All the consequences of the metaverse on international security
“Future consideration of the Metaverse as a new war domain will need a deeper understanding of the building blocks of its first version.” We publish an extract from the book "Geopolitics of the infosphere" (Rubbettino) by Paolo Savona and Fabio Vanorio
Recent studies have focused on the data-intensive capabilities of modern VR technologies equipped with sense-making algorithms. Commercial VR systems typically track body movements 90 times/second to display the scene appropriately, and high-end VR systems record 18 types of signals through the head and hands. As a result, spending 20 minutes in a VR simulation yields just under 2 million unique body language recordings (Bailenson 2018). VR also senses the environment around users, locating them within the area, tracking their movement across the room, and limiting the virtual from the physical25. Advances in mobile VR (Saker and Frith 2020), such as the Oculus Quest 2, are based on algorithmic odometry. An example is Meta's Insight stack, made up of sensors that allow the device to algorithmically build a map of the surrounding environment. The software can track the location and movement of the device in space.
A second concern is the regulatory limitations caused by VR. Tech companies profit from data-centric or surveillance-centric business models (Goggin 2014). Technologies such as XR and VR largely fall under personal data regulations such as the European Union's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation, EU/2016/679). It is worth noting though, some of the limitations of this regulation when it comes to VR. The preventive force of the GDPR is based on user consent. If customers consent to use a particular product or service and provide explicit consent for the types of data tracking outlined in their terms of service agreement, data tracking (including granular biometric data) is permitted (Article 9 of the GDPR ). Many software licenses take the form of a clickwrap agreement (accept the terms of the agreement by clicking the I accept button). This is a mechanism to quickly move users into the consumption stage (Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch 2018), but is often vague in specifying future uses of the collected data. While Meta, for example, has argued that Oculus products have the potential to track biometric data (such as hand size) or other forms of spatial data (such as room size), what is missing is a clear statement about potential subsequent uses. It is particularly problematic, for example, how Meta itself claims in its software licenses that all data is de-identified at the time of collection. Still, Facebook's internal tests on Oculus didn't rule out the possibility of re-identification. Volumetric trapping and spatial doxxing (that is, discovering an Internet user's true identity) can also lead to privacy violations.
Most importantly, Metaverse actors can compile biometric psychographies based on users' emotions. These profiles could be used for behavioral inferences that feed into algorithmic biases. The same qualities that make VR a potentially revolutionary technology, therefore, also make it profoundly dangerous. In the Metaverse, greater immersion means amplifying all of the current dangers of the Internet, particularly where AR and VR technologies can affect user cognition, emotions and behaviors. Governments look to the Metaverse concept concerned about the potential risks to their military sphere as well. In the United States, the link between simulation and Virtual Reality for military purposes dates back more than 50 years to the research of Ivan Sutherland. In 1966, Sutherland moved from Harvard's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, later changed to DARPA) to pursue its program of extending human capabilities, primarily in head-mounted wearable displays (Sutherland 1993), which illustrate the synergy between the needs of industry, government (essentially military) and university research. Funding for this project came from the same sources: military (and intelligence), academia, and industry (Lenoir 2000).
Long-term government support, especially from the US agency DARPA, has been instrumental in supporting innovative research directions and building the hardware and software necessary for the VR industry. Also important is federal research funding to create and sustain critical hardware developments for 3D graphics and simulation. Graphics and networks have become interconnected halves of a larger whole, so-called distributed virtual environments.
Central to achieving these goals has been the U.S. Army's creation of the military SIMNET (Distributed SIMulator NETworking) program, the first example of the Metaverse (Vanorio 2021a). Conceptualized by Jack Thorpe in 197826, SIMNET was launched in 1983 once approved by DARPA. SIMNET developed a scalable virtual architecture that networked simulators into a collective synthetic (virtual) training. Thorpe believed that simulation could augment live training, not just act as a substitute. Just as SIMNET's distributed architecture benefited from emerging technologies (for example, microprocessors, computer image generators, and communications technologies), today's technologies catalyze a much more advanced military readiness ecosystem. Given the evolution of the concept in the military sphere, it is justified to ask whether the Metaverse could be considered a new domain of warfare. However, taking the US Department of Defense and NATO as a reference, the doctrine that defines the domain of cyberspace is insufficient to understand how much, and above all in what terms, the Metaverse can constitute a new battlefield. DoD Joint Publication 3-13/2014 (Information Operations) identifies the domain of cyberspace as the interdependent networks of resident information and data infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers. While this definition is appropriate for purely virtual worlds, it is unclear how to apply it when the virtual and physical domains become indistinguishable.
NATO doctrine uses the term domain for something entirely different. The NATO Comprehensive Operations Planning Directive (COPD) refers to political, military, economic, social, infrastructure and information systems; it looks at domains as dimensions of an operating environment, i.e. land, air, space and sea. Therefore, future consideration of the Metaverse as a new war domain will need a deeper understanding of the building blocks of its first version. In general, the Metaverse can be thought of as a multivariate military environment. While the use of the Metaverse in military training may allow for preparation of operations in integrated space, it is difficult to replace situational awareness and spontaneous decision-making based on direct knowledge of critical situations. The military utility of the Metaverse is, therefore, essentially to be traced back to providing a virtual cognitive space that creates digital twins of real combat scenarios, where the preparation of war scenarios can be effectively enhanced by introducing subliminal messages within the simulations. International security concerns make it necessary to match the development of the Metaverse with crucial regulations.
Due to its transnational nature, the issues and challenges it poses will underlie the international politics of the digital new world order. The international community should initially initiate a paradigm shift in the awareness of rulers and citizens regarding the problem, favored by widespread knowledge, and in the methods of implementing policies, engaging in constructive communication that guides the development of the Metaverse in a healthy and ordered (Vanorio 2021a).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/tutte-le-conseguenze-del-metaverso-sulla-sicurezza-internazionale/ on Sun, 28 May 2023 06:32:03 +0000.