The Metaverse and Its Governance is the final paper in the series of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality.
The lead author is Melodena Stephens, Professor of Innovation Management, Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government (Dubai), who has been looking at broad issues of the government’s role in technology and digitization. This paper defines the Metaverse as “a collection of multiple advanced virtual worlds that are interconnected with each other and the physical world through specialized hardware and biological interfaces and software technologies, services, and data. The metaverse is an example of XR, where XR and real worlds form a continuum. The metaverse is an aspirational concept, while XR is a present-day reality.”
Here’s the range of different XR and Metaverse governance issues that are explored in this paper: Systems Thinking and Purposeful Leadership, A Sustainable Metaverse, Norms, Society, and Governance, Disassociation, Legal Recourse, Privacy, Protections for Young People, and Cultivating Digital Skills.
The paper ends with some calls to action including building general awareness and making realistic expectations, reconciling the various objectives of the Metaverse that balance the people, the planet, and purpose (and profits), the need to share data towards creating sets of standards with auditors and enforcers, the need to create agile frameworks and regulatory sandboxes, the need for funding for long-term research, and the collection of data to help “assess the effects and impact of the metaverse as it will not be uniform across societies, sectors, and the planet.”
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So this is the final episode of the series in collaboration with the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality. This episode is on the metaverse and its governance by Melodina Stevens. She's a professor of innovation management, and she's working at this public policy think tank that is investigating the government's role in technology and digitalization. Once Facebook changed their name to Meta, then there's a lot of awareness in terms of what is the Metaverse and how are governments that are interested in agile government and keeping up with the technology pacing gap, meaning that technology is just blazing forward, in order to keep up with the divide that there is between the regulations around the technology and the adoption of the technology. If we are going to be moving into a future where governments themselves are going to be having websites within the context of the metaverse, then what are the variety of different things that should be taken into consideration as they are doing governance and thinking about sustainability and safety and privacy and protecting young people? A whole wide range of different issues. I think in a lot of ways, each of these different chapters of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality has been a deep dive into a very specific, narrow context. to just explore the different ethical issues within the context of that context. Well, the metaverse is basically the meta context. It's everything about XR. In fact, their definition of the metaverse is, it's a collection of multiple advanced virtual worlds that are interconnected with each other in the physical world through specialized hardware and biological interfaces and software technologies, services, and data. They say that the metaverse is an example of XR, where XR and real worlds form a continuum, and that the metaverse is more of an aspirational concept, whereas XR is a present-day reality. In a lot of ways, when we're talking about the metaverse and its governance in this paper, they're really talking about where XR is right now and some of the different specific ethical concerns that should be considered across a variety of different contextual domains within XR. That's a little bit of the framing. It's the last paper that was released as a part of the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality. It's actually the first and the second batch, but close enough to the first batch that it's being included within this coverage here. Trying to get an overview of a variety of different ethical issues that are coming up in the context of the metaverse and its governance. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Melodina happened on Sunday, May 22nd, 2022. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:44.972] Melodena Stephens: So my name is Melodina Stephens. I'm the professor of innovation management at the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government, Dubai. It's a public policy think tank focusing on teaching research and about creating capacity for good policy and governance. So I got involved in this field because we're looking at government's role in technology. So government digitalization has been onboarding huge amounts of technology recently at a speed that's quite interesting. And this is actually encouraging the investments in things like the metaverse. So I think that's where we all got involved. The research that we do is actually on agile government. So I come from it from a systems point of view, a little bit of my background. So I came in from the private sector, working in corporations, moved into academia and now working in government. So I have this kind of 360 view of technology and that's what I think becomes interesting.
[00:03:50.227] Kent Bye: Yeah. So you were the lead author of this IEEE global initiative on the ethics of extended reality report on the metaverse and its governance, which is a really, really big topic. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more context as the work that you're already doing kind of feeds into this report and what you were trying to do at the highest level in terms of look at not only understanding what the metaverse is, but also the governance structures within the context of the metaverse.
[00:04:16.318] Melodena Stephens: I was very fortunate. We have an excellent team of writers working with me, so I'm not alone on this. And we come from different backgrounds. So I thought that was important. So not only are there people who are working on extended reality and experts in that field, but we had the private sector, we had people working on public policy, at the highest level of governments, and then we had even educators. So it was important to bring all of them together. You asked about the role, again, looking at how we're onboarding technologies. So, for example, governments have been digitalizing services very rapidly And now I think with COVID, we saw a lot of things switch to digital, you know, education went online at unheard of speeds as across the world schools shut down. We didn't really think about why we were doing these things. It was a necessity at that point in time with the pandemic. So what got a little bit left back behind is governance and because that seems to be very critical. The reason why it's critical is in the past, new time for new technologies to onboard. So just a simple example. If you looked at the airplane, it took 65 years to reach 50 million customers. But then you're looking at something like Pokemon Go, which is augmented reality, it took 19 days. So when we talk about this divide between regulations and technology, it is huge. The scale at which technology is getting adopted is so rapid. you can't go back and say, I want to take it away. I've made a mistake. Because by then you're talking about millions and millions of people having adopted it. So I think it's very important at this initial stage. And a lot of hype got created when Facebook changed its name to Meta. So we wanted to get in early and have this discussion about what good governance is.
[00:06:07.285] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think one of the starting points that you have in this paper is starting to define a definition of the metaverse. And I'm just going to share a couple of, from my perspective, that I think are helpful in terms of trying to understand what the metaverse is and what it might become. One is from the SIGGRAPH talk from 2019 from Tim Sweeney of Epic Games. He said that the metaverse is a real-time 3D social medium where people can create and engage in shared experience as equal participants in an economy with social impact. So there's a number of things there in sort of a shared collaborative environment, real-time virtual worlds, but also with an economic dimension. And Tony Parisi, he came up with the seven rules of the metaverse saying that there's only one metaverse. The metaverse is for everyone. Nobody controls the metaverse. The metaverse is open. The metaverse is hardware independent, but it's a network and it's the internet. So he's kind of taking the baseline of the open web and the internet and expanding out into adding a 3D spatial dimension on top of a lot of the existing metaphors of what we understand. Like there's one internet, so there's going to be one metaverse, but there's a lot of talk around the metaverse in terms of what it is and what it's not. And so maybe you could start from your perspective of how you start to put some bounds into what we're actually talking about when we talk about the metaverse.
