The minister of artificial intelligence from the United Arab Emirates told an audience at the World Economic forum in Davos that serious crimes should be punished in the metaverse.
According to an article by CNBC's Sam Shead, the minister views this as a necessary measure to protect people's mental health.
If I send you a text on WhatsApp, it’s text right? 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.
Tell me you don't know how post-traumatic stress disorder works.
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There is no medical threshold for post-traumatic stress disorder. Observation and interviews are part of a clinical diagnosis.
Anecdotally speaking, it isn't necessarily triggered in the way Al Olama indicated. I was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder after learning about the death of someone I'd taught. Other people's diagnoses have been completely different.
A survivor of the NXIVM cult told investigators and documentarians that she was exposed to graphic violence from Hollywood cinema and a real-world snuff in order to cause her post-traumatic stress disorder.
You can murder anavatar. Not in the legal sense. It's a stupid idea that doesn't deserve much attention, so let's just lay it bare so we can move.
10 years from now, you will be wandering around in the metaverse. The visual and audio fidelity are almost indistinguishable from reality if you wear a virtual reality headset.
When someone pushes the buttons on their control pad, they cause your character to leap out of a digital bush, and then they stab your character with the buttons on their control pad.
Youravatar dies. You have to see the knife being used. Oh! The horror!
Let's go back for a second. How did the knife get there? The leaping out of the bush animation was programmed. Is there more kill moves? What is the combo for a silent takedown?
It's not good. I am getting ahead of myself. We are not talking about a video game. Murder is the most foul in the metaverse.
I'm not sure what the minister of artificial intelligence in the United Arab Emirates knows about the field, but in this version of reality, there's no basis for this fantasy.
You should pass a law against people in video games. All of you people who play Call of Duty are screwed, because some of you have more kills than old age.
The point is that, no matter how traumatizing it might be to see yourself murdered in first person, it's not like Zuckerberg is planning on making that feature.
Maybe Al Olama thinks the metaverse will be like the web, where dark corners of the platform could host anything.
At least for now, the companies that are investing billions of dollars into creating custom experiences probably aren't going to put together a team of designers focused on adding gore to their production models.
A hacker can hack into a server or find an exploit that shows violence. It is possible that an underground mod scene could develop over time.
But seriously. The idea that you will casually shop in the Nike section of Meta and suddenly a digital Jack the Ripper is going to appear in front of you is silly.
It will be a feature that people log in specifically to experience if you can murder people in the metaverse. 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 are plenty of people who would enjoy a good old-fashioned fake-murdering in a virtual reality world.
The idea of criminalizing violence in virtual reality is dumb. This kind of rhetoric shows how far away from reality some technologists can be. Nobody is worried about logging onto a virtual reality version of Facebook and being murdered.
There are a lot of ethical concerns that the minister of the sixth richest country in the world could spend their time on.
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