What Happens to Your Data After You Die?

If you're like me,

you're probably always in front of your screens.

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?

[gentle music]

I'm gonna 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.

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[upbeat music]

In 2019, Twitter announced

that it was gonna start deleting 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 archeological sites that we leave behind,

will only expand.

We'll be able to see how you weighed in

on certain cultural moments.

Like whether the dress was blue or gold,

nsync or BSB, or if you've heard Yanny or Laurel.

[Machine] Yanny, Yanny.

It's definitely Laurel 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 estimate to be over 30 million dead people on Facebook,

which is just mind blowing

because they all send birthday reminders,

they're on LinkedIn, they're sending work anniversaries.

So it's a disgrace, really.

[Sinead] That's Rikard, 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 priceless photos in your iCloud account,

your loved ones may not find them.

If you had that Bitcoin somewhere hidden away,

priceless sort of memories

and monetary assets will be lost forever.

Who owns that data?

Do the tech company 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 wanna 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 be good for who you are.

Whether you wanna 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.

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AI chat bots, 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 want it to learn from

and eventually replicate.

And the AI that powers these chat bots

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 fiance using a chat bot.

And he did this by training it

on her old texts and Facebook messages.

And he said that there were elements of the conversation

that truly reminded him of her.

And that the chat bot 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 chat bots

on the grieving process?

I mean, in some cases it seems to help,

but where's the line?

When we think about losing people,

or 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.

And if we perhaps are prolonging or continuing

to be able to have access to these individuals through AI,

is it prolonging our pain?

Is it 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, and my framework and scaffolding

is really allowing each individual

to have their own experience

and bringing into the room with them, their world view.

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 a 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's 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.

[upbeat music]

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 engrams.

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?

The idea of uploading memories to the cloud for example,

is really popular in culture right now,

TV shows like Upload or Westworld really speaks to this.

And futurists like Ray Kurzweil has championed this idea

for some time and he, even suggest that by 2045,

that we'll be able to do this.

[Sinead] This is Dr. Joshua Sariñana,

a neuroscientist who explores how technology

can let us 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

in 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.

Our 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.

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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.

Then that's exactly what artificial neural networks do.

Like everything around us, your cell phone,

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.

Yes. Then there's in the end,

two of you, in a way.

I compared it a Y where the stalk 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,

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 change 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,

the 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

to 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 gonna have a situation

where they're gonna 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 gonna 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 house the mind?

Yes, people have space wrong.

The Star Treks and the Star Wars,

and the light speed or faster than light speed travel,

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 till it's here

and then trying to clean up the mess after it happens.

[soft music]

The digital afterlife is a spectrum,

from the photos that we share and the emails that we send

to a potential 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

in knowing that death may not have to stay so final.

But there's also something kind of beautiful in 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.

[soft music]