Algorithmic Dead Hands: What is Dead May Never Die

Authors

Zachary L. Catanzaro

Abstract

Can we transcend death? By harnessing large language models and the invasive data harvesting of surveillance capitalism, AI systems now offer testators unprecedented posthumous control over property and heirs. These algorithmic ‘dead hands’ promise a seductive form of digital immortality, but if left unchecked, they threaten to spawn a novel breed of perpetuities. This technology risks birthing a digitized techno-feudal Necrocracy marked by inalienable property, extreme wealth consolidation, and the dead’s perpetual dominion over the living.

While modern reforms have weakened the common law’s traditional hostility to dead hand control, these reforms failed to anticipate technologically embodied intentionality persisting beyond death. Algorithmic dead hands corrupt the autonomy of the living and destroy property alienability, steering us toward a future where indifferent machines dictate the fate of land and wealth. We must urgently reconsider modern efforts to weaken or abolish the strict formalism of the rule against perpetuities and other restrictions on dead hand control. After all, why should the living suffer the tyranny of the dead?

Recommended Citation

Zachary L. Catanzaro, Algorithmic Dead Hands: What is Dead May Never Die, 35 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 83 (2024).
Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/iplj/vol35/iss1/2