Will Our Digital Selves Have Human Rights?
In 2014, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case delivered a TED Talk titled “We are all cyborgs now.” It was brilliantly stated and true. You can watch the 7 minute video here. When I post this article on Medium, a whole conversation may happen about it and I will be off eating my lunch. I may check in later and read comments. I will not have been present for the discussion, but in a way, my “self” was out there. It is the same for anyone who posts anything online from a tweet to a Instagram post. This is the early days of our digital selves. What happens in the future when we may well have a digital twin that can do all kinds of things, from buying products to talking to other people?
The technologies to engage in the digital world we are slowly building are fairly crude right now. From Virtual Reality (VR) headsets and Augmented Reality (AR) glasses and perhaps, contact lenses, smartphones, tablets and PCs. We are still evolving voice command systems and gesture recognition. Then there’s Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) and the ability to well, get in each others heads.
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) we may well soon be able to build a digital twin of ourselves. We could, conceivably, reach a point where “they” become so representative of our real-world selves that our digital twin becomes able to do things in the digital world that we can do in the real world.
This gets very philosophical very fast. There are questions we will need to resolve. Say for instance, a digital twin steals some cryptocurrency from another persons digital twin. Who gets charged? Our real-world self or the digital twin and how exactly, do you punish them? In a democracy, does a digital twin get to vote? Is a digital twin sentient even? Would they, in a functioning society, have human rights?
There’s also the issue of who actually owns a digital twin? If such a technology becomes real, it is likely because a company sees an economic opportunity. Thus a company would own the intellectual property, perhaps patented too. That would suggest that the digital twin is therefore owned by a third-party and not ones real world self. When legal issues occur, who actually has the ownership rights?
Will the technologies we use to create and manage digital twins and the companies that host that digital twin have to be guaranteed that they can’t be shutdown? What is the economic model that keeps them, well alive and functioning? Would a digital twin have a “job”, such as their processing power could be used collectively to solve computational problems? If so, does our real-life person get some of or all of that compensation for the work performed?
What about privacy and how the data we and our digital selves generate? We are already struggling with this issue today in the Surveillance Economy. What happens to our digital twin when our real world self dies? Or if our real world self loses our cognitive abilities to diseases like Alzheimers?
We may never end up creating such digital twins. Not fully anyway. Not a copy of ourselves in the full sense. But we are already projecting ourselves into a digital, or cyber, world. If a true, overarching metaverse, that can easily and cheaply be accessed, is invented, then a digital twin becomes more definable and probable.
Should we ever get to that point, we will have some big questions to ask. Ones that may well be informed by how we solve the problems that exist today with digital technologies and our societies.
While it may seem early to think about these things, it is important that we do. Humans are always imagining their future and how we want to live and function in a society and culture. It’s why we have science-fiction.
