October 11-12, Leiden University, Netherlands
Information updated 4 October
Event co-sponsored by the IAPDD, Leiden University, and the Australian Research Council project “Digital Death and Immortality”
THEME
A legacy of today’s digitally driven world is the increasing number of ‘digital remains’ a person leaves behind after they die, such as audio and image files, social media accounts and emails. How to deal with these digital remains has become an increasingly significant and costly problem for individuals, families, organisations, tech companies, and governments. Existing legal approaches focus on treating digital remains as a form of property, but they do not fully capture the sensitivities and significance of digital remains in people’s lives. Additionally, a property-only approach cannot address the dangers of ‘digital reanimation’ – emerging artificial intelligence technologies that re-use digital remains to ‘revive’ the dead, making it possible to interact with them. This offers new ways of commemorating the dead and for managing grief. Yet these technologies also threaten to exploit the dead and to change our relationship to them in troubling ways. From posthumous chatbots to CGI performances from dead actors, they create ethical dilemmas for dealing with digital souls. Clearly, more work is necessary on the ethical use of these technologies and the best policies for regulating the reuse of digital remains. This workshop/conference will consider what sort of ethical significance digital remains have, and determine how they should be preserved, reused or disposed of.
TRAVEL AND ACCOMMODATIONS
This event will be held at Leiden University’s campus in The Hague (15 minutes by train from Leiden and 30 minutes by train from Schiphol Airport). The venue is right next to Den Haag Centraal train station, so transportation in and out is quite convenient.
There is no registration fee.
Each non-keynote session will last 55 minutes (with a 5 minute break in between), so each presenter will have 35-40 minutes for their presentation, followed by 15-20 minutes for Q & A. There will be a computer in the room with connections for laptops and flash drives, but for anyone who prefers to travel light, slides and/or handouts can be sent to Adam Buben (adambuben1@gmail.com) around October 10th.
As for accommodation, we highly recommend Babylon Hotel Den Haag (https://www.babylonhoteldenhaag.com/en/), conveniently located next to the train station and across the square from our venue.
Other decent options (in terms of price, quality, and location) include:
Staybridge Suites The Hague – Parliament
Holiday Inn Express The Hague – Parliament
SCHEDULE
Friday 11th October (Leiden University College, Auditorium. Anna van Buerenplein 301, 2595 DG The Hague, The Netherlands)
15:30-16:25 Elad Magomedov, “The Dead and Simulacra of the Living”
16:30-17:25 Adam Buben, “Beyond Grief: The Raison D’etre of Interactive Personality Constructs of the Dead”
17:30-18:45 Patrick Stokes, “It’s What They Would Have Wanted’: Personhood, Agency, and Executor Bots”
Saturday 12th October (Leiden University College, room 3.16. Anna van Buerenplein 301, 2595 DG The Hague, The Netherlands)
10:30-11:25 Khadiza Laskor, “Governance in the Digital Afterlife”
11:30-12:25 Patricia Zivkovic, “Ethical and Legal Discourse on the Posthumous Embodiment of Biometric Information”
Lunch
13:45-14:55 Michael Cholbi, “Griefbots, Memory, and Death Denial”
15:00-15:55 Edina Harbinja, “Key Legal Aspects of Digital Immortality”
16:00-16:55 Carl Öhman, “The Afterlife of Data: How the Internet Lunges Us Into a Postmortal Condition”
17:00-17:55 Riccardo Valenti, “Res Digitalis”
