Digital Immortality May Be In Your Future

November 3, 2018 – Can there be a digital afterlife once our biological selves expire? According to Hossein Rahnama, Director of Research and Innovation in the field of Digital Media at Toronto’s Ryerson University, and a holder of several patents in ubiquitous computing, creating a digital avatar using artificial intelligence and the digitization of a person’s life work could extend our lives indefinitely.

What would a digital version of you be like? Would your immortality be confined to a chat box or a “hey Google” voice interface? Would you be rendered in imagery to be projected as a hologram where you could sit in on corporate boardrooms, or government cabinet meetings to help with decision making?

Rahnama is the creator of Flybits, a company that provides contextual communication for its clients to send to customers through analysis of their digitally-tracked behaviours. He has used the Flybits experience to help him found Augmented Eternity, a distributed machine intelligence network that maps an individual’s digital presence to create a knowledge base which is then converted into a software agent. The software agent serves as a digital version of you and Augmented Eternity hopes to release a tool to give you the ability to create your digital afterlife using an open source identity rendering kit.

What will the kit do? If you are a heart surgeon, you will capture every digitally-created aspect of your professional practice and then make your post-life avatar available to consult with heart surgeons and cardiologists who are alive. If you are a corporate lawyer, the compendium of your life’s practice when digitally rendered can continue to serve your existing clients after your passing or allow you to gain new ones through your online presence. In other words, your digital avatar could be making money for your descendants for as long your accumulated knowledge remains relevant.

The technology combines context-aware computing, machine intelligence, and a mobile human-computer interface in rendering your digital avatar. Combined with natural language generation and familiar tools like chat boxes, your future may exist well past the best before date that appears on your headstone. Rahnama calls this digital evolution inevitable and believes it represents our future digital identity where we can continue to interact with the world after our biology has winked out. Through a digital afterlife, you will help living humanity deal with the problems you have solved in the past. But unlike a collection of papers, or books you may have written, the digital rendering of you will be interactive and will seem very much alive.