Summary AI-generated
- TL;DR
- This chapter explores the challenges and promises associated with the creation of digital minds, focusing on the future possibility of digital persons possessing personhood rights and duties.
- Problem
- Current legal frameworks offer no obvious solutions to the questions raised by digital minds, and emerging virtual reality technologies will enable lifestyles and possibilities that are difficult to fathom with present-day knowledge.
- Method
- The chapter presents and discusses the non-obvious possibilities and implications stemming from the future creation of digital minds.
- Results
- Not specified in the abstract.
- Contributions
- Not specified in the abstract.
- Limitations
- Not specified in the abstract.
- Takeaways
- The creation of digital minds introduces profound legal, existential, and technological questions—such as eternal life, time-travel, and unlimited duplication—that society will need to address in the coming decades.
- Applications
- Not specified in the abstract.
- Topics
- Digital minds, personhood rights, virtual reality, legal frameworks
- For industry
- Not specified in the abstract.
- Why it matters
- Not specified in the abstract.
Abstract
Some of the challenges and promises that would stem from the creation of digital minds are presented and discussed. In particular, this chapter addresses the possibility that, in the future, there may exist digital persons, digital minds that have personhood rights and duties. The non-obvious possibilities raised by the creation of digital minds are discussed in some detail, including the possibility of time-travel, eternal life, and unlimited duplication. Many of the questions raised by the existence of digital minds have no obvious solution in our current legal framework, and will need to be addressed in the coming decades. Digital minds may decide to live entirely in virtual reality, using technologies that are now under development. That would raise possibilities that are hard to phantom, given our present day knowledge.