Digital immortality: On new forms of care, responsibility, and empathy in the age of AI
We have entered an era where our digital immortality is almost as inevitable as our death.
Though digital immortality-related technologies have existed since the 1990s, with the growing amount of data and the advent of new technologies—especially the recent emergence of large language models—the way we experience death, dying, and immortality is changing significantly.
With these changes have come ethical, cultural, philosophical, political, and even environmental challenges and risks. How can we plan for this new aspect of death?
In this lecture, Dr Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska will trace the digital afterlife industry’s shift from niche digital-immortality-related experiments to the fully independent commercial market, considering how we might develop this rapidly emerging industry in a culturally-sensitive, responsible way.
If you would like to join us online, please register via Zoom.
About the speaker
Dr Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska is a Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, with a background in social communication, theatre studies, and interactive media and performances. In her research, she explores how new technologies (re)shape our understanding of death, loss, grief, and afterlife presence.
In 2024, she was recognized by Schmidt Sciences as one of the exceptional 19 global researchers addressing the hardest problems of AI within the AI2050 Early Career Fellowship. Over the next two years, she will lead research titled 'Imaginaries of Immortality in the Age of AI: an Intercultural Analysis,' aimed at understanding the context-specific meanings of AI for our relationship to death and immortality.
"'It comes to us all': Death and dying" series
This event is part of an ongoing series on Death and Dying taking place at the Intellectual Forum in October and November. Find out more about the series.
