Imaginaries of Immortality in the Age of AI:
an Intercultural Analysis
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Coping with, avoiding, or transcending death is one of the defining features of all human life and any form of social and cultural organisation. In the 21st century, AI significantly impacts these complex practices, introducing a range of new strategies for achieving immortality.
From posthumous avatars to thanabots, deadbots, and griefbots, AI-driven technology is involved in mediating death—one of the most personal, intimate, and, so far, inevitable experiences in the lives of every individual. Understanding these changes, shaping them, and responding wisely to them requires a new interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue.
However, this dialogue is currently dominated by US-based tech companies and Anglophone culture. To state it clearly, the most urgent issue around AI, death, and immortality today is to address how the data of the deceased are used and will be used in the future.
Imaginaries of Immortality in the Age of AI: an Intercultural Analysis seeks to challenge the idea of a universal ‘we’, positing that cultural factors play a critical role in determining the meaning of AI for our relationship to mortality.
THE OBJECTIVE
The project seeks to answer two crucial questions:
How do people from three Eastern countries perceive dominant Anglophone digital immortality projects, and to what extent do these projects reflect their interests and concerns?
What are the alternative ways of conceptualising digital immortality in the age of AI that arise from different cultural backgrounds?
WHEN AND WHERE?
To achieve the project’s objectives, three intercultural research workshops and focus groups with experts and non-experts will be held in Poland (November 2024), India (February 2025), and China (April 2025). The geographical scope of the research was based on the criterion of contrast, for it is vital to trigger intercultural conversations beyond Western countries.
EXPERTS WORKSHOP
Immortological Imagination: Traditions and Futures
FOCUS GROUPS
(Im)mortality over Dinner
EXPERTS WORKSHOP
Immortological Imagination: Traditions and Futures
These workshops will examine local representations (or lack thereof) of digital immortality and their relations with local immortality-related traditions. To this end, ten local experts—including academics, artists, palliative care professionals, and entrepreneurs from each country who work at the intersection of death, immortality, and technology—will present their culture’s perspectives on death and immortality in the age of AI, addressing predefined questions. Participants will also be encouraged to collaborate on envisioning desirable futures for AI-driven technologies in the context of death and immortality using speculative design techniques.
FOCUS GROUPS
(Im)mortality over Dinner
The project seeks to gather insights from non-experts to complement the expert perspectives on the meaning of AI, death and immortality. For this purpose, three focus groups with approximately ten participants will be held to delve into their views on the dominant digital immortality narrative. These focus groups will draw inspiration from Michael Hebb’s well-established concept ‘Death Over Dinner’, where people come together in a relaxed and inclusive setting to discuss the often-taboo topic of death. Hebb’s initiative aims to create an open space for meaningful conversations, encouraging individuals to share their fears and hopes surrounding mortality. The concept of (Im)mortality over Dinner extends this notion; it not only fosters discussions about our mortality but also raises pressing questions of digital immortality within the realm of AI. Thus, the objective is to move beyond traditional scholarly presentations and facilitate a deeper understanding of the significance of death and immortality in the age of AI.
The material collected during experts’ presentations will be analysed to understand culturally specific perspectives on the meaning of AI concerning death and immortality and the concerns and interests related to using immortality-related technologies in each selected country. This analysis will be complemented by the findings from focus groups, which will be transcribed and thematically coded, focusing on ‘meaning’, ‘concerns’, and ‘interests’. Both sets of empirical data will be compared, and a comprehensive description will be provided. The result will be a collection of micro-narratives exploring the meaning of AI in a death-related context, contributing to a diverse framework for the fast-growing digital immortality field.
An integral part of the research agenda will be also the screening of the documentary film ’Eternal You’, directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck (Dogwoof, 2024).