[00:07:23.873] Melodena Stephens: So the metaverse, if you look at how it originated, I think it came out with books, right? So science fiction. And the conceptualization of what people envisioned it to be were not yet there. A, because I think there isn't much interoperability between different types of hardware and software. Even if we look at Web 3.0, it's not easily accessible by everybody yet. I think there are some challenges with that. The easiest way to look at it is part of a continuum, and I think the extended reality continuum is a good place. When we define the metaverse, we look at it as an open-ended digital reality and culture that connects various virtual worlds by operating at multiple levels. it could be parallel to or overlaid, and it's interactive with the existing physical world, right? And this is through real-time data sharing and interface technologies. So it requires still a lot of work on connecting these multiple virtual worlds together to make it seamless, and also it needs to be embedded in the physical world. At least that's what we envision the metaverse to be.
[00:08:32.433] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess another thing that I just had an interview with croquet and one of the things that they were talking about is looking at an operating system metaphor to say when you get your phone or your computer, you're the only one that's interfacing with that system. But when you have a shared environment, then it becomes essentially a simulation that maybe have some bit identical shared context that is coming from both the environmental context, you have people having embodied presence within those, you have social dynamics and different ways of engaging and interacting with that shared space. So it feels like there's a synchrony in real-time community social environments Could you talk about that in terms of the tipping points of the metaverse from everything from the connectedness and the monetization potential from both an individual and corporate perspective, also from a governmental perspective, but also a third section here around ignorance. So maybe you could go into a little bit more context as to what you see as the tipping point of the metaverse.
[00:09:31.226] Melodena Stephens: Right. So when we look at a tipping point, we're looking at which point we think that the behavior is going to cross the threshold. And in the metaverse, I think there's a couple of things that are extremely important. The first is we are globally connected. There's 4.6 billion people that can access virtual worlds either through their smartphones, their laptops, desktops, headsets. And this is interesting. That's a large number, right, from the population. The second one is more and more we're talking about monetization. You spoke about economy, which I think is really very, very important. So this is becoming critical, not just in driving the private sector, but even governments are thinking about how can we make money and how does it contribute to the overall economy? We see, especially in the gaming sector, which is an early forerunner of the metaverse, that a lot of the economy comes from microtransactions. And this is about 85% of the economy. And now with these new concepts like NFTs or cryptocurrency, blockchain, I think we're getting more into the idea that how can we use this? How can our data be monetized? So, I think this then becomes areas for governance in future. Also, we're seeing, for example, corporations, one of the main reasons they're interested in the metaverse is purely monetization. So, when we think of governments and corporations, there's a significant but subtle difference between the two. The government's purpose is public value, right? It's not about making money. It's about helping each individual citizen, right? Whereas with corporations, I think no matter how much they would want to be altruistic at the end, they have to respond to their shareholders and it becomes profits. So sometimes you see a little bit of clash between these two things. And last but not least, I think what's important is there's a large population that does not understand what a metaverse is. And there's a lot of ignorance about what is feasible and what is not feasible. And this becomes an area where you could have ethical problems. So it's very important we get involved very quickly right now there.
[00:11:46.463] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it looks like as I look through this paper, that the second chapter has a lot of subsections that are probably worth diving into individually, but you have the metaverse evolution and its history of governance. And so you start with the Dionysio, Burns and Gilbert from a 2013 paper where they're identifying these four essential areas of immersive realism, ubiquity of access and identity, interoperability and scalability. And then you start to dive into a little bit of the metaverse history, which you start to lay out these five different phases. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more additional context in terms of the history of the metaverse and how it kind of fits into the history of computing.
[00:12:26.380] Melodena Stephens: So I think it's important to realize the metaverse is evolving from the past and there have been many lessons of governance. We don't have to repeat it from scratch. I think the past actually gives us a lot of perspective on what has happened. So if we look at the early phase, which is 1960s to 1970s, I think it was a lot of text-based worlds. Some of these were fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons and things like that. Very small communities, maybe 3,000 members maximum. They were looking at multi-user, multi-role share spaces with common goals. Now, here's the important thing. A lot of the governance at that point of time was about users having common values, right? And the way that communities would respond is they would then complain or they would get together and then they would probably approach the manager to then take action against users who did not conform to what the community thought were standards. We see the second phase was 1970s to 1990s, and the world's became a little bit more complex. We're talking about like 15,000 users. We're talking about larger areas for governance. For example, one of the virtual world's habitat had 20,000 regions, right? So we're talking a lot of space to actually govern. We're talking about instant messaging, so it's becoming a lot more quicker. The introduction of avatars, which again means another identity, so you're not really sure. Anyway, in many of these communities people were anonymous. languages started coming in. And again, the same challenges was common values. It came again and again. So the response, if how they were governing these worlds was either they were setting through the software, they were setting certain standards, or they were then getting complaints, and then taking actions on specific users, right? In phase three, in the 1990s to 2000, we're seeing web 2.5, so it's a lot more faster. We're seeing more affordable computers. Budgets for development at this stage was increasing exponentially. There's a lot of interest in the private sector monetization, different forms of business models coming in, more collaborative play, and the numbers are going about to like 10,000 people simultaneously working same problems over there. So, you're seeing that you cannot fix any of these issues. It's still what are the rules that are governing the game, for example. One of the challenges in these kind of games also, because remember a lot of these were games that were coming in, is you're starting to see black markets come up, right? So, as gamification came in and as artifacts were being developed, and you allow that co-creation, a thriving back market into the real world came in, which was not easy to manage because it's at the cusp between virtual and real worlds, and the law didn't easily fit in those areas. From the year 2000 onwards, you're seeing more age groups. In fact, it's interesting, a lot more companies start focusing on children because that becomes a huge monetization opportunity. Second life was launched. So I think most people will think of it like a forerunner of the metaverse in a real kind of way, especially also because the currency was mapped to US dollars, the virtual currency. you had World of Warcraft, and I think here there's some interesting governance lessons. So, for example, World of Warcraft had a pandemic, which was called Corrupted Blood, and it started with a bug, and I think more than one million character deaths. Now, this is interesting because you realize no matter how much care you take, there are going to be bugs, and it's really the speed of response. But because the adoption is so high, the impact has already been felt, right? And then phase five, 2000 onwards, there was one study in 2011 that said 900 virtual worlds. I don't know what it is really right now because there isn't much data, but we're really seeing that this is becoming extremely fast. And one major revenue stream is advertisements. Of course, it's data sharing in this particular case, right? So all of these things are small areas that perhaps could flag red flags, I guess, that we need to watch.
