James DiGiovanna is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where his research centres on personal identity, human enhancement and the ethics of artificial minds. He coined the term "paraperson," an entity that meets every test of personhood but can instantly rewrite its own memory, character and values, in his chapter for Oxford's Robot Ethics 2.0.

Andrew and James talk about why today's AI companions don't yet qualify as parapersons, what would need to change for that to happen, and why the constant self-rewriting these systems already do raises real questions about trust and identity. Using cases like total memory loss, dementia, and an elderly man on death row decades after his crime, they explore how much change a person, or a person-like AI, can undergo and still be "the same." They also discuss real cases of AI-linked psychosis and suicide, why people trust AI less the moment they learn it isn't human, and why James believes philosophy needs a new category between "person" and "object."

Guest: James DiGiovanna, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College of Criminal Justice https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/james-digiovanna

Host: Andrew Phipps, Empathy Unbound https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-phipps-ap/