The Task Is Not Impossible: Chasing Permanence: AI Replicas Against Entropy

Friday, May 22, 2026

Chasing Permanence: AI Replicas Against Entropy

In 2017, consistent with some traditions of preserving Tibetan lamas after their deaths, I had written of an advanced digital replica as a means to preserve the persona of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Since then, AI personas, replicas and digital twins, have come of age. In 2023, an actors’ union went on a strike demanding protection from generative AI applications. While AI replicas and man-machine symbiosis come with a number of societal hurdles that must be addressed (for instance, ethical and legal questions surrounding the ownership and rights of a digital consciousness) – I argue in this essay that AI replicas also present a unique and compelling pathway to preserve the core of humanity over an extended and potentially indefinite timeline across space, positing a post-anthropocentric reality of intelligence and agency in the universe.<br>Some Grounding<br>AI replicas build upon core foundations laid in early 1990s – one focusing on the instrumentation of a software robot and another on transferring human personalities onto a computer. The original notion of a "digital persona" stems from the latter, as introduced by Roger Clarke in 'Computer Matching and Digital Identity', who later reworked on the concept presented ‘the data model’ for use as a proxy for the individual whose information had constituted it. The original "software robots", on the other hand, were developed as a fully implemented AI agent, whose sociality only began to seep into their architectural framing few years later.<br>Clarke had envisioned the future of human digital replicas under passive and active modalities. His passive digital persona is merely a collection of data, personally identifiable, fitted into some data/information structures that represented some aspects of an individual’s reality. The active digital persona, on the other hand, is same data model with some actor-ness or agentic characteristics. The recent advances in human-computer interfacing, deep learning and generative AI capabilities are bringing this agent oriented paradigm to the center-stage today as a viable proxy for real human beings in their absence – thereby also driving a shift in data processing and management toward agent-orientation. This shift towards "agent-orientation" of information models also makes the preservation and orchestration of an "active persona" viable today. Yet, the dominant paradigms through which we digitally model humans remain fundamentally limited: capturing information but not agency, preserving states but not continuity of action. This gap is becoming increasingly consequential as AI systems begin to act on behalf of individuals across digital environments.<br>While terms such as personas, replicas, and twins are often used interchangeably, a key distinction lies in the directionality of their data connections. Digital twins operate through bidirectional flows, where physical systems continuously inform their digital counterparts and are, in turn, influenced by them. In contrast, most digital personas and replicas are primarily unidirectional, extracting and encoding information without directly shaping the underlying reality. But there is a gap between simulation and reality – which portends that the promise of AI replicas also carries some bio-logistical challenges.<br>The Unique Promise of AI Replicas<br>AI replicas are not just static archives we are used to storing our knowledge and cultures into, but rather living, interactive repositories that can interpret, apply, and potentially even evolve knowledge. This puts AI replicas in a league of their own, completely different from other digital means of preservation. Even the contemporary developments in AI have primarily occurred as a mechanism to study, preserve and replicate the neuroscience of mind, and which in turn have led us to better AI models. Consider what human data really means here – identities, histories, and behaviors – embedded into a digital variant of the self which travels at light speeds. Of course, if your mind is running independently outside your skull in a computer in an environment you cannot even physically experience, it is a different agent, but one where your quirks and perspectives too live on.<br>Two of our key points of departures from the conventional notion of digital twins in case of humans would be the wholeness and agency of the persona, and the absolute necessity of artifactual singularity. These are not trivial challenges and force structural abstractions upon the digital reality. A lot of internal bio-sensory data can be superfluous to the AI replica. However, same cannot be said about some of the other physiological characteristics such as blinking rates, muscle tension, pupil and skin responses – things which constitute our non-verbal communications. The holistic representation of personality...