“Hollow Pursuits” and the Right Not to Be Simulated: privacy, autonomy, and the holodeck

Emerging artificial intelligence and extended reality technologies increasingly enable the construction of interactive digital representations of identifiable people from their faces, voices, behavioral traits, personal data, and other records. Such systems raise a problem that extends beyond conventional questions of informational privacy or synthetic likeness. Drawing on the Holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation, particularly “Hollow Pursuits,” “Booby Trap,” and “Galaxy’s Child,” this paper examines this problem through the lens of relational access. While surveillance provides epistemic access to a person and profiling provides inferential access, person-specific simulation can provide relational access to an interactive surrogate capable of supporting social interactions associated with the represented person. The surrogate enables person-specific interaction in the represented individual’s absence, creating a form of radically non-reciprocal sociality in which the individual cannot determine whether or how their identity is made interactively available. Building on work on privacy, autonomy, synthetic likeness, and digital replicas, the paper proposes a Right Not to Be Simulated: a presumptive autonomy and authority claim against the unauthorized creation or use of person-specific interactive surrogates.