[00:16:53.208] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that's a real good setting of a broader context, because as we start to talk about some of these governance issues, what I see is that there's the centralized systems and the decentralized systems, and that there's also, as we move forward, the potential for the interoperability between these systems, which is a whole other thing. But in terms of just the control of one system, each system is going to have their own policies for how they manage and control identity, how they are doing content moderation and filtering. You actually have an interesting quote from Neil Stephenson, who is the author of Snow Crash, but in 2017, he was interviewed talking about these bubbles and filter bubbles, but specifically talking about the ways in which that you may have content moderation and blocking of different users. And so not every user may be seeing the same thing. And so he's talking about these bubbles and say, you don't see what you're not seeing. So invisibility behind the scenes, it filters out all the stuff that you'd rather not see. and you're not aware that filtering is taking place, that's the thing that causes bubbles. It's not the filtering, it's the fact that the filtering happens invisibly. So I feel like there is already within the context of social media platforms, the need for content moderation and to be able to have even automated systems with AI that's going in and automatically detecting content that may be harmful. I think as we move forward into the metaverse, we're going to see the challenge of real-time moderation of different things that may be sexual behaviors that are more embodied and may be difficult to have AI detect in the realm of harassment, but also in the context of the content, how are you going to start to moderate stuff when it's more real-time conversations rather than something that's a artifact in terms of a piece of text, a video or a photo that can be looked at by an AI and maybe have a system that has some lag, but because it's an asynchronous system that is sending out information, but in a real time system, it's got some different issues. And so love to hear some of your initial thoughts on some of the governance issues as we think about the future of the metaverse.
[00:18:55.727] Melodena Stephens: So, I mean, it's interesting you're mentioning bots. So I guess one of the challenges is also we don't know in the metaverse what's a bot and what's a real human being. And I think this will also become interesting. Whatever few experiments they've done in social media with bots, I don't know, Microsoft and things like that, you saw very quickly that they picked up negative behaviors and then they became extremely negative as they learned selectively from the many, many different social media posts. So, not necessarily maybe in thought is the best way also for content moderation also. So, it's a difficult space. I think we're working very gingerly. We're learning as we go. The human content moderators are struggling because it's overwhelmingly mentally disturbing for a lot of them. AI has to be trained, so obviously you have to train it. So there is also content moderation in some ways when you're training, because you have to decide whether this is appropriate, not appropriate. So I think the challenge we have right now is the amount of data that's being put is so high that we're not able to actually cope. And with the metaverse, I think it will become exponential. So that's one big issue, just because you mentioned that. So there are a couple of governance things that I think becomes more and more important. The first, I think, is we need systems thinking. And I think Professor Alini, in her previous podcast, actually spoke about the importance of that. We need to go and look at things across. And perhaps I would like to call it purposeful leadership. We must have a vision of the values we want. And it needs to be unified across the world, across the private sector. And this means even educating society. We saw with COVID, how society was so fragmented in terms of values of how we should respond. And a lot of it became about individualism. I think in this case, it needs to be the higher purpose. So this will be one critical area to start with. So Starting at the top, I think we really need to have an understanding of what is the metaverse and what it can do for good and how can we get there and how can we ensure that the feedback is rapid so that we can take care. Because I don't think whatever we plan, we'd be able to come up with the perfect solution. So it's really about how quickly or how agilely we can respond to what is happening on the ground or virtually or in that extended reality continuum.
[00:21:29.555] Kent Bye: Yeah. One of the things that I have noticed as we move from a lot of our activities happening from the physical reality into the digital reality is a lot of those digital realities are owned by private corporations. And then a lot of the rules are just like the first amendment within the United States. There's a right to free speech, but that is more from the relationship to the government, to the people rather than these private corporations, the people, because if you're on private property, then, whoever the owner of that private property is can dictate what those speech patterns are. When I speak to the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, I did an interview with one of their lawyers at the Decentralized Web Summit in 2018. And one of the things that she said that I found interesting was that when you have a monolithic, it's like these big, huge, major corporations that are controlling everything, then it becomes more of like a lack of diversity so that there may be places where people can have different levels of regulated speech and different policies. When I hear that we want to have one global unified values, I think the pushback I would have is there's a need for a sort of diversity so that what you're talking about here in the systems thinking and purposeful leadership is that there's the fragmentation across these different regions of the open metaverse, if it is going to be interoperable, there very well may be different regulations and rules for each of those different corners, just like different cities have different local laws, maybe the same, maybe there's a human rights global context, but then from each individual area, there may be local regional laws that are being set up. So love to hear some of your reflections on some of those dynamics of both the global values that you're talking about, but also potential need for having regional differences and diversity in the context of the different regulations across the future of the metaverse.
[00:23:18.001] Melodena Stephens: So I think you bring an important point, right? So when you look at the history of the metaverse, I'm going to call it the metaverse right now, a lot of it was fantasy. It was a place that you could go and be anonymous and live out your wildest dreams. And there was no backlash with that, right? And then suddenly now we're looking at something where your online identity might overlap with your physical identity. In a physical world, you are subject to certain rules and certain jurisdictions, and there are certain norms you need to follow. So I think this is where it gets a little bit confusing, as you rightly pointed out. And I think that's where some of the debate has to happen. So when I meant common values, it could be multiple levels and have multiple agreements. I think that's one phase of it. The second one is, I think one of the challenges that we're seeing, and I'll just take the issue of children. We know a lot of children should not be on some social media platforms. There's age restrictions, but they're able to bypass that. And similarly, a lot of people are able, much older people, are able to then enter into virtual worlds as children. And this poses all sorts of challenges in many different ways, and it flags a lot of concern. So I don't have all the answers, but I think what we're really looking right now is to start that debate and put together committees and have that conversation. Because if we don't have that conversation, it will be an extremely fragmented, polarized metaverse. And that's not what we want. We want to actually utilize it for the best.
