In an episode of the speculative-fiction TV series Black Mirror, after a woman’s boyfriend dies in a car accident she discovers a chatbot that can use her dead partner’s “digital remains” to enable her to simulate talking with him. Because, like most people in the modern world, he created thousands upon thousands of emails, social media posts and the like to sift through, the bot could recreate not only his voice and tone but also his sensibility, his humor, his beliefs — almost his whole personality. The woman’s initial fear of the technology gives way to longing, which makes her ripe for a “premium” version that inserts these capabilities into a lifelike replica of her boyfriend who will sit with her at breakfast, walk with her in the garden and, yes, have sex with her.Several companies — among them, Silicon Intelligence — have made elements of this story a reality by creating “digital ghosts” or “griefbots” that virtually resurrect the dead. Using AI, explains Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a University of Cambridge researcher, technologies can “simulate language patterns and personality traits based on processing huge amounts of personal data.”
The Black Mirror plot of technologically cheating mortality hints at myriad issues concerning what Swedish political scientist Carl Őhman calls “the afterlife of data” in his recent book of that name. As we fire off scores of emails and messages every day, venture onto Instagram or TikTok, bank or date online, and shop on Amazon, rarely do we think about what will happen to the records after we die. Yet, barring massive cyberwarfare, the demise of Alphabet and Meta (the parent companies of Google and Facebook), the nuking of data centers, or the conscious decisions of our heirs, corporations or governments, our information will live on.
A whole lot of it, too. Humanity produces 147 zettabytes (147 followed by 21 zeroes) of data per year — in Őhman’s understatement, the “the largest archives ever assembled.” And some 167,000 data-creators (i.e., people) die every day — another two billion or so by mid-century.
Data, Data Everywhere…
The immortality of data, or at least its daunting longevity, raises a host of issues ranging from ethical to economic to legal. And these are largely ones that are not discussed by economists or business leaders, philosophers or politicians. Or anyone.To begin, consider what becomes of personal data when someone leaves this mortal coil. While digital photos, like old-style photo albums, might reasonably be things that a child, relative or friend might inherit, can posts on Facebook or Reddit, video-game avatars or swipes on Tinder be heritable? Are such data things — or something less tangible, morsels of identity? Is it the property of family and friends or of the corporate behemoths like Apple or Amazon that archive them? Or does it fall into a murky sort of public domain, to be mined by marketers, governments, historians, journalists or run-of-the-mill snoops?
This much is clear: the dead have no legal right to privacy, so embarrassing (or worse) secrets that once would have gone to the grave can posthumously harm reputations or torment descendants. Because people often use search engines as a sort of confessional or a playing field for the id, unarticulated worries and unacted upon desires now leave a vast trace of zeroes and ones. Who would not be embarrassed by what Uncle Elmer left in his deleted email folder?....
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