Acts of Configuration: Rethinking Provenance, Temporality and Legitimacy in Post-Mortem Agents
Kellie Yu Hui Sim, Pin Sym Foong, Darryl Lim, John-Henry Lim, Kenny Tsu Wei Choo
TLDR
This paper explores how people reason about AI agent delegation for individuals with impaired decisional capacity, proposing new ideas for agent configuration.
Key contributions
- Explores AI agent design for individuals with impaired decisional capacity, beyond the life/death binary.
- Finds initial preference for bounded agents based on first-party authorship and representational fidelity.
- Introduces temporal model: agents evolve pre-loss, static post-loss, inform adjacent uses.
- Reshapes understanding of provenance, temporality, and legitimacy for post-capacity agents.
Why it matters
This paper addresses the critical, yet under-explored, area of AI agent design for individuals with impaired decisional capacity. It offers novel insights into user preferences and temporal considerations, providing a framework to rethink the ethical and design principles for future post-capacity and post-mortem AI agents.
Original Abstract
Work on persona-persistent post-mortem agents typically frames design around a life/death binary. This framing neglects a consequential yet under-theorised condition: when individuals remain alive but have impaired decisional capacity. Drawing on a multi-phase workshop in which participants trained and reflected on an AI agent for Advance Care Planning, we examined how people reason about agentic delegation post-capacity loss. Initially, participants favoured bounded agents grounded in first-party authorship and representational fidelity over autonomous or evolving stand-ins. However, temporality introduced novel ideas like adjacent use driven by persona persistence over functional expansion: agents should evolve while users retain capacity, remain static once capacity is lost, but somehow inform adjacent post-mortem uses. We discuss the implications of these findings and propose that the configuration of agents for post-capacity use reshapes our understanding of provenance, temporality, and legitimacy for post-mortem agents.
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