Welcome everybody and thank you for joining us for this event which is part of Santa Clara University's IT Ethics and Law Lecture Series co-sponsored by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and the High Tech Law Institute. My name is Irina Raicu and I'm the director of the internet ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Before introducing our speakers I just want to remind you that you can add your questions at any point in the q and a section and we will try to get to as many of them as possible. We are recording this event and plan to make it
available soon. I also want to take a minute to acknowledge that we are holding this conversation while massive battles and humanitarian disasters are taking place in the real unaugmented world the invasion of ukraine might prompt us to consider the ways in which vr and ar will or already do play a role in warfare and military training as well as in efforts to help people move beyond traumas or to help them understand the experiences of others living lives very different from their own our speakers today are philosopher Erick Ramirez and attorney Brittan Heller. Brittan hHeller is an attorney who specializes in advising companies on issues such as privacy freedom of expression content moderation civic engagement cyber hate and hate speech and online extremism she was the founding director of the Center on Technology and Society for the Anti-Defamation League and has collaborated with major online platforms and gaming companies to combat cyber hate. She has also produced and launched new technology for good in mediums including AR, VR and XR heller previously worked for the international criminal court and the U.S. Department of Justice's criminal division prosecuting grave human rights violations.
Erick Ramirez is an associate professor in Santa Clara University's philosophy department and the author of the book titled "The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality: Building Worlds" published in 2021. He is interested in all aspects of moral psychology and for the past several years his research has centered on exploring interdisciplinary issues involving the ethics of developing and using virtual reality technologies he is especially interested in the ethics of using VR for experiments empathy enhancement and behavioral modification and has developed virtual reality modules of classic thought experiments i'm going to ask Erick to take it away for us and and thanks for that introduction marina so i'll share my screen uh with some slides that i'll use to structure and then i'll i'll stop once i'm done and what i'm going to spend most of my time doing today is just start with a really brief introduction into just what extended reality is and then focus most of what i'm going to say about what i think are pressing now style issues that we need to deal with as this technology is being developed commercialized as um met us is spending hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to lay down the infrastructure for the future metaverse i think there are some things we need to talk about now and then i'll end with what i think are longer term questions about the effects and maybe social social questions that that these technologies are going to force us to answer and to begin with just what is extended reality um for me i think of extended reality as a as a large family of technologies most of them current but not not all and what they share what they all share in common is just that they are different ways of talking about overlaying immersive content onto your experience and and it's the immersive part that i think makes these technologies different from the screen you're using to watch this webinar on right which is also overlaying content onto your experience so really i mean going far going as far back as the the late 50s things like this mining tool that was called the mascot these kinds of technologies have the way this work there's a camera up here on this machine and there's a it's feeding the visuals into the user here the user controls the robot with the two hand devices here and it was things like the mascot that actually first started getting psychologists interested in the concept that we now call presence right this weird experience that users would have about being somewhere they're not right so people controlling this mascot would feel like they were wherever the mascot was as opposed to sitting in a room and as these kinds of technologies got developed right like it started taking into account some really interesting opportunities like combining modalities right this is combining a visual stimulus with a sense right with an olfactory one the sensorama and by the time we get to the 80s i think we get something that's really quite modern looking quite contemporary looking in terms of how head-mounted displays haptic gloves things like that as control interfaces for things like training the nasa work use this specifically for training astronauts and so when we talk about virtual reality i really think or extended reality there are lots of ways of talking about this and for me the only real difference is how much of our experience is being replaced with something simulated if you talk about cave style vr systems where you enter into a room and everything is a digital projection or traditional head mounted display style vr what those have in common is really it's replacing almost everything with a simulated experience whereas when you think of things like pokemon go which is an augmented reality game right it's just replacing a small part of your field with augmented with simulated content the microsoft hololens can do a lot more than that and so really what i'm asking questions about are what are some issues that these kinds of technologies are forcing us to deal with both now and then and then into the future and so for me when i think about um what a lot of my research has been focused on is about thinking about the psychology of simulated experience and i think what we learn about the psychology of simulated experience is that under the right conditions simulated experiences can feel like real experiences and that that adds an obvious ethical dimension to the development and use of these simulations what i'm showing you here is uh on the left if you're familiar with a psychologist by the name of stanley milgram he did some really important but infamous experiments in the late 60s about authority and obedience that involved just asking people to shock subjects if you have heard of these you know that