Will your AI ghost pay your debts when you die?

In the (virtual) public, AI is said to have turned the science fiction of digital ghosts into reality. The technology, it is claimed, can convincingly imitate those who are no longer with us, the living. Their afterlife is provided by “recovery services.” They are called deadbots (or griefbots). They can interact with and email those stuck in the deceased’s time, which is, of course, in the past. Although the deadbot is “definitely not a conscious being,” it uses vast amounts of “(personal data) to simulate speech patterns and personality traits.”

But this technology has a problem that seems to be overlooked by researchers and “tech ethicists” who are concerned with the question of adaptability – that is, how “AI technology (may) be outpacing respect for human dignity.” This is, of course, the old problem of “adaptive lag.” As evolutionary anthropologists (particularly of the niche engineering school) point out, humans are simultaneously biological and hypercultural. The former evolves slowly, the latter rapidly. This gap poses risks with biological consequences that were described in the 1970s as “future shock.” But the bigger, and perhaps more deadly, problem with dead robots is not adaptability, but their immortality.

Science News:

Companies Silicon Intelligence and Super Brain already offer this (afterlife) service. Both rely on generative AI, including large language models similar to the one behind ChatGPT, to sift through snippets of text, photos, audio recordings, videos and other data. They use this information to create digital “ghosts” of the dead that (re)visit the living.

However, your mother/father/brother/partner/or whoever’s deadbot will not imitate the main characteristic of life, which is novelty. In this way, the AI ​​imitates a soul, which, to use the words of the underrated 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, has “permanent properties” and is thus “precisely the irrelevant answer to the problem posed by life” because “the soul need be no more original than a stone.” To be more than a photograph, text message, or audio recording, the AI ​​must use the trick to create the optimal visit: the illusion of impermanence. The deadbot can only be convincing if it is mortal. Consequently, the realism of a digital ghost requires that it be reborn, only to face death again. (This requirement gives rise to contradictions as insoluble as those in films and literature about time travel.)

Life cannot be dynamic or have a future if it is immortal. It cannot be in heaven, where nothing happens forever; it must be in the heat of time, moving through it, with its vicissitudes, its ups and downs. This kind of dead robot, which might recognize the Tamagotchi pet as some kind of primitive ancestor, must eat, sleep, worry, cry, laugh, lose its mind, obfuscate, be direct, get sick now and then, and so on and so forth. It cannot always just deliver the quick good news—”I love the sunset right now…” “This Willamette Valley Pinot Blanc is just perfect…” “Walking through the park and looking at the clouds over Lake Washington.” Bad things must happen to it—”I had an accident…” “I’m in the ambulance…” “Call me back as soon as you get that message.” The virtual ghost must also age, grow old, and complain that its age-worn knees are not what they used to be. And finally it must return to the death from which it was digitally resurrected. (But only to die again? Is that really death? Death is only Death if it’s forever… right?) Be that as it may, there is certainly no future, no time, no being here without mortality.

If a deadbot can’t imitate life in the true sense, what can it do? Make money. “Our concern is that griefbots could become a new field for very insidious product placement,” explains Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Why stop at advertising? Why not take full advantage of this new opportunity to make profits?

Now imagine this (which shouldn’t be hard for a capitalist subject): if you agree to lend money, you must also allow the bank to use your AI-generated mind to collect what you still owe in the event of your death. In this world, you don’t take your debts to the grave. You stay here, in the world where money is time. The dead robot inside you could continue to pay off debts by working in a call center, charging relatives and friends a communication fee, promoting products on the radio or social media, or being recruited by the bank for virtual sex. As one sampled robot put it in a drum and bass track, “The growth potential is endless, endless, endless.”