Dorian Clay

Abstract: Extended reality (XR) technologies superimpose content onto a user’s experience of the world. This chapter argues that XR technologies, once incorporated into the basic structures of society, introduce three connected but distinct classes of ethical problems related to the self. It begins by analyzing contemporary (Western) accounts about the ethics of body modification especially as it connects to autonomy, competence, and the body. It then shows that although it may seem natural to extend ethical principles governing body modification onto XR technologies that allow users to radically alter their embodiment, such an extension would produce an incomplete ethics of XR embodiment. Three ethical issues about XR embodiment follow. The first is a question about who is empowered to determine how users appear to others. Second, such uses of XR will also pose challenges related to the self and the epistemology of self recognition. Humans have evolved to largely recognize selves in connection with their forms of embodiment. Because XR disrupts the heuristics humans have developed to identify someone across time, new heuristics must be created. Finally, the chapter introduces a third issue about human-like bots. Bots are likely to regularly inhabit future AR spaces. Because Human-like bots can be the bearers of any of the sticky and stable identities argued for, they pose unique problems of their own. The chapter ends with a call for urgency and continued research on these issues before AR applications become widespread.

Communication technologies change the way we relate to each other and ourselves. In this essay we analyze the effects that extended reality (XR) technologies are likely to have on conceptions of the self, romantic relationships, and other associated concepts like sexual orientation. While these technologies are in their infancy, key psychological and philosophical concepts are already being explored. We begin by defining extended reality and the family of technologies that make it possible. We pay special attention to the way these immersive technologies ground the experiences of presence which can become virtually real. These experiences provide a useful framework for understanding the phenomena of XR embodiment. XR embodiment, the experience of one's self as embodied in XR, opens up the possibility of blended physical and digital narrative selves which form the basis of new forms of relationships. In a future where XR is incorporated into the basic social and political structures of society, XR embodiment and virtually real experiences challenge normative concepts like sex and sexual orientation. Contemporary conceptions of the self, sex, consent, and love emerged in purely physical contexts to help us navigate the limitations of physical embodiment. XR embodiment requires a new ethical framework to make room for these possibilities. We end the paper by assessing ethical risks XR embodiment can introduce for XR developers, and researchers.