you can't replicate stanley milgram's experiments today because they're found to be unethical the risks and subjective trauma they imposed on subjects were seen as not outweighing uh not being outweighed by any benefits that subjects got out of participation in these studies in fact it was experiments like this that led to the creation of a whole set of protections and guidelines now on human subjects research what we call institutional review boards that have to approve all this research what i think is interesting is that when milgram's experiment was replicated in virtual reality one of the things that we saw was a very similar kind of subjective experience on the part of subjects they were experiencing anxiety subjective trauma to in ways that actually shocked the experimenter slater himself did not expect that result and so one thing i think we learn from the study of virtual experience and the psychology of virtual experience is we need a lot stronger protection in terms of how subjects can respond to simulated content i do think the immersive nature of virtual reality makes it very different than the exact same content experience on a flat screen for example and so we've already had examples of i think consumer corporations accidentally producing traumatizing content in vr because they weren't as familiar with these the these design questions and i do think we need to have much stronger protections at the level of institutional review boards obviously this experiment carried through somebody approved it because simulated experiences weren't understood as being harmful or risky enough to prevent this this study from going through and i think that was a mistake i also think that we need to get better at acknowledging the limitations of virtual reality and extended reality experiences so everything that i'm showing you right now is really just different simulations all of which are they're aiming to give you a kind of experience right the experience of being a cow the experience of being pregnant uh the experience of uh of anti-black racism this puts you into the body of a black man to experience racism this is a simulation that was created by uh director alejandro inarito which is meant to give you the experience of migrating into the us but without documents and i think that we have really good reasons for thinking that virtual reality can't actually do this that it can't give you these kinds of experiences and that if we use this technology to give to make people think that they are having these experiences we're doing them a disservice it's a form of i think an ethical manipulation and so we need to get better at acknowledging what the technologies are really good for but also what they can't do the other thing that i want to just mention briefly because i know britain you're going to talk a bit more about data privacy and some of the issues about biometric data is to think about what these things are and what kinds of data they can collect if you look at an hmd like this you'll notice immediately it's got cameras right it's got a lot of cameras on it these cameras can record obviously not just the room you're in and who might be in it but also other kinds of intimate information about you not just where you happen to be sitting how tall you are but also where you're looking right so uh some of these are equipped with eye tracking technology that can be used to figure out what you're looking at within a simulation uh the the hmds at our own lab in santa clara can also measure not just where you're looking but um the uh the diameter of your pupils to also guess at how much attention you're giving to the thing you're looking at all things that you might think are extremely valuable in an attention economy but also really intimate forms of user biometric data what these are used for ostensibly are things like making new interfaces so i can track your hands in vr with these external cameras so you don't need clunky handsets but again that's i think a kind of intimate kind of data that we need to get better at protecting meta then facebook was already experimenting with using these cameras also just to read and track facial expressions so this is tracking user facial expression to then carry over the expression onto digital avatars and here too i just think um and again britain will say much more about this we need to be not only more knowledgeable about what kinds of biometric data these things can collect but also how we protect user privacy with uh while trying to make use of the things i think these are good for or useful for speaking very quickly about long-term challenges i think that the long-term challenge that we're going to face more than any other about this is thinking about the self and in particular what i think is a conflict between the way we normally think about the self now as being embodied in a physical way with how we might be embodied in an augmented reality or metaverse environment and i think we're already dealing with this problem in a really low-level way by looking at how people are responding to ar filters on things like snapchat tick-tock and anything like that is a form of augmented reality embodiment and we're already seeing specific forms of body dysmorphic disorder arising from sometimes called snapchat dysphoria here right people having a kind of mismatch between their augmented reality self and their physical self and when we look at the options for embodiment that the metaverse is going to allow this is just from an image from uh meta's horizons uh metaverse space right all of these are people in the metaverse look at the vast array of embodiment options that they have that there's going to be some interesting conflicts between augmented and physical embodiment this is from a study that was done five years ago on avatar customization this is a user i think making exactly the point that i think we need to be more interested in in real life you're stuck with what you're born with but in vr you can be what you truly feel like you are inside notice the privileging of augmented reality embodiment over physical embodiment i think this conflict is going to be really important lead to lots of questions about who should have control over how people think about their embodiment in ar how we keep track of people in in ar given the forms of embodiment are possible questions about ar overlays with respect to property rights who who can overlay information over my house or over public spaces i think are things that we don't have a lot of framework for right now and we're going