Paula Sweeney

Conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) is used in mental healthcare for prevention, intervention, psychoeducation and support. But a therapeutic relationship is surely one where trust is requ...

In this paper I explore the potential benefits and harms of avatar or chatbot representations of persons who are in palliative care. Much has been written recently about the benefits and harms of ‘continuing bond’ chatbots: representations of those who have died. Depending on one’s view, continuing bond chatbots are either a useful tool that facilitates the bereaved engaging in conversations with a representation of the deceased or they are an unhealthy block to the bereaved’s ability to move through the stages of grief. But there are other grief contexts in which the needs of the griever are relevantly different to the needs of a person whose loved one has died. Here I consider palliative cases in which a loved one is significantly psychologically altered such that it is no longer easy to experience them as the ‘same person’. I consider the unique problems facing carers in this scenario and how personal avatars might provide some comfort and help with both the grieving and the ongoing caring prospect. I undertake a philosophical exploration of whether and how the arguments for the use of continuing bond avatars in cases of death carry over into palliative care contexts. Ultimately, I propose that a distinctive case can be made for the use of continuing bond avatars to help the grieving process of carers in some palliative contexts.

An individual human has value partly in virtue of their uniqueness. Personal avatar technology—technology which creates a digital replication of a real person—appears to have the potential to undermine that value. Here I explore if and how avatars might make humans less valuable by undermining the value that a human gains from being unique. Ultimately, I conclude that, while avatars cannot make humans no longer unique, they could significantly undermine the value that we place on human uniqueness. First, I argue that a qualitative model of uniqueness cannot account for the unique value that a person has. This leads to the significant and surprising claim that necessarily unique properties of humans cannot accommodate the value arising from human uniqueness: humans have unique value in virtue of being contingently irreplaceable. I explore how the use of personal avatars might undermine or even destroy that value. Finally, I consider further applications of the theory of unique human value, including how it might explain and accommodate our attachment to personal avatars themselves.

When arguing for rights for robots, many theorists draw analogies between robots, on the one hand, and humans and other animals, on the other. They use these analogies to support the extension of rights beyond humans and other animals to robots. In this paper I argue that, even if we are initially inclined to see existing analogies between robots and humans and other animals as reasons for granting robots moral consideration, there are two rarely noted significant features that threaten to disrupt these analogies: uniqueness and completeness. I argue that those potential disrupters have a negative impact on many arguments from analogy regarding robot rights.

Danaher and Nyholm (Philosophy & Technology 37:106, 2024) explore whether avatar technology makes humans less valuable by making them less scarce. They identify two forms of human scarcity, intrinstic scarcity and instrumental scarcity, and explore how each is impacted by avatar representation. Here I argue that avatars cannot make humans less scarce but that, nevertheless, the use of avatar technology can undermine the value of human uniqueness.

In the future, it is likely that we will form strong bonds of attachment and even develop love for social robots. Some of these loving relations will be, from the human’s perspective, as significant as a loving relationship that they might have had with another human. This means that, from the perspective of the loving human, the mindless destruction of their robot partner could be as devastating as the murder of another’s human partner. Yet, the loving partner of a robot has no recourse to legal action beyond the destruction of property and can see no way to prevent future people suffering the same devastating loss. On this basis, some have argued that such a scenario must surely motivate legal protection for social robots. In this paper, I argue that despite the devastating loss that would come from the destruction of one’s robot partner, love cannot itself be a reason for granting robot rights. However, although I argue against beloved robots having protective rights, I argue that the loss of a robot partner must be socially recognised as a form of bereavement if further secondary harms are to be avoided, and that, if certain conditions obtain, the destruction of a beloved robot could be criminalised as a hate crime.

Avatars will represent us online, in virtual worlds, and in technologically supported hybrid environments. We and our avatars will stand not in an identity relation but in a proxy relation, an arrangement that is significant not least because our proxies’ actions can be counted as our own. However, this proxy relation between humans and avatars is not well understood and its consequences under-explored. In this paper I explore the relation and its potential ethical consequences.