Discussing human values in digital immortality: towards a value-oriented perspective

Intense social media interaction, wearable devices, mobile applications, and pervasive use of sensors have created a personal information ecosystem for gathering traces of individual behavior. These traces are the digital legacy individuals build all through their lives. Advances in artificial intelligence have fed our dream to build artificial agents trained with these digital traces to behave similarly to a deceased person, and individuals are facing the possibility of immortalizing their ideas, reasoning and behavior. Are people prepared for that? Are people willing to do that? How do people perceive the possibility of letting digital avatars take care of their digital legacy? This paper sheds light on these questions by discussing users’ perceptions towards digital immortality in a focus group analysis with 8 participants. Our findings suggest some key human values must be addressed. These findings can serve as preliminary thoughts to inform system design, from the very early stage of development, that preserve the digital legacy while respecting the human needs and values concerning the delicate emotional moment that death provides. This qualitative research analyzes the data, and based on the insights learned, proposes important considerations for future developments in this area.