Unit 3 Takeaways: Emulative Essence vs. Emotive Remembrance
Technology often holds the promise of solving all-too-human problems. In doing so it often seeks to move cultural boundaries, re-shape agency and identity, and digitize our very essence. That which makes us… us. It lives in a limbic space between can and should. Just because we can digitize a human’s entire life experience in service of arresting feelings of loss after death, should we? The synthetic feeling of keeping someone alive inside of a period of grief may have aspiration to ease the pain of loss, but it also carries the all-too-human ethical risk of prolonging grief itself (Stern, 2020). The human oil on which many of these services run is the share. The photograph, the personal anecdote, the recorded voice. It captures the whats and whens of events in an attempt to consolidate them into an emulative experience for those left behind. Except this emulative essence is never whole. The best it can achieve is emotive remembrance. An extension of the family photographs we hang on our walls now made interactive (Stern, 2020). In preserving a life for the prompting of survivors, these products attempt to do that which a human cannot. They seek to endure beyond life itself. They position themselves as ‘the gift of being remembered’ (Vlahos, 2017). A human legacy transposed into zeroes and ones. They stir up old feelings, but we know it’s not the same. And like many generative experiences, they get close, but fall short. At least for now.
References:
Stern, J. (2020). How Tech Can Bring Our Loved Ones to Life After They Die | WSJ. YouTube.com. [Digital Video File]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRwJEiI1T2M.
Vlahos, J. (2017). How a Man Turned His Dying Father Into AI | WIRED. YouTube.com. [Digital Video File]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ7V74s6e04.
Portfolio Check-In
I’ve made a number of revisions to my initial research position. While the core architecture remains focused on the four main issues of citizenship transcendence, extraction of essence, transgression of boundaries and unintended consequence, the more I spend time with the ethics of grieftech, the more I feel compelled to make sure the work reaches the right audience. I need to ensure that it is written and constructed in such a way as to prompt ethical thinking not in those using these products, but in those building them. This research is intended for technical founders, startup executives and decision makers for investment into early-stage companies focused on the digitizing of human essence, and who wish to connect their work to current digital ethical scholarship. This is particularly critical when discussing how to mitigate unintended consequence as opposed to accepting understood risks.
Legislation around the practice of harvesting human essence is already years behind, and the pace of generative platforms is only increasing as services such as ChatGPT accelerate in scale and capability. This research is intended as a timely intervention and reminder of some of the ethical considerations for those invested in the success of these products prior to their scaling to mass audiences. Through injecting ethical considerations and tactical examples early into a large language model’s training, we can reduce bias, discrimination, and issues of ownership, privacy and identity which inevitably arise from such work.
My intent is to shape a more ethically responsible conversation for investors, which includes but is not limited to:
Deeply important issues of privacy, permissions and the commercialization of digital identity are highly applicable to those who cannot speak for themselves. This might include the posthumous use of digital likeness, but also of digital essence through chatbots and voice replicator services.
The proactive extraction of an individual’s persona where permission is given prior to death, as in the case of Hereafter Ai. What are the tactical methods used, what are the implications for issues of faith, and how do they impact a person’s digital agency and ability to control their own narrative after they have passed? What are the ethical implications of interacting with a digital essence for those left behind, and for whom the product is often intended?
How do these technologies reframe our sense of self as individuals, and what permissions are we giving those who seek to monetize our digital identities? What do we understanding about the value exchange left behind for those who survive us as the end users?
Unintended consequence and the true cost of such a value exchange. How might this technology be used for sinister ends, despite the best of intentions of its creators? This is where I intended to not just follow the money, but follow the intended outcomes of such potentially darker uses.
The second point above is particularly important, and as part of my independent research, I will be interviewing a member of the clergy in connecting systems of faith and believe to a conversation about digitized afterlives.
Miro Board Link: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVM7xYMNY=/
