and regulate certain challenges, such as: harassment and cyber bullying.
He added, the Metaverse brings new potentially risky issues to the fore like deep fakes; harassment or violence against an avatar; terrorism, warfare and the application of international laws to the digital space; content policy control and unauthorized use of a person’s personal, biometric and location data, to list only a few.
Participants considered the skill sets necessary for Caribbean citizens to actively participate in the digital space and acknowledged that while no one can accurately predict how the Metaverse will evolve they agreed many opportunities exist for a variety of content creators in the sector.