to need to address as these things become less and less strange when the metaverse becomes less some odd thing and more like when we talk about the internet i think we need to have answers to these questions already in place and i look forward to hearing more i look forward to engaging with all of you that's the end of of uh what i wanted to say and just acknowledge all the people that have worked on this thanks markula center arena britain everybody and uh i'll stop so before we jump to britain's portion i just want one point of clarification can you talk for a couple of seconds about what you mean when you say keep track of people yeah social embodiment uh when the reason i catch that i put that as a long-term question is i'm imagining that the metaverse becomes in a way like the internet meaning it's a space that we all have access to at any given point just either by having a specific device that links us to it or um if it's an augmented reality overlay it could just be something we're wearing basically at all times because all the interesting things about social and political life are there right in the way that it's hard to do this to have social and political life without being on the internet so in that sense i mean uh right now there's a lot of cool evolutionary psychology about how it is that when we booted up this this meeting i recognized that it was britain that i was looking at or how i recognize that it's you arena and all of those presume a really tight link between the self and the body and so i think when we talk about augmented reality embodiment all of these old psychological heuristics we use to track people are gone right because you can look and sound any way you you want and uh yeah i think we need some way of keeping track of users across spaces and we ideally using a system that doesn't require a kind of corporate or state-based surveillance system uh and and yeah i think those are those are longer-term questions that we we don't have great frameworks for right now we're exploring i think you've heard me talk about this before arena we're exploring all sorts of weird answers uh like turning identity into an nft or to think about turning identity into some kind of correlated pattern of anonymous activity we can track across spaces but but it's it's tough to think about good ways of doing that that don't require like a database of like nft keys assigned to a person or something so that brings us very much to questions of privacy law and biometrics law and a lot of things that i know britain has been writing and talking about for a long time now britain please go ahead thanks eric i just wanted to say that in vr i'm a flying toaster so uh shout out to all you windows 95 fans out there so all right everyone i'm i'm gonna shout out to the gamers and the nascar fans let's imagine that you and i are playing a racing game in vr i see this red mclaren and i get really really excited my heart rate speeds up and my skin gets a little bit moist and my pupils dilate i i really really like this car later on while i'm still in vr i start seeing red cars that remind me of the race car i see them they're being driven by someone who looks a little bit like me i start receiving ads for auto insurance in my social media feed i get targeted ads about why now is a great time to get an auto the type of information that my body gave off when i experienced pleasure in looking at the car is traceable by the current type of sensors that we have in ar and vr and it used to just be available in a lab but it's quickly becoming available commercially the type of information that i'm talking about where eric talked about all the cameras in the head maps device i had someone once describe a head-mounted device to me as a polygraph of six canvas so the type of information that you emit when you're in virtual reality releases a digital exhaust so this information gathered by sensors combined with biological and anatomical unique identifiers gave the video game company access to potentially intimate information through pupilometry you can actually tell things about someone like who they're sexually attracted to whether or not they're telling the truth and whether or not they're likely to develop medical ailments like schizophrenia parkinson's autism or adhd and it picks up pre-clinical signs so things that people may not even be aware that they have the proclivity to develop themselves so while this sounds like science fiction it's actually close to present reality not virtual reality in may 2020 facebook oculus announced that it would start putting advertisements in vr within five days the pilot company called blasting vr canceled the initiative and this move was seen to be a turning point for the industry bringing one of social media's most controversial features into a new medium that inspires both idealism and alarm today i'm going to bring points for you directed for lawyers and companies and legislators about what i think we need to know on at this tipping point in the technology number one this is not social media there's been nothing like this before i'm a human rights lawyer who focuses on technology and i'm very worried about the present inability of of law and regulation to grapple with these hardware and software-based challenges this is because as eric alluded to what happens in an immersive environment feels real it's actually processed in your hippocampus in the same way that memories are processed so don't think about virtual reality in the same way you think about scrolling through a facebook or a twitter feed think about it as inviting someone into your home having them sit next to you on the couch and engaging with them one-on-one instead of just reading their words across the screen because of this i argue that we should have a higher duty of care for this technology with greater awareness of issues related to consent privacy and human rights some people have have begun to term this neuro rights or mental privacy two vr is a different hardware because of the way immersive sensors work so as as there's widespread adoption of ar and vr and it's becoming more and more imminent so does the potential for massive data collection at scale even more so than your smartphone vr captures a wealth of information about you so think about what eric was talking about what is needed to orient you in a digital space the sensors can capture your precise head and hand motions they take pictures of your surroundings through tracking cameras microphone audio is picked up through voice command systems and eye