Virtual suicide and other ethical issues of emerging information technologies

•Explores a prototype of an emerging technology, based on ambient intelligence and affective computing.•Focuses on ethical issues of emerging ICTs, including privacy, intellectual property, human computer interaction.•Is based on the European foresight research project ETICA (www.etica-project.eu).•Aims to contribute to a broader discourse of the ethics of emerging ICTs with a view to developing pathways to responsible research and innovation in ICT.

This paper uses the fictional account of a personal avatar (PETRA) and its interactions with a normal family in the future to explore some of the ethical issues of emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is based on a foresight research project which investigated the ethical issues of such emerging ICTs. The findings of this research suggest that there are numerous well established ethical issues that are currently being discussed and that will remain relevant. These include questions of privacy and intellectual property. In addition, however, there are numerous possible ethical issues that relate to human individual and collective identity that are likely to be affected by novel technical developments. These issues currently are not discussed in academic or policy discourses. In order to render them more tangible and thus promote academic and policy discourses, fictional accounts play an important role. The present paper should therefore be understood as an attempt to translate the research findings on the ethics of emerging ICTs to a broader audience.