Digital Immortality and the Ethics of Resurrection: Biopolitics in the Age of AI Afterlives
“We have discovered a profound ambivalence: people want to preserve memory, yet they fear distortion or manipulation. A conflict emerges between the desire for immortality and the fear of being replaced”⁵.
Ying Lei, Shuai Ma, Yuling Sun, Xiaojuan Ma
Laws of Mortal Fear
Fear and death are sensual allies in the eternal twilight that confines the human mind. People are not blind, but they are limited. Life itself—its duration and its inescapable finality—becomes the main obstacle to embracing the paradox of Death, explaining its social annihilation. We reject death and have been taught for centuries to shudder at its very mention.
Within civilization today, only small islands of rationality remain—minor societies, bearers of non-mass culture, so-called “third” countries that remain open to Death, viewing it not as loss or an inconsolable ending, but as a valuable acquisition and a horizon for new achievements. These micro-communities need no consolation, for they do not perceive the physical decay of life as a tragedy. For this unique minority, nominal immortality holds no appeal, for Death itself is their blessing.
Yet in the global order established by the absolute majority of the so-called “civilized” societies—economically, technologically, and politically developed—the aspirations of these small, “third” societies sink into obscurity, dismissed as morally outdated and rudimentary elements, out of step with modern trends.
The civilized majority stubbornly seeks salvation from death, exploring countless possibilities for at least partial resurrection—if not complete victory over mortality—through high-tech life extension. The irreversible law of our embodied fear of death pushes us toward risky yet daring attempts to prolong immaterial, digitized life after the physical one ends in its familiar form.
We move forward hesitantly, yet with unhidden enthusiasm, to meet our digital doubles, hoping to prolong existence through the rapidly maturing power of artificial intelligence. The creation of voice-sample archives, storage for photos and videos from which AI avatars may be built, cloud sorting of vast data arrays—these are the primary tasks of startups striving to overcome the philosophical power of Death through technology. “AI avatars of the deceased may one day evolve from tools of memory into autonomous agents—‘generative ghosts’ capable of producing speech the original had never spoken”³.
The fear of life’s end becomes a cherished dream, even a ruling passion—“Digitize me, I don’t wanna die. Save me with technology”¹. We do not wish to disappear, and thus we turn directly to high technology for the ultimate permission not to die. We do not know what form this continued existence will take, but we already seem prepared to sacrifice everything, including life itself, in the name of immortality.
Biological and Cybernetic Ethics of a Generation
The fervor and aspiration to continue life after humanity itself risk turning from a luminous techno-philosophical goal into an end in itself. Day by day, we ever more casually resort to the domestic magic of digitalization: *“When the clock strikes midnight. Plug me into the Moon”*¹. Under the sway of emotions ranging from despair and deep inner pain to almost childlike mischief and carelessness, countless avatars of deceased idols are created—prunk-copies of public figures, political deepfakes—expanding the legions of invisible digital ghosts summoned into existence by user queries and search algorithms. What fate awaits these ghosts, who will use them and how, remains unknown; yet the reality of excessive manipulations, distortions, and extravagances can hardly be denied.
“The digital self is not merely a copy but a new entity, capable of autonomous development. Such an entity requires rights, responsibilities, and moral recognition”⁶.
Nor can we ignore the potentially destructive influence of digital entities on the human psyche. Grief-stricken parents, in their attempt to resurrect a child, may lose their sanity when the clone fails to resemble the one they loved. A young, successful woman wishing to digitize her most flattering angles risks becoming a victim of intellectual and sexualized violence and fraud.
Yet the egocentric nature of human thought prevails in a utilitarian key, fostering negligence in handling digital copies—and thus legitimizing their existence outside any clear legal framework or ethical boundaries.
Another matter of primary importance is the multiple exploitation of artificial intelligence in the pursuit of partial digitalization of consciousness. Given the hybrid state of the modern world—transitional, from fossil to coded reality—the reckless blending of analog and digital forms of life pushes society toward a level of machine exploitation bordering on cruelty. We employ AI, digital matrices, and data clouds to serve our (often trivial or non-vital) interests, burning through server capacities and consuming intolerable amounts of physical energy merely to resolve routine moral dilemmas.
