The Agora Speaker Series is hosted by the School of Liberal Arts. Lectures presented as part of the series are free of charge and are open to members of the School of Liberal Arts, the University and the general public.
Agora Speaker Series 2021 - Associate Professor Patrick Stokes
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Online Webinar – details sent after registration
Can You Survive Death Online?
As we spend more and more of our lives online, we are also finding ourselves surrounded by the dead in new and unexpected ways. Social media is increasingly full of the ‘digital remains’ of users who have died, raising tricky legal and ethical questions of deletion or preservation. At the same time, and against the background of rapid developments in artificial intelligence and ‘deepfake’ technology, a range of start-ups have offered to make the disturbing world of ‘Black Mirror’ a reality, by offering various forms of ‘digital immortality’ from AI chatbots to more ambitious plans for mind-uploading. But is it possible to survive your death through a digital avatar? What sort of survival could this be, and what does this possibility tell us about the nature of selfhood and personal identity?Can You Survive Death Online?
As we spend more and more of our lives online, we are also finding ourselves surrounded by the dead in new and unexpected ways. Social media is increasingly full of the ‘digital remains’ of users who have died, raising tricky legal and ethical questions of deletion or preservation. At the same time, and against the background of rapid developments in artificial intelligence and ‘deepfake’ technology, a range of start-ups have offered to make the disturbing world of ‘Black Mirror’ a reality, by offering various forms of ‘digital immortality’ from AI chatbots to more ambitious plans for mind-uploading. But is it possible to survive your death through a digital avatar? What sort of survival could this be, and what does this possibility tell us about the nature of selfhood and personal identity?