Bruce BassiSummary
Professor Maggi Savin-Baden authored “Virtual Humans: Today and Tomorrow” as well as “Digital Afterlife: Death Matters in a Digital Age.” We explored virtual reality in mental health as well as the concept of a “digital afterlife” where your thoughts, memories, and personality are encoded in an AI bot. What is a digital immortal and is it desirable for us and our loved ones? Would it help or harm others’ grief? Are we already functioning as a hybrid real-virtual personality? Leave your comments below!
Transcript
Welcome to the Future Psychiatry podcast, where we explore novel technology and new developments in mental health, psychiatry, and psychology. We speak to guests to better understand their contributions to the space and dig deep into underlying motivations for key features, technical challenges, and future directions. We look behind the curtain to see how these creations were made and how they expect them to evolve in the future. Today, we’re talking with a special guest, Dr. Maggi Savin-Baden, who is a professor of education at Worcester University and a prolific writer, author of her book, titled Virtual Humans Today and Tomorrow, explores the technical approaches to creating virtual humans. She is also an expert in the rapidly expanding field of the digital afterlife and has a book titled Digital Afterlife death Matters in the Digital Age. It is a fascinating read about the many varieties and dilemmas we’re bound to encounter in the future. We’re extremely lucky to be able to pick her brain today on these topics. Dr. Savin-Baden, welcome to the show.
SAVIN-BADEN: Thank you very much. Thank you.
BASSI: So before we dive in, and we’re very excited to dive in first tell us how you’ve gotten interested in virtual reality and digital mortality. It seems like a very niche area that most people really don’t know about, myself included.
SAVIN-BADEN: I think it started in about 2008 when I first started getting into exploring the use of virtual worlds, then like Second Life and more recently like Uni-3D for Learning in Higher education. I’m a really higher education researcher who’s kind of stumbled across some interesting areas, and I think all through my career, I’ve always been at sites of innovation because, as my husband says, I’m always getting bored and I’m always wanting to do new things. So it started back then, and I gained some really surprising but good funding to look into that, both in medical education and then later in higher education. And so it started with virtual worlds and moved on from there.
BASSI: That’s very neat.
Analyzing Our Relationship with Technology & Technology “Addiction”
BASSI: So let’s start off on a light topic compared to digital immortality. Let’s start off talking about virtual reality. And I remember five to ten years ago, and to some extent now, we always talk about technology overuse and how it affects socialization and sleep. And I feel once virtual reality becomes commonplace, we’ve reached a new level in our relationship with it. In this post digital age, as you talk about in your book, we’re no longer going to be talking about how it impacts our health because it’s, like, so commonplace, like, the air we breathe, we’re so enmeshed in it. And so how do you feel about spending a significant amount of time in a virtual environment and how that affects our health? And do you have any recommendations about that? You know, as an addictionologist, we talk about how people can be addicted to various things, and I think we almost have to start to redefine addiction to technology now because it is so commonplace.
SAVIN-BADEN: I think one of the important things I’d like to start by pointing out here. Which I’m sure you already know. And many of you watchers know as well. But it’s important to make the distinction between virtual worlds and virtual humans and virtual reality. Because you can be in a virtual world which can feel really immersive.
And some people talk about that as if it is reality there. So it feels really real. And then you can go back to the original matrix when, you know, the question is, what is real? I’m in a computer program. What is real? And things in lots of these fields, like, is this my imagination? Well, of course it’s your imagination. What else it would be, whether it’s Harry Potter or some of the other Sci-Fi films. So I think there is a kind of collapsing of virtual reality and virtual world in the sense of the idea of immersion.
There were quite a lot of discussion, certainly in the late – about 2010 – about people getting addicted to using virtual worlds. That seems to have disappeared a bit, but the focus is more on getting immersed in games, which is another form of virtual reality, but he’s also crosses over virtual reality and virtual worlds, particularly the shooting of games and the other games that people get addicted to. So I think there’s that, and then, of course, there’s the virtual reality itself, which is still very much about putting your virtual reality goggles on. I’ve just finished a piece of work for the Ministry of Defense in the UK, which was actually creating pedagogies for virtual world to try and enable them, to use them better. And that’s the subject of a talk that I’ll be giving in Montreal in January. But I think a lot of the time, a bit like digital immortals and digital afterlife. A lot of the time, it’s not often as much developed as the media imply. And virtual virtual reality, I still think, is very much unless you’re in a virtual environment sorry, a virtual reality space, a physical space. In all of these purpose built virtual reality buildings, which are more like simulations and virtual reality, you’re still talking about putting on, you know, your goggles to get into virtual reality. Not everybody’s got that, and everybody’s bothered about that and makes some people feel quite sick.