[00:24:51.298] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And as you go through these other sections, you have the next section is a sustainable metaverse. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how the metaverse is tying into already existing efforts, including the UN sustainable development goals that they have, or just to try to be in right relationship with whatever happens with the metaverse, with being ecologically in right relationship to the world around us.
[00:25:14.187] Melodena Stephens: So the metaverse will require huge amounts of computing power. And I think we're looking at huge amounts of data being created, data being stored and transferred. So obviously there is an ecological footprint. So I think it's very important we understand as we design and create new hardware, software, or even data storage platforms? What is the cost? Because even if we're talking Bitcoin, we know tremendous amount of energy consumption from that. So we have to have the discussions on as much as these things do good, what is the ecological fallout? and how do we manage it better? So that's one discussion that needs to happen. I think another big one that we're very passionate about is the e-waste, because all of these systems do not last forever. So the speed of replacement is very, very high, especially hardware, software. So how do we get rid of this? And we don't have enough policies. We only talk about carbon, but we have to look at e-waste because it has a much more detrimental effect on the environment, And there aren't that many recycling plants on how to do that. Plus, just the earth is depleting. And the techniques we use for mining many of the minerals for silicon is not very healthy. So that's something that we need to look at. So I think these are things that we need to have talk. I mean, I have another issue. I was just thinking, a child who grows up entirely on the virtual world, will they love the physical environment they have and will they have the same feeling for care if they never experience it? So if you never walk into a forest, if you never walk into an ocean, would you care that it's polluted if you only live in a perfect virtual world? So we have to also reflect on that as we create these virtual worlds, they actually replications of our real world, and then we should not let that child be out of touch with real life. This is a perspective, it's my opinion, but this is something that I think that's important to consider.
[00:27:12.940] Kent Bye: And the next section of the norm society and governance kind of goes back to what I see is this dialogue between the centralized systems that we have that have existing codes of conducts and content policies and moderation strategies. And if they violate those standards and they may get blocked or banned, and then you have different aspects of the open web where they maybe you have your own website that you're able to publish. And the existing 2d realm of the internet has been a lot of your ghost-like embodied presence. You can just kind of look at a website and you're lurking in the sense that you don't have your identity being represented in any way. But as we start to move into changing from the 2D to the 3D, then we start to have people have more and more of this embodied presence across these different worlds, and that the open and droppable metaverse would try to have people have a persistence of identity. But when you start to overlay on top of that, different content moderation strategies, then there becomes a question of like, if you get banned in one place, do you essentially get erased from the metaverse, which is another challenge that if there's a unified system there, then you have the possibility of having people be exiled permanently from all dimensions of the metaverse. And so Again, I think it goes back to the need to have some level of difference and diversity because, you know, if people are exiled, then they need to have at least some place to go to. So I'd love to hear some of the different challenges when we start to think about the existing structures of content moderation. And then when you start to expand that out into the 3D spatial realm, but also the interoperability aspects, how you start to wrap your mind around these aspects of norms, society, and governance in the context of the metaverse.
[00:28:51.781] Melodena Stephens: So if I start from the real world, I think first there's a representation of what is culture. And I think culture has different nuances across the world. So what may be culturally appropriate maybe in Asia may not be culturally accepted maybe in Europe. So you might have slightly different values. So there itself at a societal level, you have one sort of fragmentation. And then we've got maybe between nations. So I think we were just earlier listening to Professor Alini, and she was talking about maybe like the data laws, much more stronger in Europe and US maybe, but maybe the way that they implemented is different. And then you have maybe not as robust laws in many other parts of the world. So you've got also this challenge that's there. You've got different standards in terms of hardware and software, in terms of norms. So protocols, standards. So I think there are so many things that we need to look at, again, This is an extremely complicated place, so don't have all the answers. Again, saying we really, really need to have these conversations at multiple levels, you know, so it cannot be that one country you've got saying 13 and above and another country, the age is eight, because does that mean if a child who's eight is playing with something, a game that's been issued in a country that says 13 and above, it's okay. Or does it mean maybe it's not about the child, we need to educate the parents better. So I was reading this very interesting article, I think it was on Minecraft. And it said, you know, less than 11% of the parents play Minecraft, but they buy Minecraft for their children, thinking, oh, it's educational, but they have no clue what the game is about. No, what could possibly be all the things that could go wrong. So we have obviously in this thing, when we're talking about society and dominance, I think we've not educated society and we need to do that very rapidly. And it could be even teachers. I know a lot of us teachers were pushed into the online world, screaming and kicking because we had no choice, not because we wanted to. And we did not have the luxury of learning and certainly not of looking at good governance and asking questions, you know, is data privacy? What about my student? We just had to do it. So I think we have to have these discussions before it's too late.
[00:31:08.337] Kent Bye: Yeah. And the next section is about dissociation, which I see is actually a number of different dimensions here. There's not only the dissociation in terms of escapism and going into these virtual realms and maybe being not in right relationship to your physical world responsibilities, but it also starts to get into what is the virtual versus the real type of discussions in terms of like, if you do something in physical reality, it could be punishable, you know, physical assaults or sexual harassment, but if you do something in the context of a virtual world, there seems to be not the same standard of enforcing these different behaviors because there's not a physical component that is the harm that is either psychological or social or emotional, but it doesn't impact the physical body in the same way. Although that's not to deny that there is some similarities in terms of either causing new PTSD trauma, or even triggering existing trauma that's there. So there's a lot of considerations there in terms of understanding the virtual versus the physical, and how to start to differentiate from a legal perspective, how to apply the existing case law into what's happening in the virtual spaces, and how to have some layers of criminal justice. So as I look at this brief section of dissociation, there's a lot of things in there in terms of not only the medical context, but also the legal context and some of these different dimensions that start to come up in terms of the implications of the metaverse. So I'd love to hear any other thoughts you have in terms of this section here that is covering this topic of dissociation.