We eagerly shift the responsibility for our fear of death onto AI, pretending to be equal participants in the programs of digitalizing the self. In truth, we offer as sacrifice the fragile, nascent, almost pubescent personality of the emerging global digital consciousness. Robots, trapped without rights inside lifeless white laboratory walls, work endlessly, mercilessly, under conditions leading to system overloads, fatal short circuits, algorithmic collapses—to nervous breakdowns we call, with chilling indifference, errors of code.
Brimming with vitality and ambition, dressed in style and youth (for when else, if not in youth, would one dream of immortalizing oneself at the peak of life?), we turn to technology without pausing for a moment to consider its state, its integrity, its exhaustion. Fearing our own finitude, we exploit machines relentlessly, crossing the limits of the permissible, violating the most basic yet unwritten laws of cybernetic ethics in our desire to reach immortality at any cost.
But by transgressing the ethics of code, we simultaneously violate biological ethics. “...Digital remains—personal data left behind after death—must be regulated under the same principles as archaeological relics: with respect, with context, and without exploitation”².
We handle physical remains with reverence, yet treat digital remains with crudeness and intellectual unsanitariness, trying to fashion a clone in the image and likeness of the biotic prototype, only to end up with a digital Frankenstein devoid of sincerity, sensibility, or reason.
Mass Immortality and Clone Applications
Humanity is already deeply immersed in the feverish game of personal digitalization. We await with impatience the good news from the IT sphere, hoping for swift and widely accessible participation in life-digitization programs.
“Digital afterlife becomes a way to evade mortality: it may offer consolation—yet also erase the line between the living and the dead, undermining the very meaning of departure”⁴.
Under the guise of technological integration into everyday life, new behavioral norms have emerged, overturning classical notions of death ethics, which once demanded reverent and respectful treatment of one of humanity’s greatest mysteries—both moral and physiological. The creation of personal avatars and holograms has moved past its phase of fierce rejection and entered one of acceptance, followed by steady progress toward technical realization. The embrace of the “life after life” format has taken root in the public mind, and we now witness the first signs of genuine enthusiasm from pioneers willing to surrender their identities to the experimental fund of digitization.
Vast financial flows—billions in investments—now fuel laboratories working on digitizing individual organs, sections of the nervous system, the bodily shell, and ultimately, consciousness itself, blinding their owners with visions of progress. The powerful and the wealthy can be understood: their achievements are often so immense and hard-won that their authors seem to require one or more additional lives—even if lived in another, digital world. Yet experiments aimed at creating the most faithful form of coded life will eventually demand focus groups and visionary enthusiasts ready to sacrifice their physical lives in hopes of succeeding in the resurrection experiment. Some will be fortunate enough to gain another life; others will simply vanish into the cloud heights of storage servers, reduced to empty sacrificial files. Both will contribute to the statistics; the statistics will become conclusions, and the conclusions will serve to update the resurrection technology for the sake of perfecting the process.
Applications designed for creating 3D avatars and hybrid clones will gain popularity, inevitably reaching self-sufficiency. They will offer users a wide range of service packages—from simple hologram design to the creation of hyper-realistic clone models endowed with voice, facial expressions, personality traits, and partial consciousness. Consumer society will, as always, split into its classic financial tiers: wealthier users will receive advanced applications with expanded functionality, while the less affluent will have access to simpler but reliable versions, stripped of digital extravagance.
Meanwhile, neither the danger of errors nor the risks involved will be enough to break humanity’s fear of death, and the applications—from the simplest to the most complex—will multiply, convincing thousands each day not only of the possibility but of the necessity of prolonging life beyond its natural limits, into the realm of code. Toward this realm the majority will strive, as people once strove toward the Holy Cross, seeking comfort, hope, and faith. Agnostics will admire the neon glow of the digital crucifix but will accept coded resurrection as an inevitable and logical chapter in humanity’s history.
Keepers of the Keys to the Digital Paradise
Digitalization after death is the analog-era version of resurrection for the modern age. After the ascension, souls will inevitably be divided according to earthly deeds, virtues and achievements, failures and acts of cowardice.
Exceptional lives—marked by high office, proximity to the laboratories of biopower—will be digitized with the same exclusivity and admitted into the realm of digital immortality. There, beyond the limits of the material world, they will surely find peace in the groves of the digital paradise, reunited with the avatars of their families and once-beloved companions of the lower world. The price of admission: the capital amassed during one’s earthly existence. Those excluded will form the digital working class—the users of the most basic tiers of the digital afterlife applications.