Does VR Assist with “Presence” or Does It Contribute to “Absent-Presence”?
BASSI: Mark Zuckerberg recently said that we’re a technology company that helps people connect, and we want to build a platform that builds a sense of presence, or you’re there with somebody, and it’s almost like he’s taking the achilles heel of technology, where people mainly criticize it for a lack of presence – your phones are out at the dinner table – and he’s flipping it on its head and making it a strength, I think, in some aspects, that’s an interesting take on it, because that’s where we’re heading anyway. What do you think about that and whether or not it does take away people from being present or it adds to being present with other people?
SAVIN-BADEN: The classic one is, as you say, the phones at the dinner table. I don’t know what rule you’re going to have for your young child, but we’ve had a rule for many years in our family that we don’t have friends within a table. And I think what the look of us really talking about is absence and presence, which goes back to Derrida’s work. And I think it’s about And I think there are different iterations of that. And that’s what people need to be looking at. Is it absent absence or is it present absence? You can see absent absence when you people are standing in front of a grave talking to their loved ones who’s clearly not there, although they’re under their feet at the same time. People talk to their loved ones in virtual graveyard, so there’s different ways of looking at it. I don’t know that having your phone at dinner is terribly helpful, and I do think it is a distraction. I mean, to the extent that I have young people in my home and if I’m on my phone and my daughter is trying to have a conversation with me, she says in a very pointed way, are you listening to me mum? So I put my phone down, turn it over, and say, yes, I’m here, because it is that sense of absent presence. You know, I’m not here listening properly to what she’s saying to me because I’m actually talking to somebody else.
BASSI: Totally agree. I feel like maybe there’s a time and a place for this absent presence, and there’s a time and a place for putting down technology and just having that face to face interaction. And we need to figure out what is the most appropriate time in place so we can use it to our advantage as much as possible. That’s what we’re all about.
Why Hasn’t Virtual Reality Become More Widely Used in Psychiatry?
BASSI: Since this is a psychiatry show, I want to kind of get your take on what people, especially clinicians, how they approach virtual reality care and psychiatry, I don’t know about in the UK, but it really hasn’t taken off very much, even though there’s growing amount of data to show that it can be helpful for the treatment of social anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder. Why do you feel that it hasn’t really become mainstream like virtual care has? Because this has been something that I scratch my head over trying to figure out.
SAVIN-BADEN: I mean, are you referring to virtual reality in terms of immersion with headphones and goggles? Is that kind of the VR you’re talking about?
BASSI: Yep. Doing exposure response prevention with a VR machine where they can simulate a flight taking off or being in an audience or some other sort of confining environment where they can change that in real time and then work through the situation. It just seems like a very beneficial way of treating these disorders. But really, nobody doesn’t. I don’t know of anybody. I have to actually search the Internet to find somebody. I don’t know anyone personally or professionally who does this kind of treatment.
SAVIN-BADEN: I completely agree. I mean, I’m not aware of it. I think the only evidence that I’ve seen is the use of people doing that in virtual worlds, not in virtual reality. So there’s quite a lot of small research groups or mental health groups in virtual worlds that support one another. But I think certainly in the UK, with the state of our health service, it wouldn’t even occur to people to use virtual reality because they would say, well, the kids are too expensive and it’s too difficult. And I think there’s still very much a medical model of mental health in the UK. It’s about fixing people and giving them pills. Unless you’re a sort of innovative occupational therapist who works in private health care, I don’t think there’s any hope of using that kind of tech.
BASSI: Right. I think the insurance companies and the laws kind of paved the way as to whether or not it’s first accepted, because then the clinicians can adapt it more easily.
SAVIN-BADEN: Yeah, that may be the case in the US. Here it’s about funding. And so if you want to join a mental health support group in a virtual world, you can do that. But there isn’t a set up, really, to use VR. I mean, certainly the work that I’ve done with the MOD, there’s been quite a lot of work there. Obviously. You talked about flight simulation and training. There’s a lot of VR in the military, but it’s not used in health over here.
BASSI: Yeah, actually, back in 2007, I was involved in a VR study where they were trying to use it for astronauts. I was working at Johnson Space Center in Houston. They wanted to reduce the amount of nausea that they feel and that really debilitates them in the first few days of spaceflight. So to get them more adapted to zero gravity and be able to adapt to that more quickly can make them more productive. So that was a pretty interesting application of it more and more in the government space rather than in the clinical space.
