[This is a fascinating and important discussion about the darker potential of presence technology; the first story is from International Business Times and the second piece is a post from Anders Sandberg’s blog Andart II (the image is from the Vertigo story). –Matthew]
Virtual reality rape: Transhumanists highlight ethical issues arising from new technology
By Anthony Cuthbertson
June 8, 2015
The convergence of technologies such as virtual reality, haptic feedback and wireless connectivity raises the prospect of virtual sexual assault, two noted futurologists have warned.
These new forms of violation could arise by combining emerging devices, such as suits that provide wearers with physical sensations through haptic feedback, with existing virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift.
“If you have a haptic suit on, and someone tapped into it and made you do things you didn’t want to do, I would consider that a violation and probably equivalent to assault,” Zoltan Istvan, author and 2016 US presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party, told Australian publication Vertigo.
“This is one of the very strange issues with transhumanism.
“We’re approaching an age when we’re going to be rewriting a huge amount of the rules of what it means to either harm somebody, or hurt somebody, or even scare them or bother them. Clearly the controls, the security systems and the anti-hacking software will have to be much better.”
Bringing the sensation of touch to virtual reality
Efforts are already under way to make virtual reality devices, such as the Oculus Rift, more realistic and lifelike by including senses beyond sight in the experience.
Bristol-based start-up Ultrahaptics has developed tactile technology that allows users to “feel in mid-air” by using an array of ultrasound speakers capable of invisibly replicating textures.
“We’ll never create this complete immersion without this physical feedback,” Tom Carter, co-founder of Ultrahaptics, told IBTimes UK in February. “If you don’t have the sense of touch it will really break down the virtual reality experience.
“My big hope is you’ll be able to put on a VR headset and reach out and touch and feel. I think this is going to be one of the most useful things for virtual reality in the future.”
If such technology was integrated into virtual reality systems capable of mapping experiences through sensors, it would conceivably pave the way for people to interact physically within a virtual environment.
At present there are no legal protections against such incidents as the technology does not yet exist, however Istvan believes that society should already begin to consider the implications of its development.
Criminal law playing catchup with new technology
Fellow transhumanist Anders Sandberg told Vertigo that criminal law is often slow to react to issues that arise as a result of technological advances.
“The evil of sexual assault is that it involves violating our ability to interact with the world in a sensual manner,” said Anders Sandberg, research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. “It involves both coercion of bodies and inflicting a mental violation.
“So from this perspective it does not matter much if the sexual assault happens to a biological body, or a virtual body connected via a haptic suit, or some brain implant.”
Sandberg gives other examples of how technology could be used to violate someone’s rights or raise ethical issues that do not yet have laws in place to deal with them.
For example, a sexual encounter could be digitally mapped and transposed onto robotic bodies that look like children or animals.
“I suspect we will become much more tolerant of many things that are currently weird and taboo,” Sandberg said. “The issue ethicists may worry about is whether we would also become blase about things that should not be accepted.
“I am optimistic about it: I think that people actually do react to things that are true violations.”
Sidebar: What is transhumanism?
Transhumanism is a movement that aims to use technology to enhance human intellectual, physical and psychological capabilities. This can be achieved through anything from brain implants and bionic eyes to stem cell technology and exoskeleton body suits.
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Harming Virtual Bodies
Anders Sandberg
June 9, 2015
I was recently interviewed by Anna Denejkina for Vertigo, and references to the article seems to be circulating around. Given the hot button topic – transhumanism and virtual rape – I thought it might be relevant to bring out what I said in the email interview.
(Slightly modified for clarity, grammar and links)
> How are bioethicists and philosophers coping with the ethical issues which may arise from transhumanist hacking, and what would be an outcome of hacking into the likes of full body haptic suit, a smart sex toy, e-spot implant, i.e.: would this be considered act of kidnapping, or rape, or another crime?
There is some philosophy of virtual reality and augmented reality, and a lot more about the ethics of cyberspace. The classic essay is this 1998 one, dealing with a text-based rape in the mid-90s.
My personal view is that our bodies are the interfaces between our minds and the world. The evil of rape is that it involves violating our ability to interact with the world in a sensual manner: it involves both coercion of bodies and inflicting a mental violation. So from this perspective it does not matter much if the rape happens to a biological body, or a virtual body connected via a haptic suit, or some brain implant. There might of course be lesser violations if the coercion is limited (you can easily log out) or if there is a milder violation (a hacked sex toy might infringe on privacy and ones sexual integrity, but it is not able to coerce): the key issue is that somebody is violating the body-mind interface system, and we are especially vulnerable when this involves our sexual, emotional and social sides.
Widespread use of virtual sex will no doubt produce many tricky ethical situations. (what about recording the activities and replaying them without the partner’s knowledge? what if the partner is not who I think it is? what mapping the sexual encounter onto virtual or robot bodies that look like children and animals? what about virtual sexual encounters that break the laws in one country but not another?)
Much of this will sort itself out like with any new technology: we develop norms for it, sometimes after much debate and anguish. I suspect we will become much more tolerant of many things that are currently weird and taboo. The issue ethicists may worry about is whether we would also become blasé about things that should not be accepted. I am optimistic about it: I think that people actually do react to things that are true violations.
> If such a violation was to occur, what can be done to ensure that today’s society is ready to treat this as a real criminal issue?
Criminal law tends to react slowly to new technology, and usually tries to map new crimes onto old ones (if I steal your World of Warcraft equipment I might be committing fraud rather than theft, although different jurisdictions have very different views – some even treat this as gambling debts). This is especially true for common law systems like the US and UK. In civil law systems like most of Europe laws tend to get passed when enough people convince politicians that There Ought To Be a Law Against It (sometimes unwisely).
So to sum up, look at whether people involuntarily actually suffer real psychological anguish, loss of reputations or lose control over important parts of their exoselves due to the actions of other people. If they do, then at least something immoral has happened. Whether laws, better software security, social norms or something else (virtual self defence? built-in safewords?) is the best remedy may depend on the technology and culture.
I think there is an interesting issue in what role the body plays here. As I said, the body is an interface between our minds and the world around us. It is also a nontrivial thing: it has properties and states of its own, and these affect how we function. Even if one takes a nearly cybergnostic view that we are merely minds interfacing with the world rather than a richer embodiment view this plays an important role. If I have a large, small, hard or vulnerable body, it will affect how I can act in the world – and this will undoubtedly affect how I think of myself. Our representations of ourselves are strongly tied to our bodies and the relationship between them and our environment. Our somatosensory cortex maps itself to how touch distributes itself on our skin, and our parietal cortex not only represents the body-environment geometry but seems involved in our actual sense of self.
This means that hacking the body is more serious than hacking other kinds of software or possessions. Currently it is our only way of existing in the world. Even in an advanced VR/transhuman society where people can switch bodies simply and freely, infringing on bodies has bigger repercussions than changing other software outside the mind – especially if it is subtle. The violations discussed in the article are crude, overt ones. But subtle changes to ourselves may fly under the radar of outrage, yet do harm.
Most people are no doubt more interested in the titillating combination of sex and tech – there is a 90’s cybersex vibe coming off this discussion, isn’t it? The promise of new technology to give us new things to be outraged or dream about. But the philosophical core is about the relation between the self, the other, and what actually constitutes harm – very abstract, and not truly amenable to headlines.