Have you ever stopped to think about your digital footprint?

All of the text messages, emails, social media posts.

My question is what happens to all of this data after you die?

I'm going to explore this emerging space called the digital afterlife from three different edges.

What happens to your data?

How it can take on a life of its own and what it means to be digitally immortal.

In 2019 Twitter announced that it was going to start the leading accounts of inactive users and their reasoning made a lot of sense accounts of inactive users are unable to agree to updated policy terms.

But their announcement sparked a fury of backlash.

As one article stated, it meant that they might be losing a digital remnant of loved ones, but it shows that someone's digital identity can still be meaningful even after they've passed away as we live more of our lives online.

These digital archaeological sites that we leave behind will only expand.

We'll be able to see how you laid in on certain cultural moments like whether the dress was blue or gold and sank or Bsb or if you heard yanni or laurel, it's definitely your oh, by the way, taking care of your online affairs before you pass away isn't just about passing down digital remnants to your great great grandchildren.

It's also about protecting your digital identity from hackers and scammers who have been known to impersonate and target the accounts of deceased users.

So how should we deal with all of this?

We estimated the over 30 million dead people on Facebook, which is just mind blowing because they all send birthday reminders there on linkedin.

They're sending work anniversaries.

So it's a disgrace really.

That's ricard Ceo of good trust a leader in the death tech industry.

The company gathers your data and preserves it after you die.

We did a survey and it turns out that some 90% of people here in the US have no plans whatsoever what happens to the digital stuff.

So it will just remain there.

But the problem is of course if you had a priceless photos in your iCloud account, your loved ones may not find them.

If you have that Bitcoin's somewhere hidden away.

Priceless sort of memories and monetary assets will be lost forever.

Who owns that data to the tech companies still own it?

Yeah, I would argue that some tech companies probably think that they own it, but I would argue that they don't.

If you think about google facebook Apple, if you contact them saying, hey, my wife passed away and then they're wondering who are you again?

You say your husband but are you really entitled to inherit your wife?

So it's a very complicated process and that's one of the things that we're trying to do at scale because if you have to do this with 20 sites, it becomes a very laborious task.

We want to make sure that long after you're gone, you will have a representation where people can see you remember you and potentially also interact with you in a way that you would think would be good for for who you are?

Whether you want to protect your data from hackers or preserve it for loved ones.

Companies like Good Trust can help you get your digital footprint in order, but it turns out this data you leave behind might one day take on a life of its own with advances in technology, it's possible to interact with the deceased and expect a reply back ai chatbots which we interact with all the time in customer service inquiries are trained by providing the ai with examples of the type and style of language you wanted to learn from and eventually replicate and the ai that powers these chatbots is getting really, really good Joshua.

Barbeau is a freelance writer from Canada and last year he went viral after sharing his story about how he digitally resurrected his ex fiancee using a chat box and he did this by training it on her own texts and facebook messages.

And he said that there were elements of the conversation that truly reminded him of her and that the chatbot had given him permission to move on with his life in small ways.

But it makes me wonder what are the implications of digital resurrections and chatbots on the grieving process.

I mean in some cases it seems to help, but where's the line when we think about losing people are things that are important to us, right, if we have access to those things, we're going to want to do that over and over again.

This is dr Liz tolliver, she's a long term grief counselor and she's been researching ai and its effects on grief if we perhaps are prolonging or continuing to be able to have access to these individuals through Ai isn't prolonging our pain, Is that prolonging our struggle?

And I think the risk in that when we think about addiction is that then addiction impedes our ability to stay in the present moment.

And what could be the potential societal implications of a world where we don't think we fully die or we at least think we can continue to interact with loved ones.

My school of thought in my framework and scaffolding is really allowing each individual to have the wrong experience and bringing into the room with them their worldview, and a lot of that comes from their culture and the implications for that could be that a lot of those traditions are lost.

I also think that we are taking away or minimizing the value in those traditions that cultures have passed down for hundreds and possibly thousands of years.

So it's important to consider these long term cultural effects.

Technology is extending the limits of her lifetime, but to live on through a chat bot might cause more harm than good?

The thing about chat bots and avatars is that at the end of the day, we know those aren't the thoughts and words of deceased loved ones, they're an Ai is best prediction at what the deceased might say.