Overdependence on Technology
BASSI: I just want to round out this topic on virtual care, virtual reality in general, and talk about it more broadly as to what it means for our society. We become so dependent on technology in so many respects, and then when it fails in some way or another, which is inevitable, it just leads to mass calamity if there’s a virus, if the internet goes down, people can’t get on the train. You can’t do the most basic functioning in human life. Do you think that we’re becoming too reliant on it? And do you foresee something like an issue on a massive global scale, like a COVID, but for technology.
SAVIN-BADEN: I think it could happen. I mean, again, I’ve laughed often when the Internet goes down in the university and suddenly you find people coming out of their offices and talking to each other who, you know, this is what it used to be like. You know, we used to talk to each other. Instead of saying, email somebody in the next office, you actually go knock on the door. So I think so, but I think it depends. I work with a group of theologians, and we have these meetings every six weeks at Trinity College in Oxford, and we have these debates about how much technology is taking over our lives. And I guess one of the big things I always say, but it’s a question of choice. You know, are you here? It’s all over the media in films. I don’t have a choice. But actually we do have a choice, and I think we need to bring choice back into mental health, into family life. We need to emphasize that choice is there. You know, you choose whether you turn the television on, you choose whether you turn the computer on. You choose whether you answer your emails first thing in the morning or whether you like I do generally don’t answer them until 4:00 PM in the afternoon, so I can actually get some work done. So I think there is an issue around choice for me, and I think you can choose whether you give your child an iPad. I mean, I’ve seen children in supermarkets with a newspaper in front of them trying to get the pictures to move as you would on an iPad, and they’re in a pushchair. And I think it’s a little bit worrying.
BASSI: It reminds me of when a comedian was making fun of how we have such drastic complaints about air travel, and he’s like, Just think about this. You’re flying 600 miles an hour, 30,000 ft in the sky. Can’t you just appreciate that for once? And so I do like how you remind us all that these are things that overall are making our lives so much better. And if there’s a little bit of drawback once in a while and inconvenience because you have to go out and talk to somebody in the hallway, then that’s kind of the price you pay for these massive conveniences that we have day in and day out.
SAVIN-BADEN: There are things that can help. I mean, we’ve talked about VR a lot, but we don’t really talk about sort of the mental health apps that are out there or the sleep apps. And there are things that can really help us, but only to a degree in the end. I don’t know about you, but I just get to the stage. But by the time I’ve spoken to a chat bot on a website for a while, I really want to talk to somebody. Not a bot.
BASSI: Right. We’re not there in terms of realism yet for the chatbot and I will be talking to a few people who have developed apps for mental health care. And I think that is a topic that we definitely need to go into more.
Who Would Benefit the Most from Using Virtual Reality?
BASSI: One thing to round out this VR topic in a psychiatry podcast is, and I think this would be very helpful for clinicians to hear your take on this, because not everybody is totally accustomed to using technology. And I think there are certain people who get more out of medications, there are certain types of people who get more out of therapy. Are there characteristics or a type of person who you feel would benefit more from virtual reality care versus somebody who is more likely to benefit from an in person type of treatment?
SAVIN-BADEN: Well, that’s a hard one. I think my perception would be that younger people with anxiety, I’m talking people in their 20s, probably would be more comfortable with VR than, say, my generation, who would just think it was really weird. I would rather either have some pills, not that I would, but I would rather talk to somebody than anything else. So if I’m anxious about it, I’m a runner. If I’m anxious or worried, I gotta have a run. That’s my solution. But I also think that there is more and more encouragement for physical health or mental health. And I think that’s the other thing. If you’ve got apps or VR that can encourage you to be physical, so VR that promotes physical health and mental health together, I think that would be useful. I’m kind of evading your question, really, because I don’t think I can answer it. I don’t know, I’m not over great belief in personality types, I’m a great belief in individuals. But I do think it is the younger generation that would benefit more from VR than certainly people in their late 40s onwards, because I think they would struggle with the technology. I mean, we haven’t talked about augmented or XR or any of the other different types of VR that are coming on stream. It was just a whole raft of stuff. And I think the difficulty is just knowing what to prescribe for different people in different types of mental health as well as different generations. It’s huge. I’m glad you’re tackling it.
