Dr. Riccardo Valenti is an Italian philosopher, independent researcher, and secondary school teacher. He completed his PhD in Philosophy in 2024 through a joint programme between Ca' Foscari University of Venice and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, with doctoral research on passivity, historicity, and expression in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. His work since has focused on phenomenology, philosophy of technology, AI ethics, and digital culture, including the article "On Digital Immortality's (Un)Broken Connection: Exploring the Potential for Meaning-Making Cooperation Beyond Life and Death" (Journal of Ethics and Legal Technologies, 2025).
During his Visiting Fellowship at ZIBR, he will work on the project "Tokenized Absence: Deathbots, Digital Twins, and the Governance of Posthumous Identity," building on a presentation he gave at ZIBR in March 2026. The project investigates AI-mediated posthumous interaction, focusing on so-called deathbots as a limiting case for understanding how identity, agency, and responsibility are transformed in digital environments. It develops the concept of "quasi-interlocution" to describe interactions that are responsive but structurally non-reciprocal, and examines blockchain as a possible normative infrastructure for governing posthumous identity, authorship, consent, and accountability.