„Eternal You” examines the story of people who live on as digital replicants in the pockets of their loved ones. With the help of artificial intelligence and Big Data, a dream comes true that is as old as mankind itself: eternal life. It’s probably the biggest business idea of the digital age. Following tech start-ups which use a wealth of data to develop “digital doppelgangers,” which promise to immortalize people on earth. The film raises a number of questions, such as: Can a digital entity compensate for the loss of a loved one? How will human memory be affected? And do we not have the right to forget?
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Katarzyna Nowaczyk - Basińska
Principal Investigator
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Stephen Cave
Experts Workshop Moderator
Stephen Cave is Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Co-Director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity, both at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on philosophy and ethics of technology, particularly AI, robotics and life-extension. He is the author of Immortality (Crown, 2012), a New Scientist book of the year, and Should You Choose To Live Forever: A Debate (with John Martin Fischer, Routledge, 2023); and co-editor of AI Narratives (OUP, 2020), Feminist AI (OUP, 2023) and Imagining AI (OUP, 2023). He writes widely about philosophy, technology and society, including for the Guardian and Atlantic. He also advises governments around the world, and has served as a British diplomat.
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Tomasz Hollanek
Experts Workshop Moderator
Tomasz Hollanek is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, working at the intersection of AI ethics and critical design.
His ongoing research explores the possibility of applying critical design methods – prioritising the goals of social justice and environmental sustainability – in the governance, development, and deployment of AI systems. This includes work on the ethics of human-AI interaction design (in particular, the design of companion chatbots and griefbots) and the In-depth EU AI Act Toolkit, helping developers translate the requirements of the European Union’s AI Act into design practice. At LCFI, he also leads the research stream dedicated to AI, Journalism, and Communications.
Previously, Tomasz was a Vice-Chancellor’s PhD Scholar at Cambridge and a Visiting Research Fellow at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has contributed to numerous research projects, including the Global AI Narratives Project at LCFI and the Ethics of Digitalization research program at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
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Saide Mobayed Vega
Research Assistant
Saide Mobayed Vega will contribute to the ‘Imaginaries of Immortality in the Age of AI: An Intercultural Analysis’ project at the CFI. She is a sociologist focusing on STS, digital sociology, critical data studies, human rights, and gender-based violence. Saide is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, where she investigates how feminicide—the gender-related killing of women and girls—becomes translated into numerical data from global data sets to local data stories.
Saide has extensive experience in academic, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural work. She has co-organised numerous international conferences and workshops, including the Big Data & Society 2023 Colloquium: ‘Data Practices and Digital Social Worlds’ and the ‘Crossing Data: Building Bridges with Activist and Academic Practices from and for Latin America’ for CHI in 2022. Saide co-edited The Routledge International Handbook on Femicide and Feminicide, a collection of 50 chapters that offers an in-depth global examination of femicide and feminicide from various perspectives and disciplines.
Saide has been actively involved in public engagement. In 2017, she co-founded the ongoing ‘Femi(ni)cide Watch Platform’, with the UN Studies Association. From 2021-2022, she served as president of the Cambridge University Mexican Society. Before Cambridge, Saide collaborated with international and non-governmental organisations on human rights and gender-based violence projects, including UNODC and ARTICLE19.
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Anja Franczak
Focus Groups Moderator
Educator in the field of dying, death and grief. Founder of the Institute of the Good Death, an innovative and awarded social movement in Poland. Anja supports people in the final stages of life, people grieving the loss of a loved one, and those who work with them in hospitals, hospices and funeral homes. She also is a ritual celebrant, creating and leading personal farewell rituals and funeral ceremonies. Trained in Heidelberg at the Institute for Clinical Pastoral Care (Institut für Klinische Seelsorgeausbildung) as a professional grief counsellor certified by the Federal Association of Bereavement Counselling in Germany (Bundesverband Trauerbegleitung e.V.). As an end-of-life doula and certified instructor of the international initiative Last Aid Courses (Letzte Hilfe), she educates about the dying process and supports families who are caring for a loved one approaching the end of life.
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Tomasz Siuda
Photographer / Artist