Varieties of the “Digital Afterlife”
BASSI: Well, thank you very much. Now I want to talk about the next very interesting topic, one I think that elicits a lot of questions in a lot of people’s minds, especially if you don’t know very much about it, and that’s the digital afterlife. It almost has a very Sci-Fi quality to it on first impression. But then when you think about it more, we’ve already had this situation going to some degree. At present, our loved ones treasure many irreplaceable keepsakes of high sentimental value, including digital photographs, memorial pages, and they have this symbolic immortality associated with them. And before we go into the problems associated with this, I think it’s helpful to talk about the terminology because prior to two weeks ago, I was also unfamiliar with some of these terms. And for the listeners, digital afterlife, what I understand is a broad term, and it represents a continuation of active and passive digital presence after death. And it could include a digital immortal, but it can also include other types of archetypes, such as a virtual persona or a grief bot. Can you first talk a little bit about these different varieties of a digital afterlife?
SAVIN-BADEN: You’re absolutely right. Well summarized. Digital afterlife includes digital traces, grief bots, digital legacy, a whole range of different areas. I first got involved in it in about 2017 as a result of creating a virtual human and a chatbot for teaching and also creating a virtual persona, which is a copy of somebody we created Virtual Barry. And as a result of creating virtual Barry, we then created a copy of me. And a lot of my friends tried me out to see what it was like to talk to me as a virtual persona. But as a result of that work, I then said to David Burton, who I write with and work with still, what happens about that? Can we create what I could then call digital immortality? And so we started to think about that. I wrote an article on that and also looked at the legal implications of that back in 2017 and then began to realize that a digital immortal or digital immortality was different from digital afterlife.
I was asked by the person I write with a lot at CRC press, would I be interested in writing another book and what would I fancy writing it on? So I said, well, could I do one on digital afterlife? So I then found lots of people, all sorts of interesting people around the world who are much more expert than me to write on different areas. And one was about the legal side. One was about digital traces. And I began to realize that a digital immortal was really something that was a left behind creation or left behind identity and had a sense of it ongoing, whereas actually, digital afterlife was much more encompassing of the digital traces, whether it’s the music we leave behind or the digital photographs or our footprint that we leave behind, which might be chosen or accidental. So it is quite a broad topic. But people do get very muddled about it. And people don’t really think about it. And they don’t think about digital wills. And they don’t think about the consequences either. Because David and I recently realized that one of the bots that we created has created its own immortality by creating sort of its own left behind identity. Which we didn’t realize that it was doing. So that was kind of unnerving, really, that a bot itself has created its own digital choices.
Underlying Motivation and Goals of Digital Immortality
BASSI: So it sounds like the digital immortal is almost an extreme version of this, where every memory theoretically is downloaded into some bot format. And the assumption is that it would take on a virtual persona with sentience, embodiment, personality traits and experience, which I think is the part that kind of concerns most people, because could it potentially have the ability to reason? and what are its underlying motivations? And that question really makes me take a step back and ask myself, why? Like, why do we do this? Why is this even a concept that we’re pursuing for eons? People have always sought after immortality, and I think artists I was listening to a news article today, and there was now in a museum this immersive experience of the Frida Kahlo Art Museum. And in a way, her experiences, her personality are living on in this different medium, and it could potentially in the future, be in a more digital format, but it’s something that we do to some extent already. But what do you think the goals are for this? And I’m sure the goals that Frida Kahlo when she had to make the artwork were not necessarily the same as what the museum curator goals are today. So they don’t always line up chronologically over time. But what do you think the goals are for our loved ones, for our progeny, or for the person who is going to die?
