Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly capable of learning from and mimicking individuals, as demonstrated by a fairly successful effort to replicate the attitudes and behaviors of individuals by generative AI with a 2-hour interview (see, Park et al. 2024). This technical advancement has afforded the creation of increasingly indistinguishable (online, digital) doubles of individuals, variously known as digital doppelgangers, digital duplicates, and digital twins, which can talk to others, interact with them, and perform tasks on behalf of their creators and the originals. Major technology companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI have also imagined various ways in which digital doppelgangers can be adopted for various purposes including: attending meeting and performing mundane tasks on behalf of their creators, establishing and maintaining relationships, reanimating the deads, among others.
The introduction of digital doppelgangers in our current and existing social fabric will for sure generate new modes of interactions and relationships among individuals that are mediated by digital doppelgangers which are like us but not exactly us, and thus potentially disrupt our current norms and values and raise social and ethical issues related to their design and implementation. Indeed, some of these ethical concerns such as digital doppelgangers and the value of individuals (Danaher & Nyholm 2024) and their social and ethical implications in terms of life extension (Iglesias et al. 2024) have been explored along with the
social and ethical challenges of digital doppelgangers in specific domains of application, e.g., griefing, romance, and education. More generally, John Danaher and Sven Nyholm have also offered a promising general moral principle to assess the design and implementation of digital doppelgangers in what they call the “minimally viable permissibility principle”. Much less, however, has been said about digital doppelgangers’ potential implications to individuals’ moral self-cultivation.
In this talk, I shall approach the questions of digital doppelgangers and moral self-cultivation from a Confucian perspective, drawing from Confucian ideas on moral self-cultivation. The discussion, however, should also apply to non-Confucian accounts of moral self-cultivation as well. More specifically, I shall connect the discussion of moral deskilling to the social and ethical analysis of digital doppelgangers (see, Vallor 2015; Wong 2019), and argue that the
use of digital doppelgangers will in various ways result in individuals’ moral deskilling. In addition, I shall argue that the use of digital doppelgangers generates a novel challenge of fragmented identity, which requires the creators and/or the originals of the digital doppelgangers to reconcile potentially conflicting narratives and images, thereby de-stabilizing individuals in their cultivation of moral selves.
Reference
Danaher, J., Nyholm, S. (2024a). Digital Duplicates and the Scarcity Problem: Might AI
Make Us Less Scarce and Therefore Less Valuable?. Philos. Technol. 37, 106.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00
Danaher, J., and S. Nyholm. (2024b). The ethics of personalised digital duplicates: A
minimally viable permissibility principle. AI and Ethics.
doi:10.1007/s43681-024-00513-7.
Digital Doppelgängers and Lifespan Extension: What Matters?
Iglesias, S., Earp, B. D., Voinea, C., Mann, S. P., Zahiu, A., Jecker, N. S., & Savulescu, J.
(2024). Digital Doppelgängers and Lifespan Extension: What Matters? The American
Journal of Bioethics, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2024.2416133
Vallor, S. Moral Deskilling and Upskilling in a New Machine Age: Reflections on the
Ambiguous Future of Character. Philos. Technol. 28, 107–124 (2015).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-014-0156-9
Wong P-H. Rituals and Machines: A Confucian Response to Technology-Driven Moral
Deskilling. Philosophies. 2019; 4(4):59. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies4040059
