By the way, she is a robot. Seriously.

NetDragon Websoft revealed “Ms. Tang Yu,” the world’s first chief executive officer who is a humanoid, which implies electric signals and digital codes flow through her veins rather than blood.

The robot has been named CEO of the company’s main affiliate, Fujian NetDragon Websoft Co., Ltd.

In her role as CEO, Ms. Tang Yu will have her fair share of problems. She will lead the firm’s “organizational and efficiency department” as a start.

In a recent conversation, NetDragon’s chairman, Dr. Dejian Liu, stated that the company was enthusiastic about the potential of AI in corporate management and particularly about their new “boss.”

The Metaverse Just Got Weirder

The corporation claimed that the deployment of AI in this sector might result in previously unheard-of levels of productivity and efficiency.

It is anticipated that this position will improve the caliber of output and streamline business processes. Additionally, it fits into NetDragon’s plan to incorporate the metaverse into the workplace.

Dr. Liu went on to say that the humanoid will be a real-time data hub for the company as well as a decision-making analytical tool. Furthermore, the business indicated that this AI will be crucial in risk management.

NetDragon also plans to improve the system. As algorithm enhancements are deployed over the next few years, the eventual transition to a “metaverse-based working community” could become a very plausible prospect.

Given the frequency of Skynet and Terminator (the movie series) gags on the internet when announcement of the robot’s appointment as CEO surfaced, one would wonder what impact this will have on businesses around the world.

Global Metaverse Market Balloons

The global metaverse market is projected to exceed $280 billion by 2025. That is a significant sum of money with investors like Microsoft and Epic Games. The metaverse is something that local Chinese businesses are also interested in.

Companies like Alibaba, Bytedance, and Tencent announced earlier this year that they planned to invest a substantial amount of money in the metaverse.

China’s metaverse may be very different from its Western version, despite the fact that the metaverse is a concept that unifies the real and virtual worlds. Regulation of cryptocurrency in China is very stringent.

The Chinese government has deemed cryptocurrency transactions unlawful and has been pursuing them vigorously ever since.

Terminator Vibe Is Real

Given that the concept of the metaverse is still relatively new in the business world, Beijing may be able to use the Chinese metaverse to further cement its control over the nation.

What about AI in the position of senior company executives? Whether this would lead to human prosperity—or an existential nightmare—can be debated.

We can all see what may disastrously go wrong with artificial intelligence and robotics after watching the Terminator movies as children.

Image via Shutterstock. Article cross-posted from Great Game India.

According to an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, one-fifth of the population will choose to produce lifelike digital babies instead of actual ones in the next 50 years.

According to Catriona Campbell, former UK government adviser and author of AI by Design: A Plan For Living With Artificial Intelligence, couples who cannot have or afford children, or who are worried about “overpopulation,” will be able to purchase and socialize with their own virtual AI “children” for about $25 a month by the early 2070s, reports South West News Service (SWNS).

The “Tamagotchi” era, called after the popular 1990s-era electronic keychain device “pet” one could theoretically care for, is what Campbell refers to such predicted replica “children,” which one Twitter user describes as an “abomination.” The AI offspring Campbell predicts, on the other hand, would be simulated with technology that is light years ahead of Tamagotchi pets in terms of their capacity to mimic real life.

Couples would experience the sensation of holding and caressing “children” with the use of virtual reality haptic gloves, which would not only imitate the facial expressions, emotions, and speech of a child in three-dimensional form, including their laughter and cooing. With the use of AI technology, even the digital children’s physical traits and programmed “personalities” will be fashioned by those of their “parents.”

Campbell anticipates that parents will be able to pick whether their AI child grows in real time or is active only on demand, as well as whether their digital child is born as a newborn, an adolescent, or somewhere in between.

Of course, if parents become dissatisfied with their “child,” they can terminate it as if it never was.

The virtual children would blend in well with the Metaverse, a virtual reality platform connected to internet and run by Meta (previously Facebook), which is expected to become “so commonplace” that it will “become an extension of reality itself.”

Scholar and author John Horvat II has blasted the Metaverse for its manufactured reality, calling it “a metaphysical attack on the Church’s worldview” that “obliterates the nature of a God-created universe.”

According to SWNS, Campbell has positioned the future AI “babies” as a long-term “birth control” solution to overpopulation.

According to a 2020 YouGov survey on why couples choose not to have kids, 10% of couples avoid having a family owing to parenting expenditures, while nearly 10% avoid having a family due to overpopulation fears, according to the news site.

According to SWNS, Campbell stated, “Based on studies into why couples choose to remain childless, I think it would be reasonable to expect as many as 20 percent of people choosing to have an AR baby over a real one.”

“Virtual children may seem like a giant leap from where we are now, but within 50 years technology will have advanced to such an extent that babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world,” Campbell said. “As the metaverse evolves, I can see virtual children becoming an accepted and fully embraced part of society in much of the developed world.”

“As ever, this is just more anti-natal propaganda, predominantly targeting white western countries, which are already seeing birth rates rapidly decline,” Paul Joseph Watson said.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the founder of SpaceX, has frequently cautioned that, in contrast to popular belief, the world’s issue is “completely the opposite,” saying in December, “Please look at the numbers — if people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words.”