With over 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, 200 million Tweets posted daily, and an average of 90 pieces of content per user posted to Facebook every day, we are uploading our personalities, our thoughts, and our ideas onto the web, but what happens to these online personas after we die?
Already services are offering options for this — such as IfIDie.Net — which lets you record a last video or Tweet to be posted once you die. Even Facebook’s recent rollout of Timeline allows users to make a digital archive of their lives. But SVP Content & Exec Editor at Mashable, Adam Ostrow, takes it once step further in this video as he discusses the implications of these ideas mixed with machine learning, where computers can make intelligent decisions based on data.
Ostrow notes that computers grow more advanced at analyzing content every day. He wonders whether a person’s death and the personification of their analyzed content can extend their life virtually. For example, what if we could program robots to act like a person based on their created content? This isn’t too far of a stretch. One site, My Next Tweet, already offers a service that will analyze all your tweets to predict what you’ll say next.
What if Adam is right? Will we need to redefine our definition of “life?”
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