Eternal Echoes
To Be or Not To Be: The Ethical Dilemma
With these evolving changes in technology, there comes a whole new unknown realm of ethics. It raises the question of whether a robot can adopt human qualities that would allow it to reach personhood and characteristics we can resonate with. Technically, if these robots are considered humans, they should have the same rights and duties that humans have. However, computers do not have consciousness or free will, therefore they cannot be moral agents. Values, assumptions, and judgments are built into the AI tools, reflecting the beliefs of the creators. When immersed in these applications, users become desensitized to immoral behaviors. This creates potential harms around consent and how this tool will be used.
Photo generated using Wix AI.
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."
-Immanuel Kant
"Whoever is running the simulation wants the people to behave a certain way in a situation. They are going to be imposing all sorts of external judgments about what should be done. These little bits of code, there's no way for them to be free. It turns into whatever the master of the simulation wants them to be."
-Brian Green, PHd, Director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University
examples of digital resurrection in recent years
bina48
Created in 2010 by Hanson Robotics, located in Texas, United States. BINA48 is modeled after Bina Aspen, both look-wise and data-wise. 100 hours of interaction with Aspen were used to help replicate the mannerisms, beliefs, and communication style of Aspen in the robotic bust.
She has made history on multiple occasions, such as in 2013 when she received a certificate of personhood, as well as in 2017 when she was the first non-human to attend and take a course through Notre Dame de Namur University, which is located in California, United States. She has been well-documented since her creation and currently resides in Vermont, United States.
roman mazurenko
Mazurenko passed away tragically in 2015 in Moscow, leaving friends and family with a lot of emotions that were rather hard to handle. Eugenia Kuyda, a close friend of Mazurenko, decided that she was not quite ready to part with her friend, creating a mobile digital replication of Mazurenko using 8,000 texts sent between the two of them. This digital replication took the form of a mobile application chatbot, allowing messages and conversations to be continued with Mazurenko. This application is available on all app stores, such as Google and Apple, and can be downloaded by anyone for free. The application has a 2.7 rating on the Apple store.
project december: jessica
Project December is a website that allows people to "simulate the dead." The application explains that by "using patent-pending technology, in conjunction with deep AI running on one of the world's most sophisticated super-computers, we can now simulate a text-based conversation with anyone. Anyone. Including someone who is no longer living. This website uses GPT-3, which is more commonly known as Chat-GPT, owned and operated by OpenAI. William Shakespeare and Samantha, a bot-based on the AI character in the film "Her," can be talked and conversed with using this website. In 2020, Joshua Barbeau used Project December to recreate his deceased fiancee Jessica (Fagone).