Dead & Buried

When we think about what we leave behind when we die, most of us think of our physical possessions.

But nearly all of us also have an extensive digital footprint that's much harder to erase and manage.

Author and expert Elaine Kasket says - "If our digital stuff were like our material stuff, we would all look like extreme hoarders."

We'll get back to her later.

Our digital personas don't just out live our analog presence on Earth.

They may also take on a whole new life of their own.

After we're gone.

A life we rarely control.

All of this makes me wonder how do we square our digital immortality with the finality of death?

And what happens in the future where we never die?

This is our Black Mirror episode.

Welcome, all.

So picture this.

You're dead, right.

But last I checked, you were still tweeting and posting photos of what you had for breakfast.

When we die, our digital selves don't automatically die with us.

There are now companies that let you send emails from the grave.

You can literally send your aunt a happy birthday message from the great beyond.

I don't know if that's what Adele meant when she said hello from the other side.

Scheduled posts have popped up on Twitter and Meta from people who died several months before.

Seriously freaking out friends and family of the deceased.

And you've probably noticed that when someone with an active Instagram account dies, their last post often becomes a kind of virtual shrine, a place for mourners to express their grief and leave their memories.

These shrines can draw in tons of comments even years later.

In 2015, Meta rolled out a legacy page feature to manage the accounts of the deceased.

A legacy page freezes your account in time, suggesting that you have in fact died.

But the feature also allows a previously designated legacy contact to accept new friend requests on your behalf, update your profile page, and post the pinned message.

And to whoever whoever's managing my profile, you better post a good picture.

It seems that our digital alter egos can definitely live without us, but should we let them?

And whatever happened to resting in peace?

Ghost bots are perhaps the most extreme example of our growing desire to maintain a connection with the dead.

Ghost bots are highly realistic avatars of the deceased that provide a sense of continued presence and even interaction.

They're meant to soften the blow of a loved one's death and help facilitate the grieving process and they're part of a growing trend called grief tech.

A.I.

technology that allows users to create a digital copy of themselves after they die, relying on massive input of personal data.

Thank you for having me.

My name is Mohamad Aurangzeb Ahmed.

I'm a research scientist at Harborview Medical Center.

Why did you feel compelled to create a chat bot or a virtual version of your dad?

My children will not have the experience of interacting with their grandfather.

That's when I started thinking about creating a simulation.

I had a lot of transcripts, chat transcripts with my dad, so like messages, letters.

Then I started creating a machine learning based model, so I started feeding it data.

And then they could actually ask their grandfather, the code called their grandfather, some questions about his life.

Do your children fully understand like what the grandpa bot is?

In the beginning for them There was no distinction between the bot and their grandfather, at least in the mind of my older daughter.

They are two distinct entities, so the grandpa bot is more of a machine in her mind now.

How has having your father around digitally affected the grief that you feel?

The earliest version of the bot, the experience of just talking to it, even for a few minutes, that was very powerful.

I would just sometimes just have to turn off my computer and walk away because the emotional response was just very strong.

But over the course of time, I've learned to disentangle myself with that experience.

The primary audience for this system is my children and not myself.

How did people keep their memories alive of their loved ones?

You tell the stories, you look at pictures.

You look at videos, right?

A bot like this is a snapshot of when that person passed away.

Is there something that we should watch out for in terms of using technology rooted in real humans and deep emotions?

There's this danger that people may get overreliant on these technologies.

For example, even now, a lot of people spend more time than they should on their smartphones.

So the danger is that you will spend more and more time talking with people who are no longer there while neglecting the living.

If nobody truly dies anymore, are we ever compelled to face and process our losses, or is there going to be another app for that too?

There's a rapidly evolving cultural movement called Transhumanism that promotes the use of technology, particularly advanced biotechnology and AI, to enhance and ultimately transcend the biological limitations of the human condition.

Transhumanists aim to improve physical and cognitive abilities, prolong lifespans, and finally reach a state where humans fuze with machines and become virtually immortal.

I told you Black Mirror stuff.

Besides ghost bots, one example of a transhumanist project is cryonics.

The practice of freezing bodies or body parts in the hope that future scientists will thaw them and bring them back to life.

For Transhumanists, death is a scandal that can and should be prevented.

I was dying to speak with someone who had a different take.

So I sat down with Elaine Casket, an expert in cyber psychology and author of All The Ghosts in the Machine.

How do you assess our growing desire for digital immortality?

I think that we've gotten into this mind frame of if tech hasn't solved it yet, it's going to solve it.

I think we're also looking to technology to solve for grief.

Even though grief is not a problem, to be solved is a normal part of human existence.

We're now entering a period of time where, thanks to A.I., for example, you can take a person's digital remains, everything, and use that train and AI that can seem really alive.

That has really different implications.

I think than what we've been dealing with up until now, how would that affect the freedom with which you communicated in life?

Yeah, I wouldn't do it.

I wouldn't do anything.

I would be like just a rock and just sit and talk to no one, say nothing.

But who do you think owns who owns our digital footprint?

We don't own our digital footprint right now, much less after we die.

And I think this is really important because I think that we should evolve to a situation where our data belongs to and can be controlled by us, not by the companies and corporations that currently house it and gatekeep it and all that kind of stuff, because it's more up to Meta or more up to Google or whatever.

What happens to your data when you die than it is up to you.

How do we reclaim our digital afterlife?

It completely connects to the question of how do we reclaim our digital life?

Because our digital life becomes our digital afterlife.

We need more of an ability to be able to take back or remove or reclaim our data from any given platform because that data should be ours.

We should be able to have portability.

We should be able to take that with us.

On the real, I am not sure I would want to stick around virtually after I die because the whole point of life is that it's finite.

Very well.

My digital companions, although it's likely not goodbye.

I'll probably see you forever.

And ever.

But don't forget to tell us what you think in the comments!

Before you go, we want to hear your feedback.

Every year, PBS Digital Studios surveys our audience, helping us understand what you enjoy on YouTube and what you would want to see us make more of.

You also get to vote on a new show idea so it'd be great if dead and buried fans were well-represented in the polls.

There's a link in the description.

Thanks.

In advance.