tracking determines what you're focusing on and how intently jeremy balinson of stanford recently produced some research that discovered that within 30 minutes of vr content you could uniquely identify an individual conceptions of personal identifying information in vr ar look completely different than what legislators have previously thought about you can also uniquely identify somebody by the tilt of their head and the way they point so no disco dancing in vr future headsets are going to offer more intimate details like eye tracking which are going to offer incredibly precise metrics about what captures your attention in a vr space and you're already seeing this start to be monetized in web based applications moviepass recently relaunched and announced that users could watch ads for microcredits but the ads would pause if the iscanning algorithm determined that a user wasn't paying attention to them immersive technology is unique in that it not only tracks your reaction to stimuli in a way that these sensors need to function but it also creates a record of the stimuli itself and this is very valuable information to advertisers and third parties especially when there's not a clear route to monetization for industry which leads me to number three existing biometrics law won't protect us many people even fellow lawyers are surprised to learn that biometrics law may not cover these kind of risks recent lawsuits like one filed by the state of texas claim that meta violated user privacy through using a facial recognition algorithm this makes sense because biometrics is centered around the concept of your identity but many vr users log into their their now meta quest with their facebook social media accounts the company has gone back and forth three times at this point about whether or not you can use your facebook id to log into your oculus there are different terms of service governing each one of these legal regimes the legacy people the people who sign up for an account and the people who basically can use either they're trying to standardize this now but regardless of which regime you use you have to have a verifiable billing address to download immersive content this is like the early days of the internet your identity is not necessarily what's at issue here to me it's your thoughts and your preferences it's your privacy xr devices take biometric data and make it about personal data collection so this takes it to a different level by combining existing data streams on people's demonstrated preferences likes and dislikes with anatomical data on an ongoing basis while pii and biometric data and the risks that that entails are often discussed this leads itself to a deeper the way that this could create deeper user profiles is not often discussed bio biometric data may in fact be the window into a user's most private thoughts and their involuntary reactions and feelings so to accommodate for this i've proposed a concept called biometric psychography this concept captures the level of intimate intimate knowledge that companies will be able to collect on individuals using a combination of their biometric data and their psychographic data and not to term from advertising meaning your likes your dislikes and your preferences so biometric psychography is the behavioral and anatomical information used to identify or measure a person's reaction to stimuli over time which provides insights into a person's mental physical and emotional state as well as their interests to summarize it and normal people speak it's the like button on steroids xr headsets will not only be able to track what people pay attention to but for how long with what intensity and what their specific emotional response to stimuli is and this can be gleaned through a combination of pupil dilation micro expressions and facial muscle muscles and in some cases galvanic skin responses eegs emgs and ecg's so four this matters because biometric laws are designed to protect identity and not privacy so again the main issues around xr are different it's consent and privacy how can you consent when the data collected on users will be involuntary it is your unconscious and uncontrollable biological responses that are going to be transformed into data points and so users don't no longer actively participate in a data collection process it's very it's their very reaction to stimuli which would be the data you can't control your pupil dilation you can't control your heart rate you can't control if you start to sweat a little bit when um when you see things that stress you out additionally there are issues related to bystander consent that have to be grappled with there is no norm for recording in public or even for signaling that you want to opt out of being a subject of someone else's recording the industry has tried to put lights in smart classes when recording but civil liberties group have pushed back saying smart classes these lights can be covered up or disabled very easily so um i know i'm running short on time so i'm gonna speed up a little bit um so number five i think we need to define industry best practices and very quickly there are four things one you can press companies about their monetization schemes and in particular their ads policy you have to understand that ads don't look like billboards metaphors they're branded experiences they're that are entertaining many of us seek them out we even pay for them direct you go to the jurassic park experience to feed a dinosaur but it's actually an ad to get you to see the next movie and what better way to to do that than to have you feed the dinosaur right it's it's more persuasive than a billboard and for a human rights center report or approach i would press for bodily feedback to not be used for commercial purposes based on the inability to meaningfully consent you should look to on-device storage as a best practice for privacy and for many people concerned about hacking surveillance or inappropriate oversight this is the answer you're looking for it gets complicated because there's limited storage capacity in the hardware right now and many companies are going to start looking to cloud storage as a backup um this is going to make the hardware and the privacy demands and the storage demands go head-to-head as users demand longer recordings and more features in a limited hardware skate number three you need to involve engineers in the discussion bluntly there's only only so much memory you can put in a head mounted device there's only so much light that you can emit externally before the camera