[At a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland a United Arab Emirates official argued that murder in a future version of the metaverse should be an internationally recognized punishable crime. The story from IFL Science reports on the initial comments and immediate responses and I’ve compiled excerpts from several other stories that represent other responses. –Matthew]
[Image: Credit: A. Solano / Shutterstock.com]
Will Murder In The Metaverse Be Outlawed? Davos Discusses How To Police New Tech
By Tom Hale
May 27, 2022
If you’re “murdered” in the metaverse, should it be considered a distressing crime that needs punishment under the law? This was one of the topics being discussed by big business bosses and world leaders this week.
Speaking at a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland this week, the United Arab Emirates’s Minister for Artificial Intelligence was asked how governments might respond to the advent of the metaverse. Omar Sultan Al Olama said that the world governments need to discuss and agree on a bunch of policies and standards related to this brave new world.
One aspect of this, he argued, is the example of “terrorizing people in the metaverse.” Al Olama argues the realism of the metaverse could mean extreme actions like harassment or “murder” in [virtual] reality could have a significant psychological impact on a person in physical reality. There are no clear answers on how to deal with this, but he believes it’s a question that will need to be addressed in the near future.
“If I send you a text on WhatsApp, it’s text right?” Al Olama said. “It might terrorize you but to a certain degree it will not create the memories that you will have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] from it.”
“But if I come into the metaverse and it’s a realistic world that we’re talking about in the future and I actually murder you, and you see it, it actually takes you to a certain extreme where you need to enforce aggressively across the world because everyone agrees that certain things are unacceptable,” he added.
“There needs to be a conversation at the level of the United Nations, the ITU [the International Telecommunication Union], or non-governmental bodies where a certain standard is set.”
“That standard is set on the [current] internet to a large extent where everyone agrees… For example, dark web content is illegal in many countries,” he added. […]
Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer at Meta, was also speaking on the same panel as Al Olama. He highlighted how the metaverse will likely be a diverse place with multiple different platforms all operating with their own rules, norms, and culture. While Cox agreed on the need for some internationally agreed standards, he suggested that different platforms will also need to have some responsibility to set standards for themselves.
“Just as if you walk in a bar versus a playground, there’s a different expectation of what rules govern that place. Some of them are social norms, some of those are enforced by those who run those institutions,” explained Cox.
“Much like the internet, in the metaverse, you’re going to have service companies operating different systems with different rules. Some are going to be way more open-ended. Some are going to be Rated R. Some of them will be PG. Some are going to be more or less strict around safety and integrity,” Cox added.
“There will probably be something like a rating system, which we have for film, we have for music, we have for other types of content so that a parent or a young person can have some sense of what the rules are in the environment they’re going to walk into,” he continued.
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[From Futurism]
UAE Official Says Murder Should Be Illegal in the Metaverse
Does killing somebody in the metaverse make you a murderer?
By Victor Tangermann
May 26, 2022
[…] While it arguably makes sense to outlaw particularly heinous content, such as child sexual abuse imagery, in the virtual world things become a little more hazy when it comes to virtual “murder,” an argument that certainly stretches the definition of the word.
It’s one thing to shoot an enemy in a first-person shooter, but an entirely different thing to harass somebody or distribute illegal content.
In other words, it’s hard to delineate what constitutes crime inside a virtual world — especially one that doesn’t really exist yet — which is a question scholars have been struggling with for years.
Then there’s the question of who gets to make the decisions over what should the deemed verboten in the metaverse. […]
Sure, having an independent international body in charge may make some sense. As the social media landscape has already shown, having online spaces govern themselves leaves substantial gaps in their moderating efforts and allows for plenty of harassment and the villainizing of entire communities.
But do we really want the UN deciding what games are allowed in VR?
Is Al Olama suggesting we should have a virtual police force capable of “aggressively” enforcing rules? It’s a sticky problem considering any large-scale metaverse would transcend the boundaries of countless jurisdictions, making such operations legally and logistically fraught. […]
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[From The Next Web]
The UAE’s AI minister wants ‘murder’ in the metaverse to be a real crime
File under: That’s now how any of this works
By Tristan Greene
May 26, 2022
[…] No matter how traumatizing it might be to see yourself murdered in first person, it’s not like Zuckerberg’s planning on making that a feature.
Maybe Al Olama’s thinking the metaverse is going to be a splintered internet experience like web, where dark corners of the platform could be host to anything.
But, at least for now, the companies such as Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Epic that are investing billions of dollars into creating bespoke experiences probably aren’t going to put together a team of designers focused on adding PTSD-inducing gore to their production models.