Unless of course it could somehow tap into our brains or at least the contents in it.

A memory engram is the physical representation of a memory, the collection of cells that store a memory.

And thanks to advances in technology, we can now see memory and grams the green stain in this photo.

It's actually long term fear memories.

While most of the research on memories is grounded in finding solutions for brain disorders such as Alzheimer's or depression, there's a lot of implications on the digital afterlife.

If we can see memories, can we manipulate them and even preserve them after we die.

You know, the idea of uploading memories to the cloud, for example is really popular culture right now, TV shows like upload or Westworld really speaks to this and futurists like Ray Kurzweil as champion this idea for some time and he even suggests that by 2045 that will be able to do this, This is dr Joshua salernitana, a neuroscientist who explores how technology can lead to see and manipulate memories.

We can actually use fmri data or functional MRI data to reconstruct memories using brain activity specifically using AI technologies which interprets this brain activity to construct images, even videos now, the resolution is quite low, but the technology is getting better and better.

So with respect to memories more specifically I think, to grasp the significance of being able to store and manipulate memories and the impact that could have on the digital afterlife.

We would have to understand the role that memories play and shaping our identities and our realities as a neuroscientist.

How much would you say of who we are is based on our memories.

Memories literally shape our identities are experiences, alter the connections between the neurons in our brain and they shape the brain and mind in this way and with regard to our reality in the present moment, you're constantly looking back to the past in order to understand the future.

So, our memories literally shape our brains and our minds and therefore our identities and being able to upload them really starts the conversation of digital immortality.

But I think there's still one more piece to the puzzle.

The thing that makes us who we are, our consciousness.

I wanted to talk to Dr Michael Graziano, because he's actively studying the brain basis of consciousness and the potential of uploading it.

The brain is a functioning machine.

It's information that's moving in very specific ways and that's exactly what artificial neural networks do.

Like everything around us, Your cellphone search engines and self driving cars, they all operate on this mimic of biology and so the thing is to get that kind of machinery to build into it, the pattern of connectivity from an actual person.

So uploading our brain would essentially be the ultimate digital afterlife.

Then there's in the end two of you in a way compared to a Y where the stock of the Y is you from the time you're born up to the point where your brain gets scanned.

And then at that point, the Y branches and one half of it is the biological you and the other half is this digital you that thinks it's you wakes up in some simulated digital world and says to itself, hey, it worked.

And the other one, the biological you wakes up and says, um, didn't help me, I'm still gonna die.

So, which is the real You, I think they both are.

It's the watershed moment in our species is the moment that we understand consciousness well enough to engineer it and upload it.

We changed fundamentally who and what we are and that's fraught with all kinds of both good and bad consequences.

One thing we've been noticing as we've been studying this digital afterlife as a space is who's in the room while it's being built is really important.

Who's making these decisions?

Is it equitable?

How do we know everybody can access it be a part of the future that we actually want to live in.

That's right.

I do not imagine it being equitable.

And so you're going to have a situation where you're going to have a limited resource that has to be doled out.

So the potential for abuse is relatively huge.

But my own work is much more on the topic of insight.

It basically says mind uploading is possible, but it doesn't tell you how to do it right?

I think it's inevitable that's going to happen anyway.

It's just that's people do that.

And when you see industries like space evolving, we talk all about terraforming mars or building environments that can house humans from your perspective.

Why not just how's the mind?

Yes, people have space wrong.

The star treks and the Star Wars is and the light speed or faster than light speed travel.

Like that's not gonna happen.

But if you don't need to build an environment to house the human body, all you need is to build a platform to house the human mind that's the future of space travel.

If you could give one piece of advice to tech companies who are working to solve this problem, who are waiting for your research so they can go make a product with it.

What would that piece of advice be for mind uploading?

I don't know what advice I would give except it's worthwhile thinking it through ahead of time rather than waiting until it's here and then trying to clean up the mess after it happens.

The digital afterlife is a spectrum from the photos that we share and the emails that we send to the potential of uploading consciousness.

Technology has always brought about profound change combining the brain power of the living and the dead could take us to new heights.

And there's something kind of beautiful and knowing that death may not have to stay so final, but there's also something kind of beautiful and knowing that even with the perfect brain simulator and the avatars and all of the technology, it's still not you, whatever makes you human and uniquely you stays, at least for now.