Project

ERC Starting Grant: Avatar agency. Moral responsibility at the intersection of individual, collective, and artificial social entities in emergent avatar communities (avataResponsibility)

Avatars in the form of digital or robotic embodied and interactive representations of a person in virtual or physical environments are being deployed in fields such as healthcare, education, social interaction or workspace. Alternatively termed as digital/ robotic twins, clones or duplicates of real humans, personal avatars can be coupled with AI technologies such as (personalized or large) Language Models to the extent that their human users do not control them in real time. This raises new challenges in terms of agency ascriptions, (dis)enhancement of human capabilities and oversight, potentially opening new responsibility gaps.

Engaging in multiple interactions with other avatars and the technologically-enabled environment results in intertwined relationships that permeate the boundaries of the physical, the augmented and the virtual world. Avatars deployed in mixed reality spaces of human social interactions question our traditional frameworks of agency and moral responsibility that are grounded in ontological and epistemological claims over individual human beings situated in the physical world. 

The avataResponsibility
project

The avataResponsibility project aims to develop an innovative normative framework for moral responsibility in emergent avatar communities that is grounded in a philosophical conceptualisation of the changing concept of avatar agency. This framework considers the way interactions between avatars, individuals, and organisations, which take place in technologically enabled environments, generate intertwined roles and systemic functionalities that ground ascriptions of moral responsibility in emerging avatar communities. These intertwined interactions produce mutual ascriptions of moral responsibility to individual, collective, and artificial members of avatar communities, potentially enhancing or, on the contrary, diminishing human agency and responsibility. The successful delivery of this ethical framework bears direct implications for future regulation regarding ascriptions of responsibility in emergent avatar communities.

Timeframe
60 months
(Jan 2024 – Dec 2028)
Budget
1.494.688 €
Funding
European Research Council
ERC Starting Grant
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