‘It's What They Would Have Wanted’: Personhood, Agency, and Executor Bots

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being used to create ‘bots’ that embody the conversational style and preferences of dead people. Can such bots constitute a form of extended posthumous agency? To explore this issue, this paper deploys a thought experiment built around a hypothetical ‘Executor Bot’ that administers the estate of a dead person. One version of the bot carries out the decedent’s final wishes, while another version continues to develop in the way the decedent’s preferences would have done had they not died. Utilising a version of Parfit’s (1984) ‘Nineteenth Century Russian’ case, the experiment suggests there is in fact no one thing we can simply call ‘posthumous agency’; instead, the Executor Bot points to irreducibly perspectival features agency itself.