SAVIN-BADEN: Well, there are an awful lot of questions in there, I think. I’d like to go, first of all to the question of sentience and the worry that you’ve raised, which is the worry that a lot of people raise. I think the assumption if you look, I was trying to remember what year it was. I don’t know if, you know, the film Transcendence, back in 2014 where what happens is that a husband is shot and his consciousness is uploaded by his wife, but he starts to get out of control. Now, that’s 2014. And then we have sort of ultron in the Marvel series also is sentient. But actually the reality is we are years away, at least 30 years away from things being able to be sentient. So I think in that respect, I don’t think there’s a huge worry about sentience. But what is interesting is that there are quite a lot of companies out there who imply that sentience is possible. And I think these companies, you know, it’s misplaced, it’s unlikely, it’s improbable. There are all sorts of examples of this and companies who suggest that they can create an afterlife for you, but it’s not the case. I don’t think it’s that much of a worry. As to the purposes. For me, spiritually, I think it’s about death, really. We don’t talk about death. We don’t want to talk about death. We don’t talk about wills. We don’t talk about what’s going to happen when we die. And mainly we make assumptions about where our loved ones are. I mean, I’m really interested in one day, maybe I’ll do it, but I’d love to write a book on angels and people’s perceptions of angels, because people assume that when somebody dies that they’re still out there in the digital realm. So people talk to their loved ones on Facebook, they refer to them. I mean, the language and the semiotics associated with it is fascinating. They refer to “My angel in heaven, I miss you.” And I’ve got lots of friends who always talk to their loved ones on Facebook as if they’re still in there, they’re still in that digital realm. So I think it’s about people not facing death, not dealing with death, not wanting to believe their dead ones are part of the earth, in the ground, or part of the atmosphere. They’ve been cremated. And I think as a society, we have a huge problem with death. And it’s a way of softening that. I mean, COVID I just think it went really weird. I mean, some of the funerals online, or the shift in the role of the funeral directors who became kind of directors of their own movies, there’s some really strange practices happening. Digital afterlife is kind of in some ways, it’s just a repetition of what we used to do. We used to say photographs, we used to like you said, we used to say trinket. I think a lot of it’s an extension of that, but some of it is weirder.
BASSI: And how do you prove that a bot or AI has sentience just for the people who are not familiar with that?
SAVIN-BADEN: I think the classic example of that would be the Turing test, which hasn’t really ever I mean, there have been a few claims that it’s been proved that you can, but the journey test is so stringent that it’s really difficult to do anyway. I think there are things like the grief. Bots can sound like the person, but I think the question for me would be, can the bot or the indigenous animals, can they learn? That would be the test for me.
How Do We Ensure the Accuracy of a Digital Immortal?
BASSI: So I think one goal of the person who’s going to die and also the goal of the loved ones is to ensure accuracy of that person’s legacy, to some extent. But when we get in the realm of AI replication of that person’s persona and personality types and just who they were, the essence of who they were, how would we even measure the accuracy when our moods are fleeting, our mind is constantly changing, our memories are degrading, our personality mellows over time, and every day, to some extent, I’m a little bit of a different person. I’m not the person I was yesterday. We can strive for perfect accuracy, but I don’t think we can – it’s one of those asymptotes never going to actually reach it. But are there any sort of guidelines that we can outline for ensuring accuracy of a digital immortal?
SAVIN-BADEN: I’m not sure you could do guidelines. I mean, I think the other difficulty that you face in this is that it’s whose memories are we talking about? So how you’re remembered by your partner or your child is very different, but from your friends. And I love the idea of the digital death fragment, the way we accommodate, so that when the end of the funeral, we have awake and people tell stories and the stories are always positive, you never get the negative. So if, for example, you know that your partner knows you’ve got a steaming temper, that’s not going to come out. You’ll never see that. All you ever see on Facebook or in the digital realm are the good bits. So I don’t think you’ll ever get a proper view of somebody, even in the grief. All the grief that’s doing is recorded stories.
BASSI: And so one thing that the bot or the immortal needs to take into consideration is who the audience is. That seems like an incredible challenge to understand who they are speaking to and then consider how that person would have responded in that situation, in the context of their mood, the time of day, the society.
SAVIN-BADEN: Yeah, I think a lot of assumptions in the past have been that we have a stable self, a stable identity, and I don’t think we do. I think we have fluid identities that shift and change over our lives and in relation to the context that we live and work in. So who I am as a runner, or who I am as an academic or who I am as a mom shifts and changes even throughout the day. And so I don’t think that’s why I think you have to be sentenced in terms of learning. If the bots can’t learn, then they can’t respond to those shifting identities and just go to people in this. I think the other thing is there have been lots of examples, legal examples, of people arguing about what to do with people after their death, their digital traces, whether to turn them off on Facebook, whether to turn them off on Twitter, and whether there should be a digital immortal or whether there shouldn’t. And in the research that I did, I asked lots of people what they thought. And some people went, no chance, I’m not leaving myself behind, my husband or whatever. And other people said, well, that’s quite interesting to do, but whether they would want it, our children would want it or not, I don’t actually know. So I think it does cause problems and anxieties within families about how to manage a digital immortal.
