AI‐Based Immortality: The Ethical Advantage of the Aretai Approach

ABSTRACT

The convergence of artificial intelligence, digital identity technologies, and biogerontological ambitions has produced a novel set of philosophical problems that have not yet been adequately addressed within mainstream bioethical discourse. Digital life extension—encompassing AI‐generated avatars, neural data preservation, mind uploading, and postmortem digital personhood—raises philosophical questions that require urgent attention. This article argues that the Aretai model of practical wisdom, as systematically articulated by Mario De Caro, Claudia Navarini, and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, offers useful conceptual resources for navigating these challenges. Drawing on Shannon Vallor's foundational work on technology and the virtues, and situating the argument within a broader body of scholarship that includes recent work on the morality of life extension, the ethics of virtual avatars, and the contested quest for biological immortality, this paper contends that practical wisdom—phronesis—cannot be eliminated from the ethical evaluation of technologies that purport to extend, preserve, or reconstruct human selfhood. The cultivation of virtuous digital selves is not a luxury but an ethical necessity, demanding attention from bioethicists, AI researchers, policymakers, and the public at large.