can't function consumers need to understand not only how their device works but why it works the way it does and then they can ask for better things and three and we can get into this in the questions a little more is we need to design these devices for all people new research by jessica outlaw of the extended mind shows that disabled populations are some of the earliest adopters of xr technology yet fundamental controls for vision and vantage point weren't integrated into oculus quest programming until version 30. this means if i was in a wheelchair i wouldn't be able to have the vantage point of a standing person until july last july it's ridiculous um non-adjustable interpupillary distances disadvantaged women who on average have a smaller and i would say prettier heads than the average user that the hmv was designed for the distance between your pupils is as important when you're when you're wearing glasses as the um as the lenses themselves so for many women who weren't the uh didn't have the proportions the original headsets were designed for it was like they're putting on the wrong prescription glasses which is why women reported getting simulation sickness at higher rates than men an mit researcher took an oculus go to nigeria and found that straps snapped half of the time that she tried to fit them over african subjects hairstyles we can and we should do better so those are the ethical issues that i am thinking about and happy to discuss with you all so i have so many questions but we're getting already great questions from the audience and i encourage you to add more first i should say that if from now on you see me going around campus with a tiara that says do not consent to being recorded it's because of what britain said um there might be a market for signaling devices coming up um and i'm interested you know you had said we need to design for um design them for all people but there's definitely been pushback by some who argue that they should not be used by children um so i'm going to ask eric to just talk a little bit about the use of the art by children and what are some particular issues related to that yeah so i mean on the one hand i think it's good to note that even you know even the manufacturers themselves right if you look at the oculus health and safety handbook they tell you not to use it if you're under 13. um and and i think there are there are good reasons for being extra cautious with children not just because you know the acm code of ethics says that we should be or something but i think yeah because i think the developmental effects on children are still pretty unknown and um one thing that i do think we do know about general experience in virtual reality at least if you're in there for let's say 20 or 30 minutes when you come out of that experience you do tend to have for example as an adult much higher dissociation and derealization of your real life experiences as a result of having spent some time in virtual reality and so i i do think right now we don't yet know that much about how this will affect certain kinds of developmental uh milestones in children who are who have to make that dissociation uh growth right they have to be able to distinguish the the what's in their imagination from what's really happening and it's so i i think we in general should be extra cautious about children in any technology but in this one especially because its psychological effects on adults are known well enough to think it might cause developmental issues in children we got to be extra careful uh yeah yeah and to add to that recent studies that i've seen show that there there could be some benefits but some there also may be some harm to um kids spatial perception because the way that you um the way that that worlds are rendered in vr is not exactly the same as as they are um you know in in neat space and um in m-e-a-t so it's not certain whether or not that that might kind of developmentally impede children in that way as well um one of the interesting questions and eric can kind of respond to this as well is people call vr an empathy machine but some of the research that i've seen that's coming back on that based on what you've said about disassociation can actually question whether or not um some people were put into an anti-racism related experience and came back um actually more affirmed in their prior beliefs because they felt they had known what it was like to be someone else and it wasn't that bad right um so so an awareness that vr can take us and take us to the point of relating to another person and another experience to a point but it's not certain if if um if all of the if all of the benefits will be clinically proven when um when we know more about the behavioral implications of this in the long term eric um do you want to say a little bit more about that yeah sure i i mean it's gonna sound like it's gonna sound like we colluded but we didn't uh i mean i i i just i i agree with what uh britain is saying i think one of the things that you know it's getting getting plopped into a well-designed immersive experience will change you um and in some ways those changes can be really good they can be desired they can be exactly what we hoped would happen but i do think that um especially for perspective taking empathy simulations they're they're they're full of problems we do know and this is also one of those balance and lab results right is that you can succumb to something they've called the proteus effect and all that means is like when you embody someone else in virtual reality you'll start to adopt some of the stereotypical behaviors you have associated with that kind of person right so if you if you're if you're put into einstein's body in virtual reality that will trigger certain kinds of stereotype responses you have associated with this age but also like other kinds of mannerisms and it's not clear that that's being done consciously it might just be happening as a result of being embodied in that way but i don't think that tells us anything about what it was like to be einstein right and so for the for the kinds of reasons that britain was mentioning i think when we use vr for things like anti-bias work it's got to be really really carefully controlled to not give the kind of misinformation that you now know what it's like i think there are some ways of using virtual reality for anti-bias interventions that don't have that problem but but that kind of empathy route is is a bad route uh though empathy is a loaded word in lots of ways so we can unpack it if we need to but