[00:32:41.245] Melodena Stephens: So I think you captured it really nicely. There's multiple levels. I think we do need to understand as the worlds become seamless between real world and the augmented or the virtual world, how do individuals navigate that? So, so far they're just learning on their own. I don't think we're teaching them to cope or to navigate. So that might become an interesting thing. Is this something you just have to learn because you're thrown into the deep end or you're actually taught how to do that? And as you move from one virtual world to another virtual world, there may be different norms. So again, how do you manage that? And then there's the whole legal aspects, just like you mentioned, you know, am I liable? in how would I be punishable if I was liable? So it's interesting when you speak to a lot of the lawyers, they say the rules exist. The problem is the jurisdiction. How would you go and apply it, you know? And if there is data privacy, how do I know who is that person if the virtual identity is hidden? I might have multiple avatars. That also becomes another interesting issue. So I think it's complicated. And again, I don't have all the answers, but I think there are multiple things we need to focus. Clearly, we need a lot more research in this area. So I don't see much research funds flowing into this particular field. I do think that there should be more research grants to understand this impact on the extended reality and as it moves towards the metaverse.
[00:34:10.587] Kent Bye: Yeah. And in the next section about legal recourse, I think you started to touch into some of those different dimensions of how do you actually find the jurisdiction, but also like what times are punishable if it's in a virtual space versus the physical space. Another thing that comes up for me at least is the restorative justice models versus more punitive models of saying, you know, blocking someone forever versus like, if you go into jail or exile, there's a certain time period, but. I think in some ways, the way that I see some of these different big social media platforms, if you have three strikes or you do something that is so egregious that you get banned, then either all that content that you have goes away, but also at what point is that revisited? Is that the forever permanent ban? and how to connect those different dimensions of identity with this idea of justice that is either restorative justice or just kind of punitive. So I feel like we're thinking about this in the short term, but as we start to create a society, as we move forward, I think there's a lot of other deep issues in terms of the legal and enforcement of those laws, but also across these various different jurisdictions and how to make sense of all those things. So, yeah, I don't know if you have any more comments in terms of the layers of not only the rules and regulations, but as you have the metaverses, people have an embodied presence across international lines. I kind of think of it as this layer on top of all these other regional laws, but yet it's kind of a superset of all those in terms of it's on top of it, but How do you determine which rules and regulations is it based upon where the server is located? Is it based upon where the individual is located? And then when you have people in different jurisdictions and how do you settle which jurisdiction would be relevant to whatever may be happening there?
[00:35:56.247] Melodena Stephens: So I think that's excellent points and I think this is where governments will have to talk and this is where treaties will come out, you know, to discuss all of these things. Also, I do believe people, you know, I love the right to be forgotten simply because I think people eventually can be good if given a chance. So That's the scary thing in the virtual world. Everything is recorded for posterity. We're not careful. So even though people say it's not, someone was just telling me. So even if iOS will say, well, your data is important and the privacy is there, a student was asking me, but how do they then transfer your data to the next model? So obviously they're keeping it. That's a good question, you know, so we know this, and I think this is why we need to have these discussions. We want, at the end, any of these things need to be human-centered. It's for the best of the people, and we don't want to assume that an individual is wrong. We want to always assume an individual can change or if something happens, there's a context and can be improved.
[00:36:58.102] Kent Bye: Yeah. And this next section of privacy, you know, privacy is such a huge issue in the metaverse that I think it's come up in almost every single XR ethics paper that is a part of the IEEE. The thing that I would throw out there is the newer rights in terms of the right to mental privacy, the right to identity, and also the right to agency in terms of, you know, this path of having all of our information that's being tracked, and then at some point, modeling of that identity through a digital twin, and then the nudging of behaviors to the point where, at what point do you have so much information about someone that you start to nudge them in a way that may be crossing over our rights to be able to have free and intentional actions in the world that were being subtly influenced by these huge systems that are driving our behaviors. And if you go out to the extreme of what might be possible and at a global surveillance context, it seems like that we're moving into a very potentially dystopic future in that sense. And so, so I'd love to hear any other further comments in terms of privacy. within the context of the larger metaverse and the governance of the metaverse and what type of things may or may not need to be in place in order to have like a baseline of privacy across many different dimensions of the metaverse.
[00:38:09.134] Melodena Stephens: So I think most of the discussions on privacy are all applicable here. I think an additional one that will come in is when you have a digital twin and what it has rights and what it doesn't have rights. and can someone hack it and then on your behalf do a lot of stuff. So there's a security issue also with that. So there's a couple of these extra problems you'll face in the metaverse that perhaps simple data privacy laws will not take care of, but we need to go and tease these out. So we're seeing that right now. Even when we're looking at privacy, we're also looking at things like So historically, and I think this is an issue we're already talking about in social media, you know, if I die, then what happens? You know, so now imagine there's a digital me running around in the metaverse, do I exist for eternity? Did it have my permission to exist for eternity? Does it become a bot? I think these are some of the questions we don't have answers for right now, but we need to start having discussions and scenarios and talk about them right now. And then figure out, is this something, you know, you join and you create a version of yourself? Do you then also have to discuss what you can and cannot do and what they have the rights for? Right now we're learning because the speed of adoption is so high. I think we're just figuring out what does data mean and what does it mean with respect to myself and privacy. I wonder if that helps.
