Postmortem life: thanobots, digital twins and feminist immortality

Postmortem life: thanobots, digital twins and feminist immortality

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연구 분야: Analysis

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학회: AI & SOCIETY

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초록

This paper explores how cellular and digital bodies are formed, critically examining how existence post-death manifests. In doing so, it introduces a new category between life and death: postmortem life. Postmortem life is examined by drawing together nineteenth-century spiritualism that blends bodies, capitalism and technology with photographic preservations of self and the preserved/ decomposing dead body. It critiques the unpredictability and ethics of interacting with thanobots (aka chatbots, trained on data of the dead) and deep fakes, by weaving physical embodiment and notions of actual and representational skin with the microbial/nervous/neuronal nature of bodies and digital reanimations. Using examples of virtual children: baby X, Sweetie 2.0 and VR Na-Yeon the paper explores the ethics of skin cloning and concepts of non-conscious cognition within AI using 3D modeling, photogrammetry and voice/ language models. In doing so, it speculates on the potentiality of digital twins to decenter the human, exploring possible futures for human biotechnological emergence. Aiming to break from technologists and entrepreneur’s desire to create humanness and self-replication through AI, this paper explores alternative new materialist and feminist notions of biopolitical power and kinship. In doing so, we conceptualise what forms of continued existence become possibilities within a lively ecology of Postmortem Life that accepts both the technological and biological.

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