Sure, a hacker could hack some violence onto a server or find an exploit that shows violence. And it’s possible some sort of underground mod scene could develop over time.
But seriously. The idea that somehow, you’ll be casually shopping in the Nike section of Meta‘s billions-of-dollars and counting metaverse and suddenly a digital Jack the Ripper is going to appear in front of you in a rabid frenzy is just plain silly.
If you can murder people in the metaverse, it’ll be a feature that people log in specifically to experience. For the same reason so many of us play Dead By Daylight, Resident Evil, and Call of Duty, or watch R-rated horror movies, there’s plenty of people who’d enjoy a good old-fashioned fake-murdering in a VR world.
Quick take: Everything about the idea of criminalizing digitized violence in virtual reality is dumb. This kind of blathering rhetoric just demonstrates how far detached from reality some technologists can be. Nobody’s worried about logging onto a VR version of Facebook and being murdered in their headset.
There are plenty of real ethical concerns that the minister of AI for the sixth richest country in the world could spend their time on.
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[From Middle East Eye]
Activists mock UAE minister’s call to outlaw cyber-murders ‘while real people suffer’
Emirati minister’s call for new Metaverse legislation raises alarm bells among activists, who say the UAE’s real goal is to curb dissent
By Umar A Farooq
June 1, 2022
Human rights activists have condemned calls by the United Arab Emirates regarding the policing of crimes in the Metaverse, and claimed the oil-rich nation’s true goal is to push legislation that will curb dissent in the newly emerging virtual realm. […]
While the remarks were not widely reported, they raised alarm bells among activists who said while the UAE was trying to ban virtual harm it continued to physically harm activists and dissidents in the real world.
“The irony in that is that they [the UAE] use vague cyber-crime laws to sanction human rights defenders, and they want to use real laws to sanction Metaverse crimes,” said Lina al-Hathloul, the communications head of the Saudi human rights group ALQST, adding that Olama’s remarks exposed UAE duplicity:
“They should first think about how they treat people in the real world and make sure that the cyber-crime laws are not used to prosecute human rights defenders. Human rights should be first applied in the real world.” […]
Khalid Ibrahim, co-founder and executive director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, said the comments were hypocritical, as the UAE was calling for legislation against murder in the Metaverse, while jailing activists and placing them in harsh prison conditions. […]
Hathloul said Olama’s comments were tied to the UAE’s public relations campaign, and were an attempt to project the country as being tolerant and concerned with human rights.
“It’s just a way of trying to seem like they’re progressive and that they’re thinking ahead of everyone. But at the end of the day, in the real world, the real people in the UAE are suffering because of laws that prosecute people,” she said. […]
“These kinds of conversations or these kind of initiatives that they have, such as having laws for the Metaverse etcetera, is really to draw attention away from the real problems and the real accusations the international community and civil society has been complaining about,” said Hathloul.
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[From Medium]
Murder In The Metaverse: Crime or Creativity?
By Marc Barham
May 28, 2022
[…] If we cannot prevent murder in the real world how are we going to stop it in the virtual world where a click of a button or the movement of the wrist will ‘kill’ — the avatar. There are no police to enforce any laws, virtual or otherwise. The only rules are the algorithms and the Masters of the Algorithms.
It is a truly mind-blowing problem. And pretty much has contributed to the themes in three seasons of Westworld and a fourth which is imminent. […]
It has taken millennia for the Western world to have a body of Law and then centuries more to have established case law. This illustrates the depth of the problem. Our real-world murder laws are not compatible with a created reality constructed in a fictional space. There is no simple one-one correspondence between reality and virtual reality. They are two completely different spheres of accountability. We do not choose to enter reality but we can choose to enter virtual reality. If the Metaverse becomes a place where virtual ‘serial killers’ like to get their kicks then do not enter that space. That would be the safest course of action.
If the Metaverse is to work as a safe space and a place of such true sanctuary then the last thing you require is it to be policed by anyone but the people who use it. But there are other safe spaces you can create for yourself in the real world with real human beings. That is really where we should be building our mini-Utopias. And not to make these billionaires even richer.
Let us create our own humancentric metaverse in the real world we inhabit. Where even imperfect laws can work and we do have some redress. In the Metaverse for laws to apply, they must be laws relevant only to the Metaverse. Do we really want a Black Mirror, type scenario where a murder is committed and the murderer is treated like a murderer in the real world? Both a category mistake and a ridiculous assertion. But nonetheless, a very grave and serious possibility when we witness the world descend into an ever more upside-down existence.