[00:39:29.342] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's such a huge issue that I agree that things like the GDPR have had an influence of a lot of these major companies, but those rights are not distributed out equally across all the different regions, especially here in the United States. And so you have different philosophies about privacy and how different governments are approaching it. And it seems to be in the United States, at least, where a lot of these companies may be based, it's a free-for-all for pushing the limits of what you can and cannot do, as long as you have consent of the user. Yes, there's a lot of things in terms of creating these power imbalances and asymmetrical amount of information and leveraging that through adhesion contracts. So there's a lot of ways in which that, for me at least, the privacy angle comes down to the consent loopholes, I'd say, where everything's okay unless you get the consent of the user and how that data are being used. And in order to get the technology functioning, you need information and data from the body. But yet then that information could be captured and then used in all sorts of different ways of inferring different biometric and psychographic information about you. So yeah, there doesn't seem to be an easy fix because surveillance capitalism is subsidizing so much aspects of the future of the metaverse that for me, at least it ties into a lot of the economics of how this is all being run. And if there's going to be new economic models, or if we're going to fall back onto these models that are essentially using data as gold to fund and sustain and support this whole new ecosystem. And with the range of new data that are available, I feel like there's going to be so many issues with the context of privacy, but there are trade-offs in terms of creating the economic business models to even sustain this new reality.
[00:41:07.179] Melodena Stephens: Absolutely.
[00:41:11.029] Kent Bye: Next section here, you have the projections for young people. When I think about this, I think about how you have something like Rec Room or VR Chat that has ESRB ratings that are kind of rating the content in some ways. But yet when you have real-time environments with people, then something that may be the content of what the world is may be age appropriate for children that are a certain age. But when you have adults within that context, and I think it changes what the rating is, it's essentially kind of like throwing kids into a city and not really monitoring what they're doing. So would you want your preteen or teenager wandering around the city running into content that may be not appropriate for kids, but also people that may be acting in a way that is not appropriate with the grooming of sexual abuse of children, but also just age appropriate information for children. But what are the considerations for protecting young people. United States, there's the child online protection that has the COPA compliance. That means that there's certain rules and regulations, say in rec room, people that are less than 13 years old can't speak. And so they are muted or they may not be able to hear. So there's ways in which that you can start to do that. But with any of these systems, you can start to bypass those and any restrictions that you have, what happens when parents consent to having their kid in there and they help collude with their kids to be able to have access. So there seems to be a lot of issues here in terms of, does there need to be have age verification? Where's the enforcement coming? Is it coming from the companies? Is it coming from oversight with the government? How you start to actually have viable protections for young people seems to be a pretty big issue that has already had a lot of buzz within in the latest context of after each Christmas, there's all these young kids that have new headsets and you have an influx of new problems that happen kind of like at the same time at the end of the year, because there's all these new children that are getting through Christmas gifts and whatnot. So that's some of the stuff that I see. I'd love to hear any other reflections of what to actually do for protections for young people.
[00:43:12.945] Melodena Stephens: I think you've covered everything. I think there's a helpful protection, like Professor Alini said. So we've got a design if we're doing headsets or anything else that's age appropriate. I think they're all standardized made for adults right now. They're not made for little kids or as going. So this will become something important in the metaverse. We will have to look at software. And then we have to check, you know, and we say it's age appropriate. I think there's a cultural part also with that. So it's not just about what's being played there. But also, I think we have to look long term psychological impact, right? Maybe, you know, in the old days, you play cops and robbers and a little kid does it outside and knows it's fiction. But now they're playing immersive games and they are very realistic. And then they go out and they have a gun and they're not able to make the difference between real and fantasy. And this is a problem because you can see this being played out again and again. So I think we have to really think about that. And again, I cannot stress enough if we have to take care of our young kids, We have to educate society, so the elders and the guardians need to be educated first. Sometimes we didn't grow up with these technologies, so we don't have the knowledge and we don't play them. So maybe it's by default. We've bought these things as presents without understanding. But I think now we cannot use that as an excuse any longer. We need to educate guardians also.
[00:44:42.178] Kent Bye: Yeah, and this last section here of this second chapter is talking about digital skills. And so there's a number of different organizations from UNICEF to the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well as the World Economic Forum. A lot of different of these organizations are talking about digital literacy and digital skills. So maybe you could help contextualize what these big organizations are talking about in terms of the need for digital literacy as we move forward and how that relate to the metaverse.
[00:45:12.198] Melodena Stephens: So one of the things that they think is as the world is shifting and more and more the metaverse will become dependent, a big contributor to the economy, a lot of the current jobs will be lost. In that case, what do the unemployed do? So one way that they're foreseeing future jobs is through upgrading of digital skills. So I think this becomes an interesting area. There is no agreement on what those digital skills are. They're very broad, but we're not necessarily sure what should be the specific focus. So it's really about maybe re-changing our educational systems. I think also in digital skills, it's at multiple levels. So one is about maybe understanding, you know, just what is all these technologies? What is safety? What's data protection? We need to bring this earlier on. But then we also need to help people, because there's a lot of, you can learn anything on the internet today. And I think that's the amazing thing. But how do we make sure that people learn what is appropriate and help them find employability? By the way, the right to have a job is a universal human right. So I always worry when we say, OK, robotics is going to remove this many jobs or things like that, because that is one of the fundamental rights. At most countries of scientists, we have to ensure that governments provide their citizens the skills that they can have a job. I found something very interesting. I just want to mention the story. A very large company put up a challenge and what they were doing was watching how their players were trying and overcoming this challenge because they wanted to create a bot that will then go and do that. And that made me think, you know, how many times are we giving our skills to companies and therefore our jobs are getting replaced because obviously the new technology can do it faster. So I don't know, is that an ethical issue? But maybe it's something we want to talk about.
[00:47:06.425] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. Well, as I look through some of the third section here, all the different individual sections that we just walked through, you have a number of different recommendations for each of these chapters. And I guess a theme that I see in all of these is trying to take the potential harms that are being done to specific people in specific contexts, and then trying to come up with a more generalized or universal approach that is going to be useful in helping to have the structures in place in order to either mitigate those harms or to prevent them altogether. And so I guess one of the things that comes up when I see this is how so much of the metaverse is being built from the ground up from lots of different disparate entities that have their own business model, their own method of understanding what their code of conduct is going to be and what rules they want to create for each of the, in the context of the city, there's these buildings. And so they think of it as each of the buildings in a city And each of those building owners are going to have their own approach for that. And so I'd love to hear maybe some high level reflections as you start to try to come up with these high level universal or generalized approaches to be able to address each of these different issues and what the process should be going forward to figure out how to either define what those are, but then even once you define them, how to get buy-in from each of those individual building owners or owners of each section of the metaverse to start to have an adoption of that to create the baseline of standards across the metaverse?
