I disagree most with the article “Metaverse Could Be Worse Than Social Media, Inventor of First AR System Warns,” not because of the concept that the Metaverse could be dangerous but because of the reason presented within the article. The reason given is fairly valid, that like social media, it has the potential to manipulate and divide people, but the statement that “AR would become so integral to our lives that we cannot just take off glasses to not see the problems staring at our faces” is something that I cannot agree with. Not everyone is entirely absorbed in tech, and to say that AR will be so important that one would be at a “disadvantage socially, economically, and intellectually” for not having AR is a bit of a stretch. Certainly a man without a smartphone or an AR set who reads and absorbs knowledge everyday is at more of an advantage than another who has all these things but wastes time all day on social media and video games. In all three regards it is more about personal intent than it is about material possession.
In addition, like social media and traditional news, it isn’t impossible to break the habit and the cycle of information fed, not to mention the fact that there are a great number of governments that do have a hand in restricting media. I believe the problem of increasing extremism and division in the society is not due to the method of which the information is fed, but rather the problem of misinformation and sensationalism instead.
On the other hand, I do heavily agree that the dangers of privacy and rights in the metaverse is a major problem we could face, such as presented in the article “AI bots to user data: Is there space for rights in the metaverse?”. The digitization of personal information does make the question of ownership and privacy a complex situation, with digital data making one’s life tangible, but given that it exists in an environment that is indeed “owned” it’s truly hard to answer whether then this data should be owned by the creator, or the owner of the space.
I certainly lean towards the rights of the user, of course. There certainly does need to be major modifications to laws as is and other regulations in the case of a metaverse’s existence in order to protect individual rights from the corporations that create or own the virtual landscape of the metaverse. The other problem, unmentioned in the article, is that of illicit activity, that cannot simply be regulated because it inherently does not answer to the rule of law. Often we see the problem of data leakages and hacks on the forefront of news, whether it is between countries or corporations. This problem not of ownership but of security, I believe, is the true danger of privacy and rights in the metaverse.