(2018-10-25) Digital Immortality How Your Life's Data Means A Version Of You Could Live Forever

Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever. Hossein Rahnama knows a CEO of a major financial company who wants to live on after he’s dead, and Rahnama thinks he can help him do it. Rahnama is creating a digital avatar for the CEO that they both hope could serve as a virtual “consultant” when the actual CEO is gone.

...visiting faculty member at MIT’s Media Lab, he’s building an application called Augmented Eternity; it lets you create a digital persona that can interact with people on your behalf after you’re dead.

Rahnama says the CEO’s avatar will be a “decision support tool,” but it won’t be capable of running the company.

“There is one thing that is missing in AI today, and that is context,” he says. The need to include this kind of context was the basis for Rahnama’s company, Flybits (for which he was named one of this publication’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2012). Flybits provides a platform that lets companies tailor their communications to customers on the basis of contextual cues. A bank, for example, might offer different messages through its mobile app depending on your purchase history, your calendar schedule, or whether you’re walking or taking a train.

A similar concept grabbed headlines a few years ago when Russian software developer Eugenia Kuyda created a chatbot representation of her best friend, Roman Mazurenko. (Replika)

Kuyda says the main complication with trying to create digital versions of the dead is that people are complicated. “We’re extremely different when we talk to different people,” she says. “We’re basically like twenty thousand personalities at once.” For example, Mazurenko had said things to her that he might have left out of a conversation with his parents.

So someday his daughter might consult with his digital family persona, while a former student could ask questions of his academic persona.

AI could help transform your professional expertise from a scattered written record to a representation of your knowledge that people can interact with. A lawyer who charges hundreds of dollars an hour could let people consult a digital avatar instead, for a much lower price

Another startup, Eternime, based in Mountain View, California, offers to incorporate your personal information into “an intelligent avatar that looks like you” and that will “live forever and allow other people in the future to access your memories.” Its founder, Marius Ursache, has been promoting the idea for years, and more than 40,000 people have signed up to Eternime’s waiting list, but the self-funded company has still launched only limited beta versions

In a paper published in Nature Human Behavior earlier this year, ethicists Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi from the Oxford Internet Institute argue that we need an ethical framework for the burgeoning digital afterlife industry.

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