Alexis M. Elder – författare

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling the construction of “digital ghosts”: algorithmic reconstructions of deceased individuals based on patterns of interaction in their text messages, social media posts, and other personal data. This book develops an ethics of digital ghosts using resources from classical Chinese philosophy.

Bereaved people have reported that conversations with digital ghosts can be surprisingly comforting and beneficial. However, there are concerns that they can be harmful, whether by preventing a hard but necessary acknowledgment of loss, producing ongoing dependence, or encouraging instrumentalization of our beloved dead. Building on some suggestive comparisons between digital remains and physical remains, this book uses resources from classical Chinese philosophy to connect concerns from funerary ethics to those presented by AI today. Confucianism, Mohism, and Zhuangism were remarkable for their rich, detailed discussions of the ethics of handling physical remains. This book updates and extends these concerns to apply to digital ghosts. It explores topics including the role of rituals and traditions in communal mourning, the epistemic consequences of fragmented standards for remembrance and data reuse, and the value of creative transformation and adaptation. The result is a psychologically plausible, culturally informed, and afterlife-neutral grounding for thinking about the ethics of digital ghosts.

The Ethics of Digital Ghosts will appeal to researchers and graduate students working in applied ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of technology, technology and AI ethics, cross-cultural philosophy, and classical Chinese philosophy.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling the construction of “digital ghosts”: algorithmic reconstructions of deceased individuals based on patterns of interaction in their text messages, social media posts, and other personal data. This book develops an ethics of digital ghosts using resources from classical Chinese philosophy.

Bereaved people have reported that conversations with digital ghosts can be surprisingly comforting and beneficial. However, there are concerns that they can be harmful, whether by preventing a hard but necessary acknowledgment of loss, producing ongoing dependence, or encouraging instrumentalization of our beloved dead. Building on some suggestive comparisons between digital remains and physical remains, this book uses resources from classical Chinese philosophy to connect concerns from funerary ethics to those presented by AI today. Confucianism, Mohism, and Zhuangism were remarkable for their rich, detailed discussions of the ethics of handling physical remains. This book updates and extends these concerns to apply to digital ghosts. It explores topics including the role of rituals and traditions in communal mourning, the epistemic consequences of fragmented standards for remembrance and data reuse, and the value of creative transformation and adaptation. The result is a psychologically plausible, culturally informed, and afterlife-neutral grounding for thinking about the ethics of digital ghosts.

The Ethics of Digital Ghosts will appeal to researchers and graduate students working in applied ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of technology, technology and AI ethics, cross-cultural philosophy, and classical Chinese philosophy.

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies.

In the first part of the book Elder develops a robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways.