Join the Centre for Death and Society and the Bath Institute for the Augmented Human for a joint seminar with Visiting Professor Johanna Sumiala and colleagues from the Departments of Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Social and Policy Sciences to discuss the implications of Artificial Intelligence and technology on the end of life and what it means to be dead.

Suitable for interested staff and UG and PG students, this one-hour talk will explore how AI, and technology more broadly, is transforming the possibilities of communication at the end of life and the extent to which AI is radically shifting how we understand what it means to be dead. After all, if an autonomous ‘you’ can now continue online, and the dead can be brought back to ‘life’ to contribute to the world of the living, will we now never die?

The talk is in person and free, and features:

Professor Johanna Sumiala, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University of Helsinki; Visiting Professor at LSE and the University of Bath. Johanna leads EU CHANSE funded research consortium on Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife (DiDe, 2022-2025) including PIs in the UK, Denmark and Romania. Her current research interests include digital anthropology of the social lives of deathbots, study of communications between the living and the AI death as well as researching ideas of digital immortality and post mortal society.

Dr Ben Metcalfe, Deputy Director of the Bath Institute for the Augmented Human. Ben has developed technology that enables people with motor neurone disease to communicate care and end of life decisions, and he is interested in how neurotechnology and AI can be combined to further enable both communication and movement in people with neurological disabilities.

Professor Emma Carmel, Professor of Governance and Public Policy and Associate Dean for Research in HSS. Emma leads on AI and Public Policy for the CDT on Accountable, Responsible and Transparent AI (ART-AI). Prof Carmel is a political sociologist currently researching the development of digital and AI technologies and the role of the state. Her most recent book (with Regine Paul and Jennifer Cobbe) is Public Policy and Artificial Intelligence (Edward Elgar).

This event will be recorded and made available online after the event. In the talk we will be launching the new CDAS edited collection ‘Death and Institutions: processes, places and the past’, in which Professor Sumiala has a chapter with Linda Pentikäinen on Instagram and ‘deathstyle gurus’. You can hear about the new collection on a special episode of The Death Studies Podcast.

How AI is changing dying and what it means to be dead