The FTX Collapse - Tech Insiders News, November 2022
A curated collection of «signal over noise» links about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.
Today’s image generated by Midjourney, prompt: «A view of a flourishing future seen through a virtual reality headset» (Inspired by the links below.) Full image at the bottom of the article.
- Driving The News: FTX, a major cryptocurrency exchange platform, is collapsing as it fills for bankruptcy.
In short: FTX seems to have gambled with user deposits for many months. Binance, another crypto exchange, was going to acquire FTX but pulled out after due diligence, causing FTX users to try to get their money out… and now FTX is bankrupt. Why It Matters: Crypto was already having a hard time being taken seriously by regulators and the general public. Now it’s worse.
My personal take: it might not have appeared in the news, but FTX, with FTX future fund, was one of the primary sources of funds for Effective Altruism, a movement that tries to make the most good in the world on a broad range of pressing problems. This bankruptcy has disastrous consequences, of course, on affected users, but also on funding opportunities and the credibility/trust of the «earning to give» method, which was publicly the goal of FTX’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, now accused of basically using altruism as virtue signaling.
This flourishing future has become less tangible… - Related; Did you know: a small disputed land between Croatia and Serbia was claimed as a free country and self-called Liberland. They are planning to create a virtual version of Liberland in the Metaverse, with the habitual crypto buzzword on top of it.
I’m pretty fond of experiments in parallel societies, such as the one that happened in Taiwan (see here), but this one looks rather superficial, to say the least. - At Gimbal Cube, we are fond of clever, small innovations to drive engagement, and Holokit is the next device we want to try!
Leveraging the tracking capabilities of the iPhone, this device allows for a more affordable* mixed-reality experience. (*Well, you need an iPhone Pro, so…)
Their «spectator view» (allowing a third party to see what the others are seeing) is a real plus for user engagement! - And finally, Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus headsets - before it was sold to Meta - created a VR Headset that kills its user if they die in the game.
He says it’s a «piece of art», and claims that the ultimate realism in VR can only come from having such extreme stakes.
But he also says: «the final triggering should really be tied to a high-intelligence agent that can readily determine if conditions for termination are actually correct.» Ahem. Okay, I now understand why AI risks are taken more and more seriously!
And today’s image, thanks to Midjourney: «A view of a flourishing future seen through a virtual reality headset»