메타버스 시대의 기독교 윤리의 몇 가지 과제: 인공지능의 도전을 중심으로

Abstract

In this paper, I examined the metaverse at two aspects before moving on to discuss Christian ethics in the age of the metaverse. First, I investigated what the technical bases of the metaverse are, and how the metaverse works. Second, I paid attention to how the metaverse economy seamlessly integrates actual and virtual reality. After these preliminary considerations, I analyzed the challenges that artificial intelligence (AI), one of the technological foundations of the metaverse, poses to the human world at the level of weak intelligence, and proposed ethical guidelines for responding to these challenges. Weak AI poses unprecedented risks in many dimensions of life, including violations of basic human rights, threats to health and safety, disruption of democracy and the rule of law, and exacerbation of ecological crises, while strengthening digital capitalism and perpetuating bias and prejudice through big data. In response to these problems and risks, Christian ethics must fulfill the following three tasks: One is to provide ethical guidelines for managing the risks of AI, including transparency, inclusion, accountability, fairness, trustworthiness, safety, and privacy. Another is to control digital capitalism, and the last is to develop measures to regulate digital knowledge power. If AI develops to the stage of strong AI, the way to regulate the metaverse must be changed. Strong AI is considered to have the ability to make autonomous judgments and act autonomously. Although such AI is not yet technically possible, it is necessary to prepare for the emergence of such AI and how to organize the normative and legal communities. In the framework of ethics and law since Kant, in which autonomy is regarded as the essence of person as actor with rights and duties, AI with the ability to judge and act automously can be constructed as person named ‘electronic person’. The metaverse in which such an AI operates is a world in which humans exist as a unity of body and mind and at the same time as digital humans (avatars) separated from the body, and human, avatar, and AI subjects coexist. Therefore, defining the qualifications of the three subjects in the metaverse and establishing their interrelationships is necessary for ethical project to avoid chaos and confusion in the metaverse and to institutionally regulate the metaverse to realize more good and more justice. In the age of the metaverse, church and theology must make clear that the metaverse, the extended reality of humanity, is subject to the rule of God. Church and theology need to distinguish between digital images of God and the true God, respond to the challenges of the metaverse economy with Christian ethics, and expand and reconfigure theological theories of person.