Simon Ings

Will the photo of your lost loved one be replaced by a chatty robot?

It seems entirely possible that AI simulacra could be fashioned from the digital remains we now inadvertently leave behind, says Carl Öhman

[Getty Images] 
issue 01 June 2024

They didn’t call Diogenes ‘the Cynic’ for nothing. He lived to shock the (ancient Greek) world. When I’m dead, he said, just toss my body over the city walls to feed the dogs. The bit of me that I call ‘I’ won’t be around to care.

The revulsion we feel at this idea tells us something important: that the dead can be wronged. Diogenes may not have cared what happened to his corpse, but we do; and doing right by the dead is a job of work. Some corpses are reduced to ash, some are buried, and some are fed to vultures. In each case, the survivors all feel, rightly, that they have treated their loved ones’ remains with respect. 

A teenager describes how, ten years after losing his father, he discovered they could still play together

What should we do with our digital remains? This sounds like one of those noodly problems that keep digital ethicists like Carl Öhman in grant money.

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