Exploring Digital Personhood and the Ethics of Cyberpunk Existence

When I was younger, I often wanted to live in the sci-fi world of the books I read. Now that I am, my response is, “No, not THAT one! The utopia, not the dystopia!”

I wrote these lines in a text message to a friend recently while we discussed a news story about a man who died by suicide at the alleged urging of an AI chatbot, what he apparently mistook for a sentient, digital person. In more ways than I can describe in my allotted word count here, we—as in the collective, “all of humanity” we—seem to be entering a real-life era of cyberpunk existence.

Defining Cyberpunk

The science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk is typically described as a dystopian view of a future in which technology, despite its promise to improve society, instead makes our lives harder in new, innovative ways. If that doesn’t describe the technological trend we find ourselves following, then I’m not sure I have the right words to do so.

My short story “As Long as You Both Shall Live,” appearing in Writers of the Future Volume 42, grounds itself in the tropes and traditions of cyberpunk. The main character Sam Petri and Kumiko Nakamura, the object of his affection, wrestle with ethical issues related to digital personhood. If someone exists solely as a digital construct, should they be considered a “legal person”? If they live in virtual reality, without a physical body, do they deserve the same agency and autonomy as a flesh-and-blood human being? Questions like these are not new, even if they still lack clear-cut answers today. In the context of cyberpunk fiction (because it’s not yet technologically feasible to upload the entirety of our personalities, even though much of our lives take place in digital realms), the concept of digital personhood has been explored for decades.

The Origins of Digital Personhood in Sci-Fi Media

One of the early incarnations of this idea is the 1982 movie Tron, in which software engineer Kevin Flynn gets digitized and finds himself inside a computer world. There, he fights the evil Master Control Program with the aid of other anthropomorphized computer programs, including the titular Tron. The stakes are real; even though he’s a human (a “user”), Flynn runs the same risk of being “derezzed” (deleted) as the programs.

Later in the 1980s, the TV show Max Headroom debuted, featuring an AI TV host generated from journalist Edison Carter’s mind after he suffers a head injury. Carter eventually recovers, but his digital alter ego—which has developed its own distinct personality—is allowed to continue its existence.

From Neuromancer to Snow Crash: Shaping the Metaverse

In the literary sphere, no novel is more synonymous with the idea of digital personhood than William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, considered by many to be the foundation of cyberpunk. Gibson himself coined the terms “cyberspace” and “jacking in” (the process by which humans interface with digital worlds). In Neuromancer, as in my short story, the main character Case encounters the digital consciousness of his girlfriend, who is dead in the real world. (A long-awaited adaptation of Gibson’s seminal novel is expected to air later this year on Apple TV+.)

The concept of a digital world takes center stage in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which the author coined the term “metaverse” to describe a digital world where real-world users interact through avatars. The tech company Meta implicitly referenced Snow Crash when it rebranded in 2021, describing the metaverse as “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.”

Cortical Stacks and Virtual Afterlives in Modern Fiction

Iain M. Banks’s Culture series explores the intersection of digital existence with physical death in the form of virtual afterlives in which people’s consciousnesses can be saved via a “neural lace” after physical death. Death becomes a kind of preference by which people can choose to be saved in an archive, revived into a cloned body, or permanently deleted. In Surface Detail, Banks takes this idea to a brutal extreme by featuring artificial hells that exist to torture digital souls.

Author Richard K. Morgan took the idea of digitally saved consciousness further in his 2002 novel Altered Carbon (adapted to TV by Netflix in 2018). Human selves are stored in “cortical stacks” that can be restored into new bodies (“sleeves”) after death, rendering humans effectively immortal. Ted Chiang puts a special focus on the ethics of digital existence in his Hugo and Locus Award-winning 2010 novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, exploring such weighty topics as self-determination, agency, and the nature of consent and consciousness.

Digital consciousness finds expression in many other properties, including the TV shows Upload (a subscription-based digital afterlife) and Black Mirror (a virtual world inhabited by the living and deceased in Emmy-winning episode “San Junipero”). ScreenRant reports that Apple TV+’s Murderbot will lean into cyberpunk in its second season later this year. And no discussion of this topic would be complete without a nod to the groundbreaking virtual reality of The Matrix series of movies.

The Ethics of Digital Consciousness: A Fictional Case Study

When I wrote my Writers of the Future Contest–winning story, I didn’t intend to borrow tropes from this long tradition of cyberpunk science fiction. In fact, the inspiration for my story emerged from a dream that I had two days before the Contest deadline. But there’s no question that my long fascination with the moral, ethical, and practical dilemmas inherent in the subgenre—and my consumption of such stories over the years—influenced me on a subconscious level. In my story, you’ll find echoes of the tender romance at the heart of Upload, nods to the digital afterlives of Black Mirror and the Culture series, and ethical debates reminiscent of The Lifecycle of Software Objects, all set in a metaverse like that of Snow Crash.

In the near-future world of “As Long as You Both Shall Live,” advances in AI software have far outpaced the capabilities of robotics hardware. To exploit this gap, an unnamed Company tests a new technology whereby a person’s consciousness can be transferred to a virtual world while AI software uses their physical body as an automaton to perform a variety of tasks. The human subjects in this research trial enjoy carefree virtual leisure while this testing is underway—until, that is, something terrible happens to one of the AI-orchestrated bodies, and one of the test subjects is trapped in the virtual world.

What-ifs: Legal Personhood vs. Intellectual Property in AI

Some of the what-if questions that inspired my story’s premise included:

• Would a person who exists solely as a digital entity still be considered a legal person? Or would they become mere intellectual property?
• In a society where corporations have become so risk-averse, how far would a company go to hide negligence and avoid liability in a virtual world?
• Should a company have the same duty of care for a digital consciousness as it does for a flesh-and-blood employee?

At its heart, though, “As Long as You Both Shall Live” deals with themes of love and loss, using the tropes of cyberpunk as a framework to tell a timeless tale of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Even in cyberspace, love conquers all.

If you read my story and find yourself craving more cyberpunk, don’t miss Thomas K. Slee’s brilliant commentary on technological bureaucracy, “Form 14B: Application for Certification of Consciousness Transfer (Post-Mortem)”; Elina Kumra’s evocative exploration of art versus algorithm in “Bloom Decay”; and Thomas R. Eggenberger’s cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of using tech to stop time in “A Ready-Made Bubble of Light.”

Find these and other fascinating tales—the year’s best new science fiction and fantasy short stories—in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 42, available wherever you buy books.