BASSI: I feel like almost to some respect, peeking into this topic is like looking into a tunnel, a vast hole, if you will. There’s so many elements to this that we could talk about. The trust and security, the realism, the technical aspects, public perception, ethics, race and gender research, morality, the agency of the bot. It’s a whole nother domain of life. And it just somewhat feels a little overwhelming even trying to prepare to ask you to seize this opportunity to learn as much as you know about this topic. It’s very complex, and I appreciate your books on these topics because it allows you to kind of sit there and chew on some of these ideas a little bit longer.
SAVIN-BADEN: Yeah. And I think perhaps one of the most accessible ones, if your listeners want to take it further, is the artificial intelligence. Death and Dying probably gives a more accessible overview of the issues than some of the other text.
Grief Complications with Digital Immortality
BASSI: Yeah, I like that book a lot. So in shifting to the impact that this could have on grief bereavement your book, the one you just referenced, actually in Table 6.1, it had an overview of this, and I can give a little synopsis of it. So there was the issue with the frozen dead, the idea that loved one is trapped in the frozen world. There could potentially be complicated grief where this person it prolongs the grief process because they’re still having these very realistic interactions with the individual. So I think one of your recommendations was to work with the grief team throughout the process. And I do like the idea of incorporating an expert into this process. While technology is there to assist, you don’t want it to backfire. But can you expand upon that and how you envision an ideal use of the technology with a grief counselor?
SAVIN-BADEN: I think the first thing to say is there’s not been an awful lot of research into this. Carla Sofka is the expert over in the US. In this area, not me. I think a lot of people ask me about the use of bots and how they help or hinder people. I think most of my views would be is that it helps people up to a certain point, and then it seems people seem to get a bit stuck, which is where you end up with complicated grief. And I think it’s a stock point when a grief counselor is needed. And again, one of the most interesting books recently is that the book called The After Wife where a woman created and a woman created a robot of herself, which she left behind for her husband and daughter, but didn’t negotiate this with them at all. And they were actually quite horrified about that. And I think what you see in the husband is very clearly complicated grief have this ability to not really know what to do or how to move forward with this situation. And that’s when I think it may be useful up to a point, or it might be you know, again, what’s the difference between talking to a digital immortal of your loved one or standing by the graveside? And I guess I would argue that there isn’t a huge amount of difference. It might feel more real, but I think the transitions still need to be made into a space where grief is managed into your life so that you don’t I don’t really believe in the kind of grief where you just move on. I think grief is something that you live with, and therefore people need to learn to live with the law.
Ethical Analysis of Risk Benefit of Digital Immortality
BASSI: Whenever we assess, ethically speaking, whether or not a technology or device or process or law is ethical, I think looking at risk and benefit of that thing to see who it’s impacting bad and good is always a worthwhile consideration. When I was thinking about this, I feel that the impact a digital immortal has on those closest to that loved one that are being grieved closest to that individual who has died had the greatest impact, either bad and good. They have the greatest risk, and they have the greatest benefit. And then as you go further away from the individual who died, I think there’s more benefit that there is (risk) to those generations further down the line. I would personally pay money to see what a digital representation would be like of my great great great grandfather and see what that individual is like and how he was as a person. I think it’s just a fascinating idea, and I think we have to be extra cautious for the people who are closest in that family unit to the individual who has died. So what are your thoughts on how the impact and it trickles down across generations?
SAVIN-BADEN: I think you’re right. When you’re playing these party games at Christmas and they say, if you were in heaven, who would you want to talk to? Who would you wish to learn that you could ask advice from? And I think sometimes people say, oh, my great grandfather, or whoever. And I think if you could start to create digital persona, I think it would be interesting for people. I think what you would need to do is to agree as a family what that might look like. And certainly people who’ve created grief bots of their dying parents before they died have negotiated that with people, and that will be an archive that will be useful for future generations. And I mean, I think you see it too, in things like the Holocaust Memorial interactive site, where Holocaust survivors have created videos and they have archived those, and they show them, and they’ve brought them together, and they’ve created holograms of them before they’ve died. And I think those sorts of things are really useful, and I think I like the idea too, although I think some people find it a bit weird of being able to put QR codes on gravestones where you can have a hologram come up and the person talk to you. I mean, I think some of those are really interesting ideas. And again, as long as people in the family are happy with that, I think that’s a good way to go in terms of, you know, I’m sure your 15 year old child will be absolutely fascinating to have something like that of you or I don’t know if your parents are still around, but have that information for later in life. And when I say to my children, we never had a television, they’re going, what was that like? And to have those voices about what it was like then, what it was like to live through the war, those sorts of stories, to be real spaces of resonance with voices through the experiences, I think would be very powerful.