[00:48:32.862] Melodena Stephens: So I think at the high level, we want to create a systems process for governance. And this might mean, my guess is create a standardized reporting mechanism. And this is important because if we start with all countries have universally agreed, which is the sustainable development goals and the universal human rights, that's a great starting point. If we agree on that, and I think that's when we talked about values, I think that becomes a foundation. So if we can have reporting of companies that work in this space, hardware, software, data companies, I think that's a starting point. Maybe begin with voluntary disclosure. One of the important things is products upgrade so quickly. So when I talked about the thing like the corrupted blood pandemic, it's like an urban legend. There are some pictures from that, but they don't have actually any recorded data from that. So I think this is important that we keep tracks and traces of what has happened because it's learning for us. We learn from failures and there is nothing that will prepare us for tomorrow's problems. So it's important that we do that. We also want to look at setting up maybe a lifelong education digital skills committee. And this is important so that it can feed back into ministries of education and actually help develop curricula. So we're not just talking about school children, but maybe even later on, it would be vocational or any other thing. So very, very high level. We'd like to look at how we can cascade societal or rule-based interventions with government legislation. So one of the suggestions is to create a digital repository for legislation and industry standards on metaverse, both indirect and direct. And this could be at a global level. So all countries put it together so you can learn from each other, you know, and then even maybe have the discussion of what worked and what didn't work. And that could be interesting. set up a standards and interoperability committee, and this could be to present not only research, but even across industry sectors, because as we can see, you know, the metaverse is not just going to be educational gaming, but it could be healthcare, it could be government services, it will capture every walk of life. So we need to understand how it gets reflected. And then I think some of those questions that we had, you know, about my identity, you know, am I liable for that or is it a fantasy? I think this will come up then. So it's okay maybe in game to have the fantasy identity, but maybe if I'm going to the bank, I might still need to be, you know, a legitimate identity that's verified and who will do the verification. set up a global research and innovation fund. Like we mentioned, I think a lot of research is missing and obviously there's more development work to be done on technology. So definitely funding needs to be there. And then of course, legal resources, a lot more work to be done there and in privacy. So I think that's in a nutshell, which we've focused on to overcome, at least start the debate or start the discussion on the metaverse.
[00:51:33.563] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a lot of committees and task force. I think lots of different domains that would need to be seeing what the new capabilities and potentials, but also harms for the metaverse are happening with each of these different contextual domains that I think you've started to map out here. I think generally, as we started to do the white papers, we tried to focus on individual issues within the context of XR in general. And I think this paper is kind of reflecting a lot of those different contextual domains as well, and doing a deep dive into the various governance issues for each of those. The last section is a call for action. And so I'd love to hear some thoughts on what's next in terms of how to move forward with how to implement some of these different things, all these different committees and task force, and start to actually have this conversation and dialogue amongst these thinkers of the policy context, but also the builders of the metaverse. and how to help inform of what the landscape of risks and harms are to be able to then, now what? What do we do in terms of having this call to action?
[00:52:33.028] Melodena Stephens: So I'd like to bring Professor Alini also into this, because I think we've been discussing a lot about what we can do. So Alini, when we did the call for actions, I think we were very clear we needed to start first with awareness. That's right. We must build general awareness of the problem. If it is a problem, it could not be a problem. we need to understand, and the society needs to understand, what is metaverse? What are the challenges? To bring everybody together, not just governance, but also the stakeholders too. And make realistic expectations. Because I think sometimes, like XR, with the metaverse, I think people might have unrealistic expectations. They need to know the limits of the metaverse itself. And I think this is interesting because everyone's researching it from little silos. So you have beautiful use cases of how it works in a particular instance, but we've not looked at it in continuity. So we have to put all of that together because the metaverse is seamless. It's not working in silos, ideally. So this becomes important. I think we're also looking at making sure that various objectives are compatible. So, you know, people, planet, purpose, we need to make sure all of this works. Obviously, people don't make money, they're not going to invest in the new technologies. But at the same time, we want to make sure we take care of the planet and we want to be human centric. So people is extremely important. That's right. And we need to consider the good for all. And although it might not make money, although I think it will make money, and companies will buy into that at the end. But we have to be careful what we're sharing with the companies and ethical design. We need to ensure compliance, compliance with data sharing, ethical data, data auditing. And that's why we need to have standards, auditors, educators, And then because the speed of technological change is so fast, we're looking at an agile framework, right? So how can we respond to what we're hearing and deploy these new technologies or these fixes for these bugs? So we need perhaps also to create regulatory sandboxes where we can test before we deploy. I think this is very, very important, especially if we need to create regulations on untested technologies. Yeah, that actually comes into the long term need for funding. So we need committed research funding that could actually be around different disciplines. So we definitely need sciences, we need social sciences, we need technological sector, we need industry sector innovation, and we need politics in terms of governance, in order to do justice to the whole platform and the new way of living and learning. without interrupting our physical life. Yeah, absolutely. And the last but not least, I think, is if we want to prevent inequalities, we really need data. And we need to look at the metaverse across different industries, societies and sectors, and pull them together. And that's why these high level task force are so critical.
[00:55:47.802] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, that's certainly an ambitious paper to be able to map out all these things and start to come up with some recommendations and a lot of more specific things that I recommend folks to check out the paper, because there's a lot more details for each of those different sections and recommendations that are probably a little bit beyond the scope of this conversation to dive into every single nuance. I think generally to have these committees and task force and funding to be able to have folks look at the policy recommendations and then figure out how to come up with these frameworks that are a recommendation to the industry to have them either adopt and start to implement. Yeah, kind of the bottom up and top down and how to have those meet in between in some fashion, I think is the spirit of this paper here. So Melodyne, I'd love to hear from you what you think the ultimate potential of XR as well as the metaverse and having proper governance around the metaverse and what that might be able to enable once we achieve all of these things.
[00:56:40.621] Melodena Stephens: I think it can unleash human potential. There is a tremendous amount of untapped human potential. I mean, we're seven plus billion people on the world and we haven't really tapped into what we can do. So if we can create a meaningful metaverse, there is every reason to unleash the potential of 7 billion people. And I think that will be a fantastically beautiful thing to see. So that's the positive side, I feel.