yeah i i would agree so a question from the audience i think for both of you maybe more directly to eric do you see the ability to choose your embodiment as potentially self-revelatory in ways we have not contemplated and that creates a new category of personal information yes and and i think we don't know exactly what that will mean in a way right uh so this is this is stuff that i'm thinking about right now is about you know when we think about all the freedoms we have in terms of body modification um in in this non-augmented space right there we have a lot of freedom to modify it you've seen images of people who take it about as far as i think we can take it but we're always limited biologically by what we can do to the body and in augmented reality of the metaverse anyway you just there are no limits on your form of embodiment right you could be that giant robot you couldn't do that in in this space meat space as it were right like um you could become a dragon you can become i can look just like you if i wanted to right and so though the fact that there are no limits i think is just a it's one of the many challenges that we have in terms of things like certain forms of privacy right and i do think that this this question about deep faking somebody else's physical appearance in in augmented reality is something that we're we're not even exactly sure how to regulate deep fakes right now in a 2d you know dimensional sense and so in an immersive context i'm not sure how to handle those but yes they will be transformative i think we already see as i tried to show you like we already see people who are giving investing more in their augmented reality forms of embodiment and their physical ones and i don't even know if we have a good sort of social moral framework for thinking through those things yet um but they're there like we have to so so britain you are revealing something about yourself by making yourself a flying toaster i am i am the brave little toaster but um i i i what i think is it is interesting is how i don't want to say fungible because it brings up you know ptsd about nfts but um i think the concept of identity when you're when you're considering all of these immersive technologies is is one that we're really gonna have to grapple with you know when when i go to a restaurant in um in my daily life there are parts of my identity that are necessary for the transaction and there are other parts that aren't like my um you know my my race or my gender my religion aren't as relevant when i'm trying to buy a hamburger but um making sure that my credit card is attached to my identity which is attached to my address um that that that does take precedence so part of me started to think about identity in ar vr being almost like a closet of different skins that you can put on for for different reasons because i like in the same way like when i go to the doctor they don't need to know what sports do i root for so there's different types of information that we foreground for different types of person to person and commercial interactions in meat space and i i don't see why that can't be replicated in in a virtual space especially if we have control over um visual representation and even the laws of physics you know my first time in vr is magical and i i could fly it was um i just i remember the early experiences being transformative and being visceral really visceral there was a an experience where you you jump off a building and that is something that you really shouldn't do in in in real life but it really felt like falling off a building and um and so when people talk about how you you really shouldn't take the this is gaming you know it's just pixels you should just turn it off when somebody's harassing you or when something uncomfortable happens it's um it's not it's playing with this alchemy and your somatic self as well as your identity as well as your intellect so it's it's not just pixels on the screen so that brings us to another good question from the audience who says i am concerned about virtual sensory inputs that trigger innate reflexes and the possibility of changing the user's emotional state either accidentally or deliberately um for example an object moving fast from your peripheral to central visual field will trigger fear of a collision not necessarily consciously so how do you see that potential because it's so visceral um and because it's designed by people who understand these things more than the users do do you see a potential for manipulation intentional or accidental eric do you want to take this one first i can jump in after sure i mean the the the short answer is yes um but i you know i i think what matters here is the the intention behind the use of this kind of stimulus right um for me and eric i know you know this uh as sablemen but um i think one of the one of the resounding successes for me in terms of virtual reality has been therapeutic uses and and in particular things like virtual reality exposure therapy or um other forms of therapy related uses of virtual reality can use exactly these kinds of things right knowing that you can trigger certain kinds of responses in people that they might need to therapeutically work on helping to manage and control and so on can be really helpful um at least the the the meta-analyses suggest that it's it's it's almost as good as traditional exposure therapy definitely better than imaginative exposure therapy so there's something there that i think you can you can harness the ability to trigger involuntary responses for good but but you can also do this to manipulate people right uh for for nudge-based manipulation to get them to prefer something on a shelf in a certain way if you've got an augmented reality layer in a store that can make certain objects become more likely to be attended to than others than then we might be manipulating in in ways that would at least require more justification but but i think it it works depends for me it's it's i'm not a kantian like all the way down but i for me it's intent really matters like what are we using the technology to do but absolutely you can trigger innate uh reflexive behavior yeah uh i'm gonna connect this question if you don't mind with another question from the person about um are we going to see traditional online harms like this information and hate speech manifesting in um in vr and the answer is absolutely like and and so i think that that's predicated by the question you're talking about the this technology is very persuasive there's evidence that it's more cognitively