Facebook said it plans to hire 10,000 workers in the European Union over the next five years to work on a new computing platform that promises to connect people virtually but could raise concerns about privacy and the social platform gaining more control in people’s online lives.
The company said in a blog post that those high-skilled workers will help build “the metaverse” a futuristic notion for connecting online that uses augmented and virtual reality.
Facebook executives have been touting the metaverse as the next big thing after the mobile internet, though their track record is spotty on predicting future trends.
Expectations that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made four years ago of taking virtual vacations with faraway loved ones via a headset or using a smartphone camera to improve an apartment virtually have not materialized so far.
The company also is contending with antitrust crackdowns, the evidence of a whistleblowing former employee and concerns about how it handles vaccine-related and political misinformation.
“As we begin the journey of bringing the metaverse to life, the need for highly specialized engineers is one of Facebook’s most pressing priorities,” according to the blog post from Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs, and Javier Olivan, vice president of central products.
Facebook’s recruiters are targeting Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Ireland for the hiring drive.
The social network is not the only one working on the metaverse, and Facebook acknowledged that no single company will own and operate it.
But there are concerns Facebook and a handful of other Silicon Valley giants would end up monopolizing the metaverse and use it to collect and profit from personal data, mirroring the situation now with the internet.
Facebook last month announced a 50 million US dollar investment to fund global research and partnerships with civil rights groups, nonprofits, governments and universities to develop products responsibly for the metaverse.
But the company added that it would probably take 10 to 15 years to “fully realize” many of those products. – Associated Press