All articles tagged with #digital afterlife
AI 'deadbots' of deceased individuals are increasingly persuasive and being explored for commercial use, raising ethical, legal, and societal concerns about exploitation, consent, and the potential for targeted advertising, with the industry poised for significant growth and monetization.
Series creator Greg Daniels discusses which characters from his shows, including Homer Simpson and Dwight Schrute, would choose to upload themselves into a digital afterlife in the final season of Upload, which emphasizes love transcending death and explores themes of AI and personal connection. The show is now streaming its last season on Prime Video.
The documentary "Eternal You" showcased at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival delves into the unsettling world of digital afterlife technology, featuring individuals using AI to communicate with deceased loved ones. The film explores the potential benefits and ethical concerns of this emerging industry, including the use of AI to recreate conversational patterns and the ownership of data. Interviews with tech founders and users shed light on the emotional impact and moral implications of these technologies, raising questions about the boundaries of grief and the responsibility of tech companies in managing digital avatars of the deceased.
Sociologist Timothy Recuber's book "The Digital Departed" explores how the dying and the dead exert agency over their online presence, examining digital texts from terminally ill bloggers to online suicide notes. Recuber also delves into the use of hashtags as a form of collective online remembrance and interviews individuals involved in transhumanism, discussing the potential for advanced technologies to enable digital records of the human mind to be uploaded to the Internet. He raises ethical concerns about mind uploading, cautioning against narratives that promote technological progress as necessarily good and highlighting the inequalities mirrored in people's online lives.
Computer scientist Dr. Pratik Desai predicts that consciousness could be uploaded onto a computer by the end of this year, allowing people to recreate their dead loved ones as avatars living in a computer. The process would involve digitizing videos, voice recordings, documents, and photos of the person, then feeding them to an AI system that learns everything it can about the individual. Other experts, like Bill Gates, believe AI will improve our lives, while Elon Musk and more than 1,000 tech leaders are calling for a pause, warning it could destroy humanity.
Cybersecurity expert Zane Bond warns that most people make basic cybersecurity errors every day, including memorizing passwords, not unsubscribing from junk email, failing to set up a guest network for visitors, ignoring digital afterlife planning, and not using two-factor authentication. Bond advises using a password manager, unsubscribing from junk email, setting up a guest network, planning for digital afterlife, and using two-factor authentication to improve cybersecurity.