Afterlife Avatars

One of the unique human traits is the preservation of memories of the people that have passed away from our lives. We keep their pictures, stories, personal items, video and audio recordings, and other reminders about who they were and what they meant for us. Sometimes, the necessity to communicate with someone who has passed away is so strong (due to overwhelming emotions, unresolved guilt, superstitions, etc), that we employ the use of psychics and palm readers and fortune tellers to help us reach out to our dear ones. I think it is inevitable that soon we will be able to do the same with the cyber-world representations, or Avatars, of our friends and family who have left us. I would like to see how people’s behaviors and interactions with the Afterlife Avatars (AL-atar) will shape and change overtime.

It is not so hard to imagine how much an avatar can eventually come to resemble its owner. As technology evolves ever faster, it is possible that avatars will evolve into intelligent entities with the ability to mimic and preserve our behavior and thought processes. We leave tremendous amounts of data about who we are and how we act - on social sites like Facebook and Myspace, in virtual environments like Second Life, in our financial/spending history, in our mailboxes and personal files, etc. As Artificial Intelligence evolves and we use more sophisticated computational mechanisms - recursive logic, neuronal networks, evolutional algorithms and quantum computing (Kurzweil), just to name a few - it is possible that our avatars will learn how to think and act like us. It is also possible that we will become more attracted to avatars primarily due to their quality to closely resemble us, and thus we will go to great lengths to design them in our liking. Furthermore, it is possible that the AL-atars will not stop where we have left and will continue to develop further and “live” on.

When I pass away what will my friends do with my Facebook page? Will they simply visit it to leave their condolences? Will they engage in conversations among themselves about who I was and what I meant to everybody? Will they ever wish to communicate with me via my AL-atar? Sure, they will know that I am dead and they are dealing with something that thinks and acts like I do, but how far can and will they go in believing my AL-atar? If my AL-atar is just like me - it can leave similar comments, likes, ask questions, provide interesting links - where is the borderline between the real me and the fictional me? Will my grand-grand-grand-grand-grandchildren ever want to communicate with me and ask me for some advice? How will humans’ perception of the dead change in general? If more and more almost-identical versions of ourselves start to populate cyber-worlds in the near future, will we pay the same kind of attention to cemeteries? Is it possible that AL-atars will start to communicate with other AL-atars? What can come out of this? AL-atar sounds a lot like Altar, and ironically, the symbolic meaning is pretty similar too. How will our Altar-keeping culture transform in the AL-atar future?