persuasive than reading than being taught one-on-one even so we we do need to understand how it works and create now i'm getting on my soapbox but create terms of service for platforms that recognize the differences between this and social media um i i can give you a good example of this that that i think is is really profound um one how do you translate a spam policy into uh ar vr i've been doodling on that for a few days i think i came up with an answer but i'm not gonna tell you it i want you to think about like how do what does spam look like in a spatial computing immersive environment and then how do you create behavioral and systemic interventions to stop that two there's a lot of debate about whether or not you want something to be it whether presence so that feeling like you're really there is increased by um by photorealism in vra and there are some very high-end super cool things like the vargo headset that look almost like optically replicated pass through vr they're they make you really feel like you're driving that mclaren um from your from your dining room table and like you're in monaco it's awesome but the research says that's um the most effective treatments for ptsd are ones that are actually not photorealistic they're representational people coming back from afghanistan and iraq reported night raids were some of the most stressful experiences that they had breaking into a building and not knowing who was going to be there if they were going to be a threat or if they were going to actually be a danger being harmed themselves so harming bystanders or harming the military personnel so that is what's replicated that experience is replicated in in ptsd trainings and they keep it intentionally vague and shaded and what happens is that the brain fills in the gaps so if the brain feels in the gaps and you make and it feels real to you because you you see it as real based on your personal experience um how do you how does that translate over to um people using using weapons in vr is a photo gun more poignant than a roger rabbit style gun i would argue based on the research that the glorification of violence policies like you see in social media shouldn't take into account whether or not it actually looks like a real gun but they should respond to the act of violence like your body will like your mind will and not not whether it looks like a picture of a weapon so i think you guys have already touched on this but maybe if you have others what would you say are the most positive uses of this brand new technology that you've seen where does it seem to work better than other tools we had before and you mentioned that the therapeutic ones are there others that we should be thinking about i think this talk i think someone brought this up but training so things that are expensive or dangerous or novel like going to the going in a submarine to the bottom of the ocean or cutting into somebody as a surgeon or um gosh it's or experiencing black friday sales with a mob of people trying to get the latest toy um allowing people to kind of practice and get their reflexes and experience without having to put themselves or others in harm's way that i think is great um i think artistic representation is really fascinating fabulous um i also think other medical uh interventions where one experience i did um before the um for science and art too i put my hundred year old grandmother in a headset and basically put her in into the blue and to the bottom of the sea and she said that it was one of the most magical experiences of her life and she just sort of enlivened in a way i hadn't seen probably 20 years i didn't experience that was actually a went you went into this this little world it was called cool and you you figure out that you can shoot from your fingers rainbow trout at river otters and they're animated so it's like you're in a nintendo type game and you shoot the fish at the ritter out rib rotters and if you hit and if if you hit the river otter with the fish they turn rainbow colors and you float down the river you feel like you're floating you go through a cave you go through a sakura bloom shower you go through all right all right it sounds like you could go for a long time but okay but eventually i really really enjoyed it yeah the punchline is is it's pain mitigation software and it was clinically proven to last twice as long as opioids because when you are in virtue when you are in happy otter land you are not in your somatic self experiencing pain so they gave it to people and asked them to think back to that experience and how their pain was treated more effectively than drugs oh now i feel bad that i stopped you so that's all right it's all right i just get excited about happy outer land so i appreciate you keeping me on track eric are there others i mean those are pretty compelling examples i i also put my parents through the blue this this last week oh you did um to to similar actually the whale one was scary but that makes sense um but yeah no i i in general actually not just in general i agree with uh britain i think for me the the therapeutic angles are are just it's you know in a way it shouldn't be surprising i guess if you think about the fact that if this is really just about talking about giving people experiences they're going to treat as if they were real then it of course it's going to have similar kinds of responses as real experiences but it's fascinating and and to me awesome to see it actually working that way um you know the the this they've even done um the the the standard treatment for things like phantom limb pain right the mirror box uh style thing you can do in vr and get results that work therapeutically i think there's there's a lot of good uses of vr for that kind of thing and the fact that you can do it at scale right you don't need to hire all of these um people to come and put on the production because it just exists and can be delivered to anybody with the hardware anyway um and i i also just think the aesthetic the aesthetic options are they might not be the you know the the the most i don't know what you want to call them they they're not to me like saying oh this person now literally feels better from phantom limb pain but i think it's it's an untapped realm of expression that we're just developing a language for right um just as i think just as it took some time to develop techniques and language for how to put film stories together people are just kind of learning how to use a new language to for artistic expression in virtual reality and so i'm excited to