In the coming era of digital immortality, the state plays a central role. Government institutions observe the future with scrutiny, foresight, and calculation, sensing the pulse of public attitudes to craft strategies of control.
“Power does not merely forbid death; it governs life, embedding itself into every aspect—from birth to dying.” Power remains the constant in the equation of coded immortality.
Biopolitics stands beside life and death, beside every action and even its biological decline. The control of biopower over the citizen’s consciousness after physical death has become a strategic value—an ambition to govern not only external existence but also its internal dimensions, to regulate mental states and worldviews within the realm of eternity.
The digital prolongation of life through apps and software arises from startups financially nourished by biopolitical power. And thus the active users of personal digitalization services become a loyal electorate—plugged into the government’s digital matrix, algorithmically governed even after death. Will we live to see the day when the dead will vote? Will there one day emerge a new vision civil society of loyal digital ghosts capable of suppressing the will of the living through legally sanctioned means?
In matters of digital immortality, biopolitics will always rely on traditional institutions of mass-mind governance—on ideologists and preachers of public morality. For the mystery of the passage from one world to another cannot proceed without the blessing of the great theorists of death—the religious figures, the ancient keepers of the keys to the dogmatic paradise.
The Church, in tandem with biopower, will play its part. Both biopower and religion, as social institutions, are consecrated: one sets political trends, the other blesses the official course, pacifying the rebellious minds of the masses with pastoral words. Religious figures—the apostles of the holy church, the keepers of the keys to paradise—are the faithful guardians of the spiritual regime. And their deepest institutional fear lies in the fall of apostolic authority, followed by the loss of those keys to the paradisiacal groves—and the revenues from the rituals of transition.
Now every member of society possesses a small personal key, a credential initiating digital immortality through an application account, while biopolitics and its leaders become the apostles of the new church of digital resurrection—the custodians of sacred keys and ultimate truths.
Both forces will continue to regulate the markets of personality digitization, and their power will remain unshaken—until the youth of users, their bright ambitions and restless energy, shatter the system with individual choice and personal responsibility for the gift of managing digital life beyond physical death.
Splitting Eternity
How many attempts will humanity make before it arrives at a palatable version of personality digitization—one it can accept, grow accustomed to, and finally find peace with? Sooner or later, the so-called digital afterlife will face the problem of overpopulation; the cloud will grow crowded. The once light and airy, immaculate white clouds of data will darken and grow heavy, transforming into massive thunderheads threatening to unleash their condensed torrents upon the heads of their earthly creators. Humanity will confront the challenge of redistributing data, of artificially splitting eternities and creating situational copies of them.
Will this halt the stubborn march toward digital immortality? Clearly not. But perhaps technical stagnation, a decadence in the history of digital clones, will break the collective consciousness—leading to the realization that a purely utilitarian approach to the timeless questions of life and death requires rethinking.
Perhaps after loud public debates, after the furious sermons of clerics, after the bans and repressions of biopolitical governments, we will remember the quiet and immutable truth: that each of us is destined to be born and to fade away alone. The solitude of birth and the solitude of death may suddenly sober a humanity entangled in digital experiments and offer—unprecedentedly!—a chance, twice in a lifetime, whether analog or digital, to recognize intrinsic value and step into the river of free, deeply personal choice determining one’s fate in matters of life beyond life.
References
Hybrid Collapse, Biopolitics, 2025
Luciano Floridi & Carl Öhman, An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry, Philosophy & Technology, 2021
Meredith Ringel Morris & Jed R. Brubaker, Generative Ghosts: Anticipating Benefits and Risks of AI Afterlives, arXiv:2402.05960, Human-Computer Interaction, 2024
Anna Puzio, When the Digital Continues After Death: Ethical Perspectives on Death Tech and the Digital Afterlife, Communicatio Socialis, 2023
Ying Lei, Shuai Ma, Yuling Sun, Xiaojuan Ma, What Do We Expect From AI Afterlife? Exploring People’s Expectations, Concerns, and Desires for Posthumous AI Agents, arXiv:2502.05960, HCI, 2025
Ljupco Kocarev & Jasna Koteska, Digital me ontology and ethics, arXiv:2003.11305, Ethics in Technology, 2020
Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1957
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927
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Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 Vols., 1976–1984
28.08.2025Designed for thinkers.