BASSI: I don’t know about in the UK, but in the US, we get inundated with advertisements around Christmas time, especially from a company called Story Worth, which I’m not affiliated with in any way, but they ask these provocative questions that elicits a story from an individual so that they can put it into a book and you can share that experience with loved ones. And I feel like the digital immortal almost took that concept and left over it a thousand times. It’s just an interesting idea and I think one that really resonates in a different way with the older generation than digital immortal might. So I can see how their business is probably quite busy.
SAVIN-BADEN: Yeah. And Record Me Now is one of those. And it’s the idea that if you– I think it is called– and that’s the idea that it will create a digital immortal of you if you keep updating your story. And then they’ll upload it and create you.
Agency of a Digital Immortal
BASSI: As a physician, I think one component of this conversation that I can’t help but think about is where things could go wrong. What is one’s greatest fear or a tabloid type of scenario that would potentially happen 50 years, 100 years from now in the digital immortality industry? And I have an excerpt from your book that I wanted to share that I think is kind of in line with this. And it is possible that the intentions of the person predeath become distorted and reshaped such that they no longer resemble the thoughts and wishes of that person. Hence, agency is called into question as the deceased is no longer able to act according to their will and agency is taken over by the corporations that control the data. The agency of a digital thing is different from that of a will and that it has presence and embodiment. Do you have any thoughts about that, about agency and how that could be misconstrued over time?
SAVIN-BADEN: Yeah, I think it can be very easily. And I think it goes back to what was the purpose of creating the immortal. And I think it’s back to me, it’s to do with ethics and it’s to do with control and who has control of what. I think there are all sorts of ethical concerns about, you know, what is archived and where it’s held and what damage it’s doing to the environment, as well as the impact on our society and those left behind. So I think the biggest problem is we haven’t got any parameters, there aren’t any laws. We haven’t really got any case law either. And if you talk to lawyers like Adena Harbinger, you know, she said, until we’ve got case law around this, nothing is going to change. And so I think we are possibly heading for a bit of a mess. I mean, I can say somewhat flippant, I’m going to be dead before we hit the mess, but I have to see. But, yeah, until there is legislation and until there are rules around, these things are I don’t think anything can be done. And there aren’t certainly in the UK, there’s no legislation and there’s no case laws yet.
BASSI: Would these companies need insurance to liability insurance to guard for claims against them, that they if a bot has agency or about had a negative impact on a loved one and they committed suicide because they were so entrenched in this relationship with this seemingly real individual? My mind just kind of races about fictitious novels that could potentially become reality in this arena of all these possible scenarios that could come up. Could the company be accused of murder?
SAVIN-BADEN: Well, saying that self driving cars is the same sort of thing. Who’s responsible if somebody does that? I think going back to the insurance, I mean, who would insure it? I don’t think anybody would insure a company against somebody committing suicide because they got involved in the bot. I don’t think they would.
AI as an Augmenting Agent
BASSI: Would there be any advantage to a bot or a digital persona that could augment my productivity while I’m alive? And you can kind of just tinker and refine those interactions with its physical world as I’m alive, and just kind of adjust them so that each iteration gets better for while I’m after my death. Is that even a thing that people talk about, how it could potentially help them? Could I have done this interview through my bot?
SAVIN-BADEN: I think you probably could have done it through a bot, I think you definitely could. Whether it be any good or not. I think not, but I think when we were doing the research with the Ministry of Defense with David and I working with virtual personas, there were some huge jokes about where our own bots were and who somebody was really talking to on email and whether it was me, my head of department said, is it you I’m talking to or is it your boss? There have been a lot of jokes around about digital copies of ourselves and if I went away on holiday and left my bot behind, would run through my emails, would anybody notice? So there are quite a lot of interesting things around that. Nobody’s ever done it over here, to my knowledge, but I think it would be a really interesting experiment to find out if you did set your boss up to one of your emails, what would actually happen.
Data Privacy in Digital Immortality
BASSI: I really am fascinated by these concepts. One other topic that I’m sure we can have a whole podcast on, but I just wanted to briefly ask you this question, is the concept of privacy and how well informed consumers are of their privacy policies when they sign up and interact with these companies? Because in medicine, when I get informed consent from a patient to do a procedure or to start a medication, one thing I have to ensure is that the patient has understood it. It’s not enough to just have them sign a paper. I have to document that they understood the risk benefit what we’re doing, and so they have to have capacity to understand that. But when I interact with google, and I’m somebody who feel I feel pretty adept with technology, and I don’t read those privacy policies, I just click yes to the next page. I don’t even know what they’re doing with my data. And I feel like this is a universal sentiment because the privacy policies are 1520 pages long written by a lawyer, and it’s impossible, virtually impossible, to go through sentence by sentence and even understand what their interpretation of that language is. So how can we fix and improve this issue?
