Beyond Speculation About the Ethics of Virtual Reality: The Need for Empirical Results

Stanislaw Lem’s 1974 novel The Futurological Congress1 describes an apparently wonderful utopian world. The problem is that in reality the world is in a state of ruin but government addition of hallucinogens to the water supply and air generates the illusion in people that they are living in a paradise. As virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR) become mass products it is likely that an alternate “cyberspace” world will be created, a parallel world much as the Internet, except that we can choose to embody ourselves in it as a full and shared virtual reality that offers alternative life experiences. This is also the vision introduced in classic novels as William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer2 and Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash3, and many other so-called “cyberpunk” novels. Will these worlds be dystopian, reflecting the vision of Lem?

Even before it entered the mass market there were warnings that the future created by VR will be a dystopian one. For example the short movie “UNCANNY VALLEY” by 3DAR, written and directed by Federico Heller4depicts a situation much like Lem’s novel. People living in ruins and hopelessness in reality spend much of their time in virtual reality to escape the disaster of their real lives (do not read further until after watching the movie if you prefer to find out what happens yourself; some violence depicted). They spend their time living only for VR, in which they play continual war games. Unknown to these players they are actually controlling remote robots, that are carrying out their actions in reality. A player killing a virtual character corresponds, in reality, with the robot that they embody killing a real person. At some point the movie steps out of virtual to real reality to show that the virtual foes are real people in a catastrophic war situation.

Could this happen? Certainly yes, it is almost possible now. For example, in (Kishore et al., 2016; Kishore et al., 2018; Aymerich-Franch et al., 2019) the actions of people in VR controlled remote robots in which they were embodied5, and executed via thought in (Cohen et al., 2014).

The fundamental lesson here is that this is an extreme example where people may carry out actions in alternate realities that they consider to be virtual, but actually there can be significant consequences in reality for situations far less extreme.