We can look forward to witnessing an infrastructural acknowledgement of the vastness of scale of human death: Initially guised in the form of “public health services”, corporations at the scale of Facebook and Amazon will grow robust services around the handling of the dead, or the soon-to-be dead. In a truly general sense, it’s only a matter of time before the profiles of the dead exceed the amount of living profiles across social networks and companies will develop means by which revenue can be generated from the non-content-producing dead.
Corporation-backed affordances for ‘hosting the dead’ will result in everyday people having access to the same technologies that keep Carrie Fisher in suspended animation, forever subject to the whims of profit generation. The everyday influencer will persist past their death, and society will find itself in a position where influential bodies no longer lie in wait to be discovered, but constitute active presences in social networks – virtual human bodies as literal extensions of the advertising–surveillance machine. Virtual influencers will cease to be interesting as the dead-who-still-persist are piloted by lifestyle/PR companies.
Old Musicians Never Die. They Just Become Holograms. (Published 2020)
Now Vlahos is bringing his Dadbot technology to HereAfter AI. The platform lets the dead live on as what Vlahos calls a "Life Story Avatar" that chats on demand, in the recorded voice of the deceased.
Talk with your dead loved ones -- through a chatbot
The idea resurfaced in the last couple years as Medina’s own daughter, now 9, said she never really met her grandparents. Medina decided to launch his startup Lalo — also his dad’s nickname — with the mission of giving people a private, digital space to connect, share stories and hold on to precious memories.
Currently operating as a small, private beta, Lalo is an app that facilitates the collection of digital content such as images, video, voice, text and more. Away from the noise and common pitfalls of traditional social media platforms, groups are intentionally kept small to foster increased trust and privacy. Imagine family members gathering to collect the best recipes in one space or share images that might have been lost to an unseen photo album.