From Virtual Personas to a Digital Afterlife

Recent years have seen a steady growth of interest in what happens to our digital presence after we die. As exemplified by Aura there are a variety of steps we can take now to manage that presence, gracefully closing it down or by establishing our own memorialisation pages, or by sending messages to loved ones.

Such memorial pages are what I would describe as passive and non-interactive forms of Digital Afterlife. Some organisations are already looking at the idea of creating a more interactive version of you that can exist beyond your death. Perhaps one of the most extreme forms recently has been the South Korean Reality-TV show Meeting You where bereaved families are “re-united” with digital recreations of recently lost loved-ones to say a final goodbye. The re-creation here though is by the TV production company, working with the family, rather than something created by the deceased themselves.

A more interactive type of Digital Afterlife could be a form of chatbot. A chatbot is a computer programme which mimics human conversation – and a well-developed chatbot should feel little different from talking to a real person. Websites such as Eter9 (no longer public), Lifenaut and Eternime (now defunct) promise(ed) the chance to build a chatbot of yourself – but don’t seem to be getting very far. Whilst recent experiments such as Google Duplex have shown that it is possible for a chatbot to have a conversation with a human without them realising they are talking to chatbot they are typically in a very narrow (and structured) area of knowledge – in the Google Duplex case booking a restaurant table over the phone. Achieving such deception more widely is still a long way off – and achieving it for a particular person rather than of a generic “assistant” is even further off. All very much reminiscent though of Black Mirror’s Be Right Back episode!

However, there is one route to such chatbots which seems more achievable.

Virtual personas are chatbots or virtual humans based around a specific person – and increasingly being referred to as Digital Twins. The reasons for wanting to create such a persona are driven by really mundane needs, such as how to keep corporate memory within an organisation – particular if people are leaving or retiring early, or the nature of the job makes it hard to get in contact with previous post-holders. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just have a quick chat with the previous people to do your job – asking for their views and opinions, mining their knowledge and experience, even if they were now working elsewhere, or for someone else, or retired – or you’re just too embarrassed to call them?

Whilst a Virtual Persona could be built as a discrete task, the better way may be that it gets built as a background task. If in the future you are using a virtual assistant to help manage your life, perhaps even to screen calls and deal with routine emails, then who better to help build that virtual persona than your virtual assistant – perhaps a good argument for virtual assistants and their data being under an individual’s control rather than being managed by a big tech company!

But what if the Virtual Persona didn’t just become a passive entity on your death but became an active, and not just interactive, entity? What if that Persona continued an active “life” reflecting your interests and wishes, whether in business, social, political, cultural, financial or family affairs? As more and more of our lives become digitised, from Facebook Messenger and Zoom chats, through on-line banking, to gig economy working (through People-Per-Hour and the like) and romance (whether on Tinder or a virtual world like Second Life) the more feasible it is for our a Virtual Persona to just take over our life. The novels Kiss Me First and The After Wife have interesting takes on this, and more and more popular culture is exploring ideas around such a digital afterlife (from Humans and Devs to Caprica and Upload). And with COVID19 almost all of our social and business interactions became, for a time, digitally mediated.

When I’ve carried out polls on the idea of having a virtual persona live on into the Digital Afterlife, it’s interesting that people are often far keener to have their own virtual persona living on after their own death than they are to have a persona of a loved one living on beyond the loved-one’s death – it seems they’d rather have a clean break than be virtually checked up on, but aren’t averse to checking up themselves! Does this mean that those Virtual Persona might end up living in their own city of the dead – as in Upload? Having a spatial existence through a virtual world seems like it could be an important ingredient in “grounding” a virtual person, and so such a city may not be as fanciful as it sounds. And there is no reason why that city needs be on Earth – who better to explore a distant planet or star than a virtual city full of dead – but still “living” – scientists, explorers and artists! A lot cheaper than trying to ship biological people.

Whilst some of these ideas may seemed far-fetched, it’s important to note that none of them rely on currently fanciful technology such as brain-uploading. They are all logical developments of technology which we are using right now. Those first virtual personas may not be very convincing, that is true, but they will help us better understand the ethical and emotional challenges that may lie in our future and be better prepared once the technological challenges are overcome.