# Why the Metaverse Needs Ethics

There are many different ideas about what the **Metaverse** is or will someday become and even what we might call it. But there’s one thing all professionals in XR can agree on: 

**We want to build things that customers love, that clearly help them and never harm them.**

The practical challenge is determining what that means. The easy path is to ignore deep questions, racing headlong into the unknown, break it, sometimes fix it, and then make excuses for our repeated and embarrassing failures. Like:

> “How could we know that kids would wind up using our headsets not designed for them?”
>
> “How could we know that our computer vision code doesn't work for minorities?”
>
> "How can we possibly know any novel problems before we launch a product?"

It turns out, the process of building the best products for customers is nearly identical to the process of building them to be most **Ethical, Responsible, and Trustworthy,** because these are all part of **what makes products good.** We can't find all problems up front, but we can always do better.

Enter the [XR Guild](https://www.xrguild.org/)®. We’re a collection of professionals in XR, Metaverse, and Spatial Computing who have been around the block a few hundred times. Our mission statement is simple:

> The **XR Guild** provides the **resources**, **organization**, **mentorship**, and a common set of **ethical principles** to professional members to help us all achieve **the most ethical outcomes** for our products and services — benefiting **consumers**, **companies**, and **makers** alike.

The **XR Guild**® includes *Designers, Developers, Artists, Researchers, PMs, Producers, Writers, Directors, Creatives, Lawyers, even CEO*s. Some of us have over 30 years in the field. The XR Guild is **not a labor union**, but we all agree to a common set of **ethical principles** up front. Like the skilled trade **Guilds** of the past, we can teach **professionals** to spend more time on **ethics** in their everyday product decisions and back each other up when bad decisions can be reversed up front.

The XR Guild is a registered trademark of the XR Guild, Inc. A non-profit 501c3 membership organiation created to foster ethical development in XR/AR/Metaverse and Spatial Computing. All rights reserved.


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://principles.xrguild.org/why-the-metaverse-needs-ethics.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.