see what that means i think um an augmented reality layer is going to change fashion in ways we literally can't predict um because it gives a new element a new degree of expression that doesn't exist right now it'll be interesting if nothing else so so let me take us uh far from fashion for a second um at the markle center we have this thing called the um ethical toolkit design toolkit and one of the tools is called think of the terrible people so even as you guys are talking about all these uses i'm thinking this could be used to enhance torture right and and and scale it in ways we couldn't have before as well right so it goes back i think very strongly to your point about intent and about putting guardrails and about really helping people understand what this can do and what it is and what it isn't so britain you have written about some first steps that you think need to be taken right now you talked about uh data localization as being important you talked about potentially an industry-wide code of conduct modeled on the un guiding principles for business and human rights can you can you give us sort of a list of what you think needs to be done right now because we're running out of time really fast okay as fast as i can can get it out there one there are no best practices um every time a client comes to me or or an internet safety organization concerned about this they're like what is the best thing to do and i'm like nobody knows yet so i i think it would be great for companies to actually combine their research and to make some decisions about what consent is going to look like what what privacy is going to mean in a spatial computing environment um two there's no standardized physical vocabulary for this hardware um when something bad happens to you or me on the way home we know to call 9-1-1 imagine if 9-1-1 was a different number in every city you drove through you wouldn't be able to access emergency services there are there are protections for users when things go wrong in vr but every interface is different and there's there's not a standard way to to signal that you need help um three i i use the u.n guiding principles for business and human
rights because it's about a protect respect remedy framework it gives different responsibilities to government and to industry and both are designed to protect um to create remedies and it's also um a consensus-based international standard it's 10 years old at this point so looking at looking at what responsibility companies are going to have for their product for their users and for the impact the unanticipated impacts of this will be very important going forward and eric i'm going to take us a little bit into virtue ethics just to wrap up what should individual developers and organizations that aspire to be ethical in their development and deployment of ar and vr do or avoid doing in order to live up to that aspiration yeah and i think this is actually going to tie back to the toolkit in a lot of ways right i mean um there are some easy ones things like honesty and humility right this is what i was trying to get at earlier when i was talking about acknowledging the limitations of the technology right so don't sell it as doing something that it's not capable of delivering because of the i think just the fallout that comes from that in terms of like empathy and perspective taking simulation um compassion which i would just say is is a form of expanding the ethical circle right which is to think about not just the the intended user base but all who might be affected so even the even what does it think of the terrible people is that what it is so think of the terrible people right um not only people who would misuse it which to me is is one of the i think i saw a question through the q a that was kind of about this when i was you know one of the things i worry about is augmented reality embodiment it explodes choice right it makes it lets you express yourself in any way you possibly want to but that means right that i can not only deep fake somebody else's identity i can uh engage in digital blackface i can do a lot of things if i'm empowered to choose how i look to other people that we we might want to regulate anyway or at least might want to try and control or limit but that itself then calls up its own regulatory questions who should limit who should be empowered to how do we track users in this way i think they're just um there are so many questions that need to be addressed about how things are gonna work in this space either if it's one platform like like uh horizons or if it's many different ones that we float between um i i think it's it's going to be a lot of work but but yeah courage to acknowledge limitations but also to say no to products that i think might have clearly foreseeable harms or misuses is one of the hardest things to to do is to is to stop the production of something for ethical risk reasons anyway so i heard honesty and humility and courage compassion and compassion um britain would you add any others i really like all of those so i'm i i can't add anything better just want to make sure that we're not just leaving ethics for the ethicist because that's also something we say all the time ethical those are things that we all of us make in our daily lives all the time i guess i would add prudence as a virtue that seems to come into play here and i think uh one group i left out um but that we've been talking about implicitly in our conversation are regulators right i mentioned organizations and developers but what regulators need to do and think about right now is also really important maybe grace as well because the hardware is not solidified it's still a nascent industry and there is going to be missteps but that doesn't mean we should give up on it all yeah and i think um you know one thing that we haven't captured so maybe we'll leave that sort of vague at the end but but that kind of magical quality that you both were describing you know and inviting you know people you care about to strap these things on because you knew that they would have those feelings um what's the virtue term for that right i mean there's wonder and creativity um very much as well so we are at time and i want to thank very much our speakers for wonderful conversation and thank all of you and apologize to all of you for all of the questions we didn't get to i think we could have you know at least an annual event talking about arvr ethics and we would have new questions all the time thank you again for joining us thanks everybody thank you you
2022-03-22