Ethical Design For The Future Internet, Rolando Masís-Obando, G6 (3936699)

The future internet, or what people have recently been calling the “Metaverse” will be a more spatial, more 3D, and more immersive internet. The room for innovation in the metaverse will pave the way for a new era of the internet. But, the idea isn’t new: the Metaverse as a concept has been in the minds of technologists and entrepreneurs since the 1970s. And, initial attempts to construct a spatial internet really began in the 1990s, but due to technological constraints, fizzled out in the mid 2000s. Now, the technology is catching up and its further development will merge with augmented reality glasses and smart devices. These devices already and will continue to capture physiological data about our bodies’ and minds’ state of being. What protections are there to ensure that our personal and private information about our behavior and our minds stay safe and are not used unethically? One solution, among many, is to consider the design of technology through an ethical lens, one that is human-centric rather than human-adjacent. In this short video, we only scrape the surface of how ethical design can be used to help us think about how to safely interact as individuals with a technology that connects us to a larger community through centralized services and companies.