Scenario planning: Death, dying, and afterlife in the age of AI

Project Background
scenario planning

 

Scenario planning: Death, dying, and afterlife in the age of AI

 

A collaboration between Medical Humanities and Uehiro Oxford Institute

Led and facilitated by Matthew Finch (Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, Oxford)

 

Emerging capabilities in artificial intelligence create the possibility of new relationships between the living and the dead. After physical decease, what digital entities might live on in our stead? What agency will they have? How will the underlying technologies be developed, deployed, and managed? How will identity be authenticated? What will be the impact on how individuals, families, communities, and societies approach the end of life, its associated rituals, and the ways in which we remember those who are gone?

This project uses the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach to explore different future contexts for the relationship between AI and the afterlife, encompassing all aspects of memorial culture, funerary practices, and posthumous existence in the digital world.

Anchored in the work of the Uehiro Institute, the project will develop a set of plausible, contrasting descriptions of the future context for medical humanities research into “AI and the afterlife”, challenging current assumptions and exploring alternative possibilities.

 

Medical Humanities Research Hub, TORCH Research Hubs

 

Team

Matthew Finch (Saïd Business School, University of Oxford)

Alberto Giubilini (Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford)

Cristina Voinea (Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford)

Halina Suwalowska (Ethox Centre, University of Oxford)

Charlotte Dewarumez (History of Art, Université Toulouse-II-Jean-Jaurès)

Eleanor Kerfoot (Faculty of History, University of Oxford)