The digital life after death may soon become a reality. But do you need it? The accumulations of data we create may soon make possible digital avatars that will live after us, after our death, comforting loved ones or sharing experiences with future generations. To some, this option may seem less attractive than the vision promised by more optimistic futurists, in which we upload our minds to the cloud and live forever in machines.
However, in the not so distant future, this particular option seems more realistic - and the first steps have already been taken.
C Numeric avatars: the near future
After a friend of Evgenia Kuyda, co-founder of Russian artificial intelligence startup Luka, died in a car accident, she trained a neural network chatbot so that she could talk to him like a friend. Journalist and amateur programmer James Vlahos took a more proactive approach, doing extensive interviews with his terminally ill father to create a digital clone of him when he dies.
For those of us who don't have the time or experience to create our own AI avatar, startup Eternime offers to take your social media posts and correspondence, as well as your personal information to create a copy of you that can communicate with relatives after your death. The service is still running in a private beta with a few people, but 40,000 are already in the queue, so it's obvious there is a market.
Comforting. Or creepy?
Promotional video:
It is difficult to say at this time whether interacting with the deceased person will help or exacerbate grief. There are concerns that it may prevent the person from “letting go” or “moving on”. Others believe that all of this can play a useful therapeutic role, reminding people that just because someone died does not mean that they are gone, and by providing them with a new way of expressing and resigning to feelings.
While most nowadays see these digital resurrections as a way to perpetuate the memory of loved ones, there are also more ambitious plans to use this technology as a way to preserve advice and experience. MIT's Augmented Eternity project explores whether we can use AI to collect someone's digital footprints and extract both their knowledge and elements of their personality.
Project leader Hossein Rahnama says he is already working with a CEO who wanted to leave behind a digital avatar that future leaders could consult with when he dies. And you don't have to wait for your death - experts could create virtual clones of themselves to distribute advice to as many people as possible. Soon, these clones could be more than just chatbots. Hollywood has already started spending millions of dollars to create 3D scans of its most precious stars so they can stay active outside the grave.
The appeal of the idea is hard to miss: imagine if we could bring Stephen Hawking or Tim Cook back so that their wisdom stays with us. What if we could create a digital brain simply by combining the experience and wisdom of the world's greatest thinkers?
There are still many obstacles ahead that prevent us from creating a truly accurate representation of a person simply by collecting their digital remains. The first problem is data. Most people's digital footprints have only just begun to reach significant proportions in the last decade or so, and span a relatively short period of their lives. It can take many years before enough data emerges to create more than just a superficial imitation of someone.
And that's assuming that the data we produce really represents who we are. Carefully retouched Instagram photos and neat work emails hardly reflect the hectic realities of most people's lives.
Perhaps if the idea is simply to create a repository of someone's knowledge and experience, then pinpointing the nature of character would be less important. But then these clones would be static. Real people are constantly learning and changing, but a digital avatar is a snapshot, or rather a cast of the character and opinions of the moment they died. Failure to adapt given the volatility of the world can shorten the useful life of these cues.
Digital impressions: who needs it?
All of this will not stop people trying to create digital versions of themselves. A more important question arises: Who will be in charge of our digital afterlife? Are we, our families, or the companies that store our data?
In most countries, the laws on this topic are rather vague. Companies like Google and Facebook have processes at their disposal that let you choose who should control your accounts in the event of death. But if you forget to do this, the fate of your virtual remains will be decided by federal law, local law and the technical conditions of the company's services.
This lack of regulation can create incentives and opportunities for unfair behavior. The voice of the deceased can be a very persuasive exploitation tool, and digital cues from respected experts can be a powerful vehicle for driving a hidden agenda.
It follows from this that there is a need for clear and unambiguous rules. Scientists at the University of Oxford recently proposed ethical principles that will treat your digital remains as museums and archaeologists treat mortal remains - with dignity, but in the public interest.
These principles will determine whether the digital afterlife becomes heaven or hell.
Ilya Khel