The world is rapidly going digital. Not only our communication or our devices, but our very own existence is getting digitized. With virtual reality and augmented reality at play, it is not difficult to visualize how our perception of the world around us is getting warped by the emerging technologies in the area of enhanced reality. People have readily and happily adopted the virtual reality paradigm, with headsets being donned for gaming, tourism, and other applications. The lines between the physical and the digital world are getting blurred, fast enough to be a part of the oblivion.

However much exciting it may look, entering a virtual world has its ramifications. We may not be able to spot the finer issues with the enhanced reality paradigms, but soon we will have to ponder over the ethics of hyperrealism. With people catching the fancy of the fantasy worlds running on computer codes, the real world stands neglected and also despised. This warrants a pertinent question, ‘is enhanced reality the new prison for people’s minds and very existence?’ Technologists, policy advisors, and doctors are all growing worried about the consequences of the virtual world that is straying us further from reality and is enslaving the minds of people like hardly anything else. On Idea74, this is the first time we shall discuss the other side of the coin – the ethics of hyperrealism.

No idea who is who

Enhanced reality soon will give you access to choosing your avatar. In case you are fair-skinned but want to look brown on the virtual platform, the enhanced reality applications will do so for you. If you wish to look like an Indian, even though you are a European, that will be possible too. You can don a new face and a customized body when engaging with people in hyper-realistic environments. You may not be able to figure out the real face of a person and the real physique of the individual you may be dating in a virtual realm. Moreover, you may not even realize that the person who presents himself to you may have entirely different looks. The hyperrealism will bring in instant gratification for people who just don’t want to be themselves, but someone who they can’t be but want to be.

In such a scenario, it will be a breach of ethics to present oneself as someone different from the world, while the world associates you with your virtual personality. This can even lead to the growth of distrust in the enhanced reality realm. One shall never be able to figure out the true identity of the person he/she is interacting with. And because of this concern, it may get all the more dangerous to meet people in person, without knowledge of their personality – which will further drive virtual meetups.

Menace of obscenity

Tomorrow, as your kids will watch their favorite content on the virtual reality world, you may not even realize what they are watching. Today, at least the conspicuousness of the television screens and the laptop screens allow for parental control. In the future, whatever content gets streamed will be confined to the volume of the opaque headset and you may not know the standard of the content. Violence, obscenity, and unethical content may go streaming scot-free and we may not be able to detect it as well. Yes, we can enable child lock for sure, but what about the content being watched by the adults? There has to be a censor system to allow only the socially constructive content to go on enhanced reality. Yes, we cannot eliminate the menace to its root, but at least we can try minimizing it.

Lingering digital Fingerprint

Personal data acquisition has always been a concern for users of digital media. With enhanced reality paradigms mapping our facial structure, moods, identification parameters, and other personal details, it will become all the more concerning for people as cybersecurity challenges arise further. The hackers can exploit the facial identification parameters to create a digital duplicate of your avatar to access your confidential resources and make unauthorized transactions, leading to siphoning off money from bank accounts. The advanced malware can also threaten the netizens by hacking into their digital personalities and altering them into repulsive characters, which can be deleterious to an individual’s virtual existence.

With enhanced reality, we cannot expect everything to be safe and secure. We need to certainly come up with advanced forms of personal data security frameworks and user authentication mechanisms. Retina scans and fingerprint scans will no longer be useful enough.

Misbehavior with a virtual avatar

This is a very sensitive topic, that is growing in prominence in the recent debates of ethical practices. With the advancements in enhanced reality, we may soon be interacting with virtual agents and virtual characters that have no existence in the physical world. The future may present us with applications where we may be able to have a date with virtual beings, travel around with them and maybe even customize them as per our preferences. The last part is where the issues arise. Will it be moral for a person to exploit a virtual being for his/her certain urges and desires? Will any certain kind of behavior with the virtual beings count as misconduct?

How do we plan to monitor the interactions between real beings and virtual ones? Should we also come up with ‘robot rights’ or ‘avatar rights’, just the way we have human rights? Will these issues invite policy action? These are matters that need much more discussion than we are having today.

Disconnect from the physical world

If the virtual realm becomes a preference for people at large, it can lead to a disconnect from the real world. People may tend to stay in their fantasy world, where everything happens as per their choice. This can make them distant from the challenges of the real world, and people may just grow indifferent to the planet as they would have a perfect realm to exist in, albeit virtually. The virtual embodiment can also lead to behavioral, psychological, and cognitive changes in people, which may need therapy to address if the implications are bad.

In a nutshell

Enhanced reality is not all that bad. It is just a soft clay that is waiting to be molded in whatever shape the users want. What we need to ensure is that the people who mold this soft clay are ethical in their practice and are bound by ethics and check mechanisms, so that a wonderful technology does not end up being a bane for society.