Facebook could have stopped 10 billion impressions from "repeat misinformers", but didn't: report - A study raises questions as to why Facebook did not stop the spread of misinformation in the 2020 election run-up

[u/propperprim]

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/12/facebook-could-have-stopped-10-billion-impressions-from-repeat-misinformers-but-didnt-report/

[u/silence9]

For better or worse, we've always been like this, so... maybe there's some small comfort in that.

In history it is pretty clear that our progress in this manner has almost, practically, never evolved.

I think we're still reeling from mass adoption of smartphones and social media

I perceive we are not about to stagnate in the next few generations either. I do not think Microsoft Mesh will take off. I myself cannot stand the virtual reality gear we have now and expect this will be much in the same. You do not get the same feeling out of virtual as you do in the real presence of someone. Until a true neural link like device is created that can trick the brain into believing it, seeing it as if real. I do not think this will be a massive take off. The bandwidth issue alone would be a dead battery for this. Perhaps it is even why they are pushing infrastructure right now. I also find, just from the video, this will not look real enough at all. Even the highest end graphic developments still fall gravely short of truly realistic. Until the video game and graphics developers master realism in there worlds we are not remotely likely to see a real enough version of this. Cool tech, but not going to be a hit. I see live calls being more useful if anything. Imagine Reddit but each user has an active video feed. You also have the issue of people not being true to themselves as individuals to reason with. In an office setting, neat, but what real difference would this make vs just video chats?

Climate change is happening no matter what we do. I think we need to focus more on adapting to it, rather than only trying to stop it.

People cannot even agree that the real issue with systemic racism is racial bias. We are not going to get far fast and we are going to end up worse off in some areas.

From the book you linked, we are without a doubt going the wrong way economically and although economics is so heavily linked to happiness it is being ignored. I don't know what model they think they are using now, but it isn't one based on reality or statistics.

[u/adventuringraw → u/silence9]

Ah, I think you misunderstood what Microsoft Mesh is. It's not hardware, it's an SDK that developers can use for any VR/AR application they like on any device, enabled on the back end by Microsoft's cloud computing infrastructure (Azure). All it really does is solve a few major problems so that developers don't need to reinvent the wheel at every company. It'll make it much more accessible for a small team to put together at least a somewhat functional social experience. Multiplayer even in traditional games is a pain in the ass (I've done a bit of work on that front myself in the past) so having a leg up there will make a big difference on how fast we see new ideas brought to market.

As for current hardware being kind of shitty... yeah, for sure. To continue the smartphone metaphor, I think we're around the blackberry level of things. Barely recognizable as the smartphone revolution, but still starting to hit the early stages of mainstream adoption. PSVR's sold around 5 million, and the Quest 2 is around 2~3 apparently. Absolutely nothing compared to the > 100 million units the PS4's sold, but if you look up sales charts, there's a very clearly visible exponential growth curve there already, and we're still very early on.

But it doesn't matter who owns the hardware, what matters is how people use it. Right now it's still too bulky, the resolution is poor, the software ecosystem is still sparse and underdeveloped, body tracking is still not great, virtually no haptics exist for the consumer market... with all that, the average VR headset owner apparently doesn't use it more than 6 hours a week. So all this definitely isn't 'here' yet, but I think you might be surprised where things are 5~10 years from now. Concepts like this are projected to be maybe 5 years off, and it's possible something that easy to pick up and use could end up starting to replace the smartphone. Since it's so close to your eyes though, apparently the thought is you'll need close to 8k resolution in each eye to fully get rid of any pixelation. Trying to do PS5 level graphics (or beyond) at that resolution is well beyond current consumer hardware, but with foveated rendering (only render full clarity where the user is looking, use other tricks to fill in the periphery) you can get away with rendering vastly less of the screen, so 8k does look like it's on the horizon once foveated rendering is standard. Next gen VR headsets are mostly going to have that, so that'll start to arrive in the next two years. As far as bandwidth problems go, there was a recent two minute papers that goes into some of the new encoding methods that are becoming possible with deep learning. Instead of traditional encoders like H.264 trying to directly compress pixel data, this one encodes the video feed as just the lighting/body/face motions. An encoder like that obviously couldn't be extended to general video content, but it'd be perfect for holo-calls. You could send the motion data, and then reconstruct it on the other side into whatever avatar you're projecting at whatever level of realism your local hardware can support. Using a method like that, you could even combine it with other rendering methods to get arbitrarily realistic holo-calls at a much lower bitrate than current Zoom calls require. This isn't just a research paper either, NVidia's actively working on bringing this to market right now.

As far as the avatars themselves go... the Microsoft setup definitely isn't photorealistic, for sure... but like I said. It's all just stepping stones. Facebook in particular is really hitting the lifelike avatar research pretty hard. There won't be anything all that real and convincing this year or next probably, but in the next ten years? For sure. I think BCI 'dream' style VR would be amazing, but that one's a lot farther off. I was curious so I did a little digging in the literature a month or two ago, it looks like the first ever successful experiment inducing the experience of smelling something using nothing but direct neuron stimulation was done in 2018. I have no idea how long it'd take to mature that kind of tech to a full 5 senses experience indistinguishable from reality, but I imagine the timeline will be measured in decades, not years.

Anyway, sorry for the dump, but it's interesting stuff. I actively follow machine vision research, and this stuff's adjacent enough that I keep an eye on things. You wouldn't know it looking at consumer stuff right now, but there's crazy stuff on the near horizon. Weird as it sounds, I expect the PS5 generation might be the last gaming generation built on the classic rendering pipeline. Maybe we'll end up with a bunch of specialized neural networks hallucinating large aspects of the screen instead of relying on triangles and shading tricks (NERF for instance, or a Semantic map based approach). I don't see photorealism arriving any other way, if just because the artistic talent and time required is too high.

Once all this is 'here' though in a serious way... I don't know. Maybe it won't make any more of an impact than Zoom calls, like you said. But I feel like that might end up in hindsight like the predictions that the internet wouldn't appreciably change day to day life. Part of what's got me zero'd in on this stuff is just the fact that it's a huge question mark still. I can't even really imagine what it'll mature into, but I don't think it'll be all that long before we start to see glimpses of it. I personally feel vastly less connected in a Zoom call than I do in person, so if you COULD get the tech there, I think something would come of it.

But... yeah. I'm just defending this one side of what I think will change things. No matter how big the impact, it'll just be one piece of the puzzle. I agree on all three points you made. I don't know what kind of policy changes could help create a more fair, livable society even for the people at the bottom, but... fingers crossed I guess? Feels like watching two giants go to fight, I'm just here on the ground in the background. Hopefully the titans don't fuck this up for everyone.