Acts of Configuration: Rethinking Provenance, Temporality and Legitimacy in Post-Mortem Agents

TL;DR

This paper explores how post-capacity AI agents, especially in healthcare, challenge traditional views on agency, temporality, and legitimacy, emphasizing the importance of user capacity in agent design.

Contribution

It introduces a nuanced perspective on post-capacity agents, highlighting the significance of temporality and user capacity in shaping agent configuration and legitimacy.

Findings

Participants preferred bounded, first-party agents over autonomous ones.

Temporal considerations lead to ideas of adjacent use and persona persistence.

Post-capacity agent configuration impacts notions of provenance and legitimacy.

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.