What Survives Technical Change? Artificial Identity and Persistence in Contemporary Cinema

Contemporary science-fiction cinema keeps depicting artificial entities that develop, are technically modified, reconstructed, or copied, or stop operating while information about them stays accessible. These situations raise a narrower problem than whether artificial beings can think, feel, or count as persons: what makes an artificial individual the same individual across technical change? A system may keep its memories in a new body or preserve its organization while its components are replaced. It may produce a successor with an indistinguishable psychological profile or leave records behind after shutting down. Such cases usually get filed under “continuity,” but continuity takes different forms, none of which alone establishes “numerical identity.”I work through the problem with John Locke on personal identity, Derek Parfit on psychological continuity and branching, and Gilbert Simondon on individuation and technical objects. Locke separates information about past experience from the consciousness through which a person appropriates it. For Parfit, continuity can branch into several successors without making each numerically identical with its predecessor. Simondon explains how technical individuals emerge and change through their formation and associated milieus. He does not treat technical development as proof of personal identity or consciousness.The principal films are The Artifice Girl (Franklin Ritch, 2022), Archive (Gavin Rothery, 2020), and After Yang (Kogonada, 2021), with Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009) as a comparative reference for duplication and branching. Development, reconstruction, archival preservation, and duplication do not preserve the same thing. The Artifice Girl presents a developing technical system whose causal and operational history supports continuity across modification, while its distributed instances leave the unity of the system unresolved. Archive distinguishes the preservation or reconstruction of mental contents from the survival of the person they represent; its final revelation also changes the evidential status of the protagonist’s apparent experience. After Yang shows informational traces and social significance outlasting the operation of an artificial individual, without establishing that the individual himself continues. Moon shows distinct successors inheriting the same memories without becoming one individual. The comparison distinguishes six relations that may connect earlier and later states: causal, psychological, informational, organizational or technical, experiential, and social or narrative continuity. These are analytical distinctions, not an exhaustive taxonomy; numerical identity remains the question to be assessed, not another form of continuity. Memory, information, behavioral similarity, technical organization, and social remembrance are not interchangeable evidence of survival. Here, “artificial individual” is an analytical category, not an assumption that every represented system is a metaphysically unified subject. I propose no universal criterion of artificial identity.