[00:57:06.261] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:57:13.363] Melodena Stephens: I think we need to be transparent about what metaverse can and cannot do. I feel when I read a lot of papers, people choose sides, either they're for or they're against. I think we need to be balanced and look at it both ways. So this will be a fundamental shift, I think, even in research, because I see when I read the papers, it's either or. We need to do both and be very honest about it, because it's about the future. It's not about now. It is really about the future.
[00:57:42.926] Kent Bye: Awesome. And I'm wondering if you could just give a little shout out to some of the other contributors to this paper.
[00:57:48.229] Melodena Stephens: So Eleni, Monique, Nathana are all members of the XR community and very well known and respected. So we're very fortunate to have them. John Havens is a very well-known veteran, I guess, of IEEE and leading now the Positive Planet. So Happy to have him there. Keegan McBride is a researcher in the public governance space. Himanshu is from the private sector. Sumaya works also with governments and then there's me. So we're a nice mix of people and I think we bring that balance profile.
[00:58:22.208] Kent Bye: Well, Eldina, thanks so much for helping to lead this paper of metaverse and its governance as part of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Extended Reality. And yeah, thanks for joining me today to be able to help unpack both this paper and the future of the metaverse and what needs to be done to be able to have proper governance to enable all these potentials, but also mitigate all those harms. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast today.
[00:58:45.401] Melodena Stephens: Thank you, Kent. A pleasure to be here.
[00:58:48.579] Kent Bye: That was Melodyna Stephens. She's a professor of innovation management at the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai. A few takeaways about this interview. First of all, the metaverse is a big amorphous concept. In terms of looking at the variety of different governance issues that are coming up, I think it's spread off across a variety of different domains, but generally I think most of the different XR domains are going to be considering some of these different things, whether it's privacy, whether it's how to deal with protections for young people, dealing with health and safety and how to mitigate different aspects of dissociation, trying to look at the norms, society, and governance in terms of how do you do moderation and creating safe online spaces that people feel safe in being in. Are there ways of protecting yourselves if there are bad actors in the context of these spaces? The sustainable metaverse, I think, again, this is just looking at ways in which there's ecological footprints from a lot of different algorithms and different technologies. Proof-of-work, as an example, has a high ecological footprint. Just weighing some of the different considerations, if you're going to use a proof-of-work blockchain, then there's huge implications in terms of how ecologically friendly that's going to be. They were putting forth the desire to come up with a systems thinking and purposeful leadership, which I think is coming up with what is the bare minimum safety and security that you want to see across any or most of XR site that you go across, especially when it comes to privacy. But in terms of the code of conduct and everything else, I think there's going to be a pretty wide variety of different ranges of what is and is not OK. And I don't know if I would even want a uniform vision of that, just in terms of there is value in terms of having different spaces for different people that value different things. Then the legal recourse, the different rules that are existing, but problems with jurisdiction and treaties and how to have some sort of agreement across these different shared spaces. Really, you're creating a shared social space, but it's transcending any of the existing legal boundaries. So what is the jurisdiction for some of those different spaces for legal recourse? And then, you know, just these broader issues around digital skills and digital literacy and trying to look at these wider efforts that a lot of these governments have in terms of trying to keep up with the pace of technology, but also to start to adopt and implement different aspects of these XR technologies as well. It'll be interesting to see some of the first virtual worlds that are really sponsored and built by government. What are the different protocols that they're going to have to follow? There's a lot of ways in which the American Disabilities Act, as an example, has a lot of requirements to be able to follow in order to be accessible. If you have a government that's building a lot of these immersive spaces, then they're going to need a lot of innovation when it comes to making sure that these immersive spaces are just as accessible as a 2D platform. and in the discussion that I had in the IEEE paper, goes into great detail, detailing all the different things that are still yet to be done. It's probably going to be a while before we start to see some of these virtual world spaces that are actually built and sponsored and sustained by a government. But thinking about all these different governance issues, in terms of the sustainability with the norms of society governance, the dissociation, legal recourse, privacy issues, the protections for young people, and digital skills that are all embedded into these variety of different governance issues as We move forward here and also just the different bots and AI and the digital skills committee and the interoperability community Which hopefully we'll be hearing a little bit more information there from the Cronus group here soon to see what the latest of interoperability in the matters might be And then identity, verified identity, giving some of the different calls for action that they have within this paper are just to build general awareness of what are the realistic expectations about where things are at and where things might be going. Reconciling the compatibility of the variety of different objectives and people and planet across, you know, many different stakeholders. Referring to earlier in terms of the, you know, I'm a little bit skeptical in the sense that they're going to be able to come up with a uniform code of conduct of everything within the metaverse. Data sharing, auditing, and requiring standards, educators, auditors, and enforcers to be able to do that level of data sharing and auditing in the metaverse. Having an agile framework with regulatory sandboxes. Again, there's a technology pacing gap where technology is blazing forward. In order to really come up with the rules, then maybe there needs to be these sandbox environments that allow the rules to be experimented with and the collaboration with the development of these different immersive spaces. so that you can start to figure out what are the larger regulatory approaches that some of these governments should be taking to the metaverse. And a lot of this requires long-term funding from researchers to dig into a lot of this stuff, but also to just do long-term data collection and insights to assess the impacts and effects of the metaverse across many different iterations of society, sectors, and the planet, just to get a sense of where things are at and where they're going, and how to track progress over time. Those are some of the different calls for action and a wide-ranging discussion of looking at the metaverse and its governance. That brings to a conclusion this whole effort that I've been working on for the past couple of years with the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality. I've been on the Executive Committee, helped to start the White Paper Committee, and to facilitate and catalyze the discussions to be able to break up into these different white papers. So I'm just really happy that it's gotten to the point actually producing a lot of these different white papers and hopefully you've been able to get something out of Listening to these discussions with a variety of the different authors and yeah, and like I said, I'm an independent scholar So if you appreciate the work that I've been doing on this then please do consider becoming a member at the patreon So you can donate today at patreon.com slash voices of er. Thanks listening
