During the “Dare to Shape the Future” initiative, Swiss students worked with the support of KPMG coaches on bold predictions about the metaverse in 2043. The following prediction was developed by Franziska Heusser and Sven Würgler from the Universities of Zurich and Bern.
Prediction
In 2043, the entire education system will be fundamentally changed. The basic right for education will no longer be a vision, but a standard defined by quality.
Empowered by the metaverse, students will be able to access a digital twin of every lecture from every university, regardless of time and location. In an immersive VR world, they can attend lectures and learn as if they were in the middle of the classroom – in fact, they will be, just in the metaverse.
Advances in machine learning will bring forth a metaverse version of professors which are fully adaptable to the individual students’ needs. As a result, the students will have their full support to deeply understand the topics and get the best learning outcomes through both the advantages of human professors and the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) teachers. The metaverse education will be truly immersive and supported by gamification and visual experiments, improving education even more. Being able to reduce physical infrastructure and having an AI-driven teaching experience, the metaverse will dramatically increase the student–teacher ratio, which lowers the cost per student and therefore makes top-notch education even more accessible.
Having been in contact with the metaverse from early on in their education, metaverse natives will begin their higher education with a 360-degree assessment of their skill set, needs, and potential. This game-like assessment will enable a much more holistic view of a person’s performance and potential. An artificial assistant then helps the student with proposals for possible subjects and lectures, putting much more emphasis on developing passions and the interpersonal skills which will be driving the nature of work in 2043.
The students will then have a personalized education experience, tailored to their individual needs, interests, and potential. They will be able to access a university in real life like in 2023, but will also have the possibility to join the digital twin of the real-life classroom – from anywhere in the world and at any time. As a fully immersive VR experience, the metaverse classroom won’t be different from a real one. If a student has a question, the AI version of the lecturer will answer them, being able to explain concepts, proofs, and experiments in more detail and at the pace the student needs.
Why did this happen?
To understand the educational revolution and why all the universities have metaverse twins of their lectures, it is important to understand the following rationale: First, there were companies and universities bringing their education to the metaverse because they wanted to take advantage of the immersive VR learning and optimized language models like ChatGPT. After this phase of technological improvements, smart investors saw the business case for creating a metaverse of universities with top-notch lecturers at just a fraction of the cost. At the same time, facing massive labor shortages, companies decided to foster their own education to build the specific skills needed for their employees without relying on them to go to a university. This privatization of education then dramatically reduced the need to attend an expensive real-life university. Forced by this trend, universities around the globe started to make their education accessible in the metaverse and to participate in a truly global education initiative.
The internet infrastructure as we knew it in 2022 simply could not provide for the metaverse. The requirements regarding the amount of data being exchanged within the metaverse combined with the increasing complexity of the programs, platforms, and possibilities led to a growing demand for a sustainable infrastructure that would allow for an optimized allocation of resources. Thus, the metanet was brought to life in 2030. Powered by satellite and peer-to-peer, decentralized infrastructure, the metanet offered a scalable long-term solution for the development of the metaverse so that it could unleash its potential.
In addition to the disruptive changes in the infrastructure, the metaverse has been largely impacted and determined by radical and revolutionary advances in machine learning. In 2030, for the first time, a researcher succeeded in creating a set of computing systems which accurately imitated the human brain and could predict decisions and personal development due to its fundamental comprehension of an individual’s reasoning. Building on this and the metanet infrastructure, the metaverse became able to fully comprehend human beings on another level and to provide personalized education.
Impact
This revolution of the education system will increase social mobility on a global scale. Because education and work will be possible from anywhere in the world, we will have true global citizenship. Being able to recruit from around the globe, companies will have a much more diverse workforce with a better people–job fit. This will increase people’s general happiness, as they will finally be able to do what they are passionate about. Powered by this educational revolution, we will start to enter a phase of self-fulfillment on a global scale.
