That’s the question being asked here and there on the intarwebs at the moment, after a story appeared in a Belgian newspaper claiming that police in Brussels are beginning an investigation into allegations of a rape that occured in Second Life.

I’m no lawyer, nor am I an ethicist, and I don’t claim to have an answer one way or the other. But the fact that we can even be asking such a question is fascinating; the walls between the real world and the virtual - what Edward Castronova calls the ‘permeable membrane’ - are becoming increasingly thin and easy to cross, and the legal machinery is going to take a long time to catch up.

I like to use the ‘Wild West’ metaphor, describing MMOs like Second Life in terms of new frontiers where new experimental ways of life can take place, thanks to the relative lawlessness that prevails. It’s a double-edged sword, as the virtual rape case demonstrates, but these spaces are test beds for the social systems of the future.

Of course, much like there was in the American West, there is pressure on the people benefitting most from the expansion into new territories to police the anarchic goings-on. Which is probably why Linden Labs has announced their intent to exclude SL users from ‘Adult’ content in-world unless they can provide evidence of their legal majority … though the fact that the enforcement of non-adult content in a region labelled as such is to be left as the responsibility of the landholder leaves them a neat get-out clause for when something goes wrong. Every lazy sherriff needs a box-full of deputy badges.

The world imitates science fiction once again, as South Korea announces a project to draw up a code of ethics “to stop humans misusing robots – or vice versa.”

“Hye-Young adds that the government’s guidelines will reflect the “Three Laws of Robotics” put forward by science fiction author Isaac Asimov.”

Good old Isaac - his mark on history is assured, the media can’t write a robot article without giving him a plug…

This headline rang Pavlovian bells for me, and I realised that was because I blogged about a very similar announcement from the European Robotics Research Network back in June 2006, in a post called ‘Legislating against robot rape‘ (which naturally mentions Asimov’s Laws, because I wasn’t so worried about cliche back then, cough cough):

“You can’t rape an autonomous vacuum cleaner (although you could conceivably have sex with it, and knowing humans, people probably already have - the tales of people with vacuum related injuries turning up in casualty departments are too common to be completely unfounded). But something with a mind of its own, however limited? That’s another question entirely.”

Despite its potential import, it’s a hard subject to treat seriously in journalistic mode - but it seems to fare far better in fiction. Curious.

As mentioned previously, yours truly is off to a ‘Cafe Scientifique’ about conscious machines this evening. So what better time to discuss robot ethics? Continue reading “Legislating against robot rape”