Could the Afterlife Be Digital?

For thousands of years human beings have struggled to cope with tragedy and loss. Departed friends and relatives have been honored and remembered in countless different ways from graves and shrines to poetry and legends. Keepsakes have been handed down for generations, artifacts of ancestors long-gone.

Yet for the first time in history human beings who have passed now often leave behind a much more immediate and potentially eternal form of remembrance: their social media accounts.

From facebook to twitter, instagram and tumblr there are dozens of ways we connect in the digital sphere and our profiles and the data these services build on us does not just disappear when we pass away. It often falls to friends and spouses, parents or children to take over a departed person's social media accounts and decide what to do with them. Some are deleted, some are preserved as an archive of a person's life. If preserved there is really no way to tell how long a dead person's profile, whether public or private, could be preserved. Decades surely, maybe even centuries. Who knows, perhaps in a thousand years people living in the Martial Colonies will have school assignments to look up and study the social media accounts of long-dead people and write essays on the culture and language of the past. Quite literally the massed data and profiles of social media services may well serve as a cultural time-capsule, ensuring that all the best meme's and viral videos are remembered long into the future.

However I have also found myself considering another, rather morbid, possibility. As machine-learning software continues to advance and the data gathered by social media sites on each user continues to amass I find myself considering whether it will soon be possible, if it is not already, to use an AI to keep a dead person's social media accounts active in perpetuity. Various companies already use massed user data to provide customized advertisements to each and every user with considerable accuracy. Based on past activity machine-intelligence's could probably predict and emulate the behavior, likes, dislikes, sense of humor and personality of someone who has passed and continue to generate new activity on social media accounts.

Consider for a moment the possibility of grandma's facebook profile continuing to like pictures, share silly cat videos, and send happy-birthday e-cards just like it did when she was alive, and continue to do so forever. Heck with the advent of auto-complete and the data it gathers AI's could possibly even manage to send short messages in the style and manner of a deceased user. Consider the possibility that a thousand years from now not only will Martian children be researching the culture of the past through social media, they could potentially do so by asking questions and exchanging content with the still active ghost-profiles of dead people. Dead people whose accounts have continued to talk to and share digital activity with each other long after anyone who knew them was long dead.

In this digital age we all leave behind a digital footprint of ourselves. The more active we are, the more social media sites we use the more data is gathered on us and a more complete picture of us is built. Ostensibly this data is just there to generate and present us content we will enjoy, so we will click on it, or buy something. Yet when we die this data does not vanish. The significance of that digital footprint, and what it could potentially be used for after we are gone are questions and concepts that we have yet to even begin to seriously consider in these early years of the digital age. The internet is at most about thirty-five years old and already it has fundamentally changed the human existence in incredible ways and we have barely scratched the surface in my opinion. Who knows, perhaps in another thirty-five years users will be able to plug a cable into their skull, transport their minds into a digital space and visit the data-mimics of departed relatives, digitally rendered and capable of holding conversations. Perhaps in seventy years data-compiled machine-intelligence copies of departed humans will be able to own property, vote, and hold public office. Perhaps we will develop AI's that don't simply try to be like humans in general, but that try to actually become a specific human.

Honestly the possibilities are endless, the technology ever evolving and ever advancing at an astonishing pace. Today we look back on the Jetsons and laugh at how ridiculous and inaccurate it's view of the future was. Perhaps forty-years from now people will look back at 2018 and laugh at how we viewed the future, at what we did not see coming, at what we did not expect. Who knows, perhaps forty-years from now our data-ghosts will look back and do the laughing themselves...