Metaverse is the latest darling of tech firms. With an urge to stand first in line, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, but not to forget, the step coincided with Microsoft and Roblox making significant investments parallelly. Everybody wishes to have their say in how virtual reality and digital identities will be rolled out and how to organise different aspects of everyday lives - from work and health care to shopping, gaming, and others. For instance, 

• Meta announced an annual investment of $10 billion on Facebook Reality Labs (its metaverse unit responsible for creating AR and VR hardware, content and software). 
• Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard (an American video game company) at $68.7 billion. "Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms," said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft. 
• Qualcomm launched its Snapdragon Metaverse Fund to invest up to $100 million in developers and companies building unique, immersive XR experiences and associated core AR and related AI technologies. 
• Chinese tech giant ByteDance acquired virtual social platform PoliQ to foray deeper into the metaverse space. 

One thing is sure - the metaverse is not going to be a single domain under the control of any one company. Facebook nodes in agreement - a vast and interoperable metaverse cannot be built by one company alone. It will require the contributions of many companies, developers, and creators - and it will take time, per the Facebook Reality Labs post. Clear with the fact - the metaverse space is a multiplayer game, the question is - who will own the responsibility for any wrongdoings? Will these tech firms be able to take collective responsibility, or do people have to deal with it on their own? Many questions need to be answered and are valid. 

Problems exist 

The idea of the metaverse is not new. Science fiction author Neal Stephenson first used the phrase in his 1992 book Snow Crash, which imagines a hyper-capitalist dystopia in which everyone has chosen to live in imaginary worlds. Now, the concept is becoming reality and is fraught with multiple challenges. 

In December last year, Meta made Horizon Worlds - its social networking platform for virtual reality available. In accordance with Meta, a beta tester reported being groped by an unknown person on Horizon Worlds and posted her experience in the Horizon Worlds beta testing group. In May 2022, as per a report from SumOfUs, a nonprofit advocacy organisation, a 21-year-old woman claims she was raped within an hour of entering the metaverse. The news was reported by the New York Post as well. The cases of sexual assault need to be strictly taken care of, and the aspect must be looked upon in a detailed manner during the development phase itself.  

Further to this, racist harassment is becoming more prevalent in the pre-metaverse immersive environments of today. Avatars, the graphical personas people can build or purchase to represent themselves in virtual worlds, are priced differently depending upon the perceived race of the avatar. A paradigm change from the present 2D standard to a fully immersive 3D experience is necessary to create an AR world. To build solutions for AR, enormous volumes of appropriate data are required. It is crucial that the data capture the complexity of reality and is not sanitised. Additionally, this requires the policy to respect individuals' privacy and address bias concerns 

So, what about ethics 

The phenomenal growth in the field of AI generated interest from corporate and government and led to a major contribution from ethicists and activists who published research on the risks of training AI on biased data sets. Now, in order to prevent self-interested firms from implementing governance models with an eye on their profit margins, independent parties should propose governance models as soon as possible. 

In the past, whenever the issue of ethics originated, tech giants have suggested self-regulation as the most effective means. To allay public concerns, AI developers tend to produce technical toolkits for internal and external reviews. In reality, it didn't because the majority of companies working on AI have business strategies that are directly at odds with the ethical standards that the general public expects them to meet. The time is ripe to foresee industry self-regulation to lay a strong ethical foundation for the metaverse. The metaverse is certainly consumer-centric, whereas AI has traditionally been focused mostly on internal corporate processes. As a result, it will come with a variety of behavioural dangers that most people will not have considered. 

To sum up, although the metaverse may not exist for some time, it is never too early to begin considering these ethical problems and developing frameworks and norms for moral behaviour that foster trust and provide the groundwork for the future.