The moral boundaries of digital immortality
Outline of the project
I wanted to convey to the participants that ‘in the future of data immortality, the deceased will not be able to collect back all their privacy in full, and the moral boundary between life and death becomes blurred.’ The aim was to get participants to understand that even though algorithms can preserve information and memories for people who have passed away, it is still important that the dead are respected. The project is made interesting by designing small programs that create characters to simulate the life of a community. First participants create a persona in the software through a basic privacy protocol, and then participants can live in a virtual community through this persona. They will meet some tempting multiple choice questions in the community, thus allowing the participants to appear in the community with their secrets. For example, pet cats are not allowed in the community, but participants are tempted to quietly keep a cat, which is then the participant’s secret in the community experience. When the participant’s virtual character reaches the end of its life, the participant is unable to open the program, while their virtual character is still kept running. Their secret is also being made known to those around them, and while everyone around them knows everything about the participant’s character, the participant is still unable to change anything in the community. This is like the death of reality, separating the real self from the virtual self. The experience is one that first creates conditions for participants to generate privacy, prompting them to create secrets, and later when the character slowly moves towards the point of death, they have no control over the character, just as the deceased has no way of knowing whose data is in their possession after death. Participants have no way of knowing how their virtual personas are treated by the community, and the value of life and death in Data Immortality becomes difficult to measure.
Why dose the project need to be undertaken?
In the past, we revered nature and respected life because of death. We sought the meaning of existence because of our only life and lived out the splendor of life.
When digital immortality preserves people as data, it reimagines them and re-recognises them in the virtual world.
As virtual reality technology and algorithms get better, and dead people start talking to people again, it seems to reduce the fear of death, but whether the value of life will become less important. Do we waste time and our lives because we are not afraid of death?
The tree can grow for hundreds of years, but it can’t move to other environments. Stable and familiar environments protect it from stable growth. But who benefits from the privacy of our information, our happiness, our sadness and our thoughts being sold as commodities on the rapidly growing and ever-changing virtual web, and what controls the privacy of the dead?
What readings and independent research has led to the project….
In “Your digital life after death”, the author of the video offers virtual reality reconstructions, based on photographs and videos, that let family members greet the deceased People want to know how life is lived in the world after death and how the deceased is remembered.[1] In another article, the authors use a new virtual reality approach to remembering the dead as an alternative to past memorials, so that people can even meet and greet the deceased again. 2045 Initiative is to “create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a non-biological carrier, and extending existence, including to the point of immortality”. [2]This plan puts digital immortality on the agenda early on, where the deceased can reappear in the network. But does death become meaningless when the physically deceased takes on another form of existence that also affects people and societies that are still alive? The power of the digital dead to manipulate the living is enormous, and it is difficult to deny the demands of those close to us, which becomes another kind of moral kidnapping.[3] At this point, the issue of trust will be brought back into focus, if the ‘digital immortality’ algorithm is draining us of trust and love for the passing world. More and more people are now concerned about their privacy on the internet, but with unclear rules, it is still a bad thing when a person’s privacy is collected and regenerated at will after death. We need to think about where the boundaries of ‘digital immortality’ lie, how we can protect the privacy of the living, and how we can respect life.
Personal motivation doe the project
Some interesting key words were extracted from the reading material in the course, such as algorithm, nation, race, economy, prejudice, etc. I am very interested in algorithms, which have become an inescapable topic in our communication and life nowadays. Changes in algorithms may affect the way of life in the future, and people’s way of thinking and values will be challenged. As more and more people change, it slowly grows from a small group to a huge network of communities. Algorithms bring new challenges to the society of today, where computer vision technology reshapes virtual characters and reflects on the value and meaning of human existence.
I often struggle with the inability to delete software from my computer and the privacy it contains. It’s always in front of me like a deep, bottomless ocean, and I don’t know where my data will float to, I don’t know what my information will be boiled down to. But what I am sure of is that my privacy is no longer in my hands like it used to be when I could put it in my pocket and press it into the corner of my room. I sometimes marvel at how accurately the algorithms judge what I want when I browse the web, and how my decisions are no longer self-judged conclusions, but are generated by my preferences and habits. Although this is not a bad thing now, it saves us a lot of time. But what if when my life comes to an end, I am not in control of all my secrets and the algorithm has been trained by my habits to act like a second me. It is far easier to change an algorithm than to change oneself. Algorithms don’t have likes and dislikes and it is hard to make decisions. One can let algorithms play people and learn this data, for example there are many relationship games, role games, maybe in the future people can fall in love with algorithms and live together in a virtual world. At this point digital immortality will blur the line between life and death and the value of existence and life will be questioned again, and this is when we have to be wary of some moral issues and values.
Reference
- ‘Digital immortality’. In Wikipedia, 17 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_immortality&oldid=1055636333.
- MIT Technology Review. ‘Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever’. Accessed 19 March 2022. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/18/139457/digital-version-after-death/.
- The Plaid Zebra. ‘This company wants to help you achieve digital immortality’, 12 February 2015. https://theplaidzebra.com/achieve-digital-immortality/.
- ted.com. ‘Your digital life after death’, 13 September 2016. https://ideas.ted.com/your-digital-life-after-death/.
[1] ‘Your digital life after death’, ideas.ted.com (blog), 13 September 2016, https://ideas.ted.com/your-digital-life-after-death/.
[2] ‘Digital immortality’, in Wikipedia, 17 November 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_immortality&oldid=1055636333.
[3] ‘Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever’, MIT Technology Review, accessed 19 March 2022, https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/18/139457/digital-version-after-death/.
[4] ‘This company wants to help you achieve digital immortality’, The Plaid Zebra, 12 February 2015, https://theplaidzebra.com/achieve-digital-immortality/.