A digital life after death

It is perhaps not surprising that during a pandemic, we find ourselves thinking more than usual about death and what lies beyond. So the news that Microsoft has filed to patent the process of building chat bots from dead people's social media histories, seems somewhat timely.Microsoft's patent covers chatbots built from anyone's digital history, not just the dead. But it is there that your mind immediately goes. Especially if you have been reading Neal Stephenson's latest novel Fall, as I have. Fall is about the creation of a virtual world into which human bodies can be scanned at the point of death. The newly created 'souls' retain some aspects of their personality, albeit not their full memories.

We can rebuild him

Microsoft's proposal is to delve through the digital archives of an individual and recreate their personality in digital form. The system would apparently draw on “images, voice data, social media posts and electronic messages” to build a profile. It might even use a ‘voice font’ assembled from recordings to make it sound like them, or recreate their image in 2 or 3D. Of course, with current levels of technology, we can't actually replicate human thought processes or capability. But call centre systems can already assemble original conversations from stores of data. A conversation with a chatbot such as Microsoft may seem fairly true to the original. It may even be able to say completely original things, if it can process news media through the lens of what it understands about a person's views.

Do not resuscitate

For me the main problem with this is about consent. Do you want a digital puppet based on your personality existing in the world after you are gone? Could you stop someone creating one if you wanted to? After all, many of us have sufficient digital footprints to support the creation of basic deepfakes today. It's not a massive leap to think someone could create a virtual clone of us today without our consent. The only reason I have a blue tick on Twitter is that someone - maliciously - created a digital identity pretending to be me, so some people are clearly motivated to do this. Imagine if that digital clone had been autonomous rather than human-controlled. Imagine if they could have spawned hundreds of virtual Toms, each time one was shut down.These are extremes. But we are already having to face issues of consent around digital resurrection. From holographic performances by Tupac or Elvis, to Kanye's holographic gift to Kim Kardashian: a speaking representation of her father with a message from beyond the grave. Who has the right to resurrect us?

The big conversations

These are questions to which we don't have answers today. Like so many technologies, this possibility creates questions for society about ethics, etiquette and law. And as is so often the case, we feel ill-equipped to address the range of questions at the speed required. Facebook may have abandoned its mantra of 'move fast and break things', but our approach to dealing with new technologies remains to break things first, then work out how to fix them.The prospect of a digital afterlife in one form or another is already moving from science fiction to reality. If you want to live forever, or want to ensure that your end is a true end, it may be time to update your will. 

Teaching technology isn't about the economy, it’s about democracy

I recently spent some time at Raspberry Jamboree, a day of education and sharing, based around the credit-card sized low-cost computer, the Raspberry Pi. The demographic here is wonderful. Yes, there are the middle-aged men with beards you may have expected. But there are also plenty of women and children — boys and girls. The atmosphere is inquisitive, open and discursive. Everyone is learning. People point to the various components on sale to accessorise their little computers and ask strangers: “What does that do?”I had a great time.Two weeks later I got a phone call from the BBC. Will I come on and talk about Theresa May’s plans for the internet following the London and Manchester attacks.Here we go again, I thought.Theresa May, like many politicians, likes to talk about ensuring that terrorists can’t communicate beyond the surveillance of the state. It sounds pretty reasonable to the uneducated — which is most people when it comes to the inner workings of the internet. Why would Google, Facebook and Apple want to allow terrorists to communicate? Surely they can allow GCHQ a little peek into people’s messages if it will prevent a tragedy?Of course, it isn't that simple. There are all sorts of reasons why it just isn't practical — or desirable — to give the security services a key to our secured communications. Cory Doctorow sums them up best.To put it even more succinctly, interfering with encryption would collapse many of the services on which our modern lives are increasingly dependent, while leaving terrorists free to access a separate range of entirely secure technologies.The problem is, most people don’t understand this. They’re ill-equipped for the technical argument, let alone the moral one.This is why events like Raspberry Jamboree and the wider initiative to educate people about technology is so important. Yes, digital skills are crucial to the economy, but they are also crucial to all other aspects of modern life.Participation isn't just about the skills you need to access services, it’s about a reasonable proportion of the population being able to make informed choices about the controls placed on those services.

Why The Future of Digital is Physical

I often have the same conversations many times over. Sometimes they’re with other people, on air or answering questions at a talk. Sometimes they are entirely in my head, as part of a blog post or just a thought process. It means I’m never quite sure what I’ve said and to whom. So forgive me if this is an idea I’ve shared before, but I couldn’t find reference to it on my blog.There’s a belief in the minds of many of the more mature that young people have given themselves over to the digital realm. That they are more interested in the screen than the sky and that this is somehow inherently damaging. And that they engage indiscriminately without thought to future consequence.Personally, I think this is nonsense on a number of levels.

Digital augments the physical

Firstly, my own observations of the young people I work with and how they use technology suggests that its primary function is to organise physical engagement — of every type. Why have services like Snapchat and Instagram become so popular? Because they encourage the sharing of your current real-world experience. Facebook is increasingly dominated by videos and photos. Tinder? Well, its success speaks for itself. These tools are being used to organise future real-world experiences and share the ones they have already had.There is an argument about the narcissistic, show-off culture that drives us to use these tools. And one that says we would be better off enjoying the experience than constantly trying to share it from behind a screen. But to say that young people use digital tools as an alternative to the physical? I think that is increasingly wrong.Young people’s TV consumption is falling as they consume more digital media on mobile devices and we have to see this as primarily a good thing: they are moving from a passive activity to a more active one, albeit one that carries risks.

Privacy conscious

Secondly, there is the charge that the young engage indiscriminately online, sharing personal information without a thought for risks. Again I have to say the behaviours I’ve witnessed and the success of private messaging services suggest this is not true.There was absolutely a generation who were young when social media was an absolute novelty and who embraced it without a second thought. That generation has probably shared a lot of stuff they’d now like to retrieve.But the generation that followed them is a lot more savvy. Hence the success of Snapchat and less public messaging services like WhatsApp and their diminished use of Facebook. They are careful about what they share, and where they share it.

Merging worlds

So what does this say about the future?Despite the so-far limited success of augmented reality (Google Glass etc), I believe strongly that we will increasingly see the physical and digital worlds merge as more items are connected and our interfaces to them become more natural and human. Our digital interactions will become more subtle: conversation and gestures, colours and vibrations, head up, not head down. We will become better at receiving, filtering and responding to information via multiple sensory channels. We’re capable: just look at how we deal with all of the information flying at us when driving a car at speed.Young people aren’t lost in some cyber netherworld. They’re mapping out our increasingly physical, digital future.