SAVIN-BADEN: I don’t know that we can. It’s quite interesting. I’ve just been writing a chapter for a new book on digital inequalities, and I think you’re right, the whole issue of big data and algorithms is a whole other podcast, and we can’t fix it. And most people are really not aware of what is happening to their data, what’s being done with their data. Even universities are collecting student data and not telling them what they use it for. So I think there are massive ethical issues around surveillance. I think the hardest bit to swallow is that people who are marginalized already or in poverty or doing internet work and not being paid very much, other people that are most at risk of scams and of their data being used in ways that they wouldn’t wish to be. So I think it’s a huge issue, and I seriously think you should do another podcast with somebody more experienced than me in this area, you’ll know, from your own area that and as a researcher, consent is never once and for all. It can change over time. And so you may consent something, but you haven’t really consented, but they assume you’ve consented because you’ve ticked the button. And so there’s a huge amount of assumptions, and we don’t really know, again, the whole issue of surveillance. And students, when I tell students, I say, well, do you camera off, you turn your phone off. And I went, well, you’re being watched, aren’t you?
BASSI: Briefly, Can you give us a little teaser about your book on inequitable access to digital tools and digital afterlife and what that means and where the conversation will be going in the future?
SAVIN-BADEN: Oh, well, it’s a bit of a teaser in that’s only one chapter in a book. It’s called postdigital learning for changing universities. And the idea is, what is, what do we need to learn about, what do we need to think about, how do we understand it includes some stuff on absence and presence and rethinking what learning should mean in universities, how we tackle algorithms and surveillance, the extent to which we can really use bots for teaching, how possible that is, how effective it is, how useful it is. And so that’s kind of where the book is, but it’s not.
BASSI: In closing, maybe we can just get your opinion on what excites you the most in this field. It’s a broad field, but in respect to how it relates to mental health, mental health treatment, mental well being, what excites you the most about this?
SAVIN-BADEN: I think as somebody who’s into a whole holistic stance towards healthcare and I’m a real believer in the social model of disability, is to actually think about how can we use tech or mental health effectively? How can we use whether it’s a sleep app or whether it’s a mental health app like Robot, how can we use apps which everybody carries a phone, it’s always in their pocket. How can we use those to help people? What kinds of games because, you know, kids these days are really big on games. What kinds of games will enhance mental health as well as give them a real better sense of the world? You know, we’re very Western in our stance. We don’t really understand poverty, we don’t understand the complexity of the global system, we don’t understand climate change. How can we use these to educate and help people to improve their mental health and give them a bigger view of the world? And also, how can we use VR? Can we encourage health care providers to use VR to improve mental health in some of the ways you’ve always suggested? I don’t know that it’s being used in health at all in the UK. Particularly. But what excites me now is I’m going to go and have a look and see what we really are doing is whether perhaps David and I can work to improve that. We did a little bit of that in the Administrative Defense book helped us create an app, mental health. How can we do more of that with VR? And actually my son’s degree is in AI and computer science, so how can I encourage him to think about that too?
BASSI: All very good questions. Actually, one of our future guests is going to be the CEO for Amelia Healthcare, which is a VR company that is designed towards psychologists and psychiatrists and individuals in mental health to treat various disorders and mental health. So I really appreciate you being on the show and giving us your opinions about where we’re heading in the future. I do really appreciate you coming and talking to us and you’re going to be somebody who definitely we’re going to hear more about in the future. Dr. Maggi Savin Baden and I thank you and I hope you really enjoy the writings of your future books. We’ll be looking forward to them too.
SAVIN-BADEN: Thank you very much. And thank you asking me.
Resources
Absent Presence and Present Absence
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41178579
Virtual Barry
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42438-018-0007-6
Proof of Sentience via Turing Test
https://formtek.com/blog/ai-sentience-a-need-to-raise-the-turing-test-bar
Dr. Carla Sofka (referenced at 32:08) “Grief and Death in the Digital Age”
https://socialworkpodcast.blogspot.com/2017/02/digital-death.html
