If you're a programmer it's certainly possible you might have some pre-canned scripts to run -- perhaps telling nephew Susie she should have a great birthday and life once she turns 18. Maybe you have something to detect jokes your Uncle tells and add in a "lol" in a comment. Aside from being weird, is that socially acceptable? Should relatives help you do this?
This is the paragraph of the article that I found the most interesting from a sociological point of view (the rest has been covered many times in the past, and as other commenters have pointed out there are several services who deal with it). I wrote a bit more about it a while ago, as I think that this will become something potentially very real in the next few decades:
I agree that this is the most interesting part of the article, sociologically. My father was a tech guy who passed away over ten years ago, I believe that if you had the power to do so it would be an invaluable gift to your loved ones to leave them little messages every so often… (as long as your relationship was healthy!) But unlike the attached article implies, psychologists shouldn’t be concerned as I don’t think most people will ever feel like we are truly “communicating” with our deceased loved ones as communication is always a two-way streak.
A robot giving standard-human like answers (or a relative enabling that) isn’t really your loved one communicating unless that loved one somehow took the time to sit there and guess what you might answer in different scenarios. As much as I’d love periodic messages and jokes sent from my dead father to appear every once and a while (and would look forward to and treasure them) I could never feel compelled to reply back to him, or desire a robotic answer, and once you cross that line then I think it falls into “socially unacceptable”.
What about when we get to the point where we have an AI capable of simulating, if imperfectly, an individual's response to a given question?
If you think that this is farfetched, it's not - it's basically like http://iwl.me , but in reverse. The catch is that you need a lot of easily classified textual data about the person. But in the Twitter age, we do have that kind of information - or soon will.
Gracious Eloise[1] is a really cool idea, though it's going to create a nightmarish situation for forensics experts. Imagine if you combined the two - you could simulate what a person might say, and you could simulate their actual handwriting for it.
I remember reading about something like this in a few science fiction novels by Jack McDevitt (the "Alex Benedict" series) -- basically people had left behind AI versions of themselves that some of the protagonists interviewed to try to piece together interstellar archaeological mysteries.
I was thinking about a related issue yesterday: In 100 years, which free web services, where I can post content, will still be around, with high probability?
Wikipedia is one, but most of my edits will probably be buried by then. My Wikimedia user profile page will still be up, maybe.
Maybe the Internet Archive (archive.org).
Maybe the arXiv (arxiv.org), though it may be renamed or subsumed by then.
What else?
Maybe public libraries could offer some kind of digital archival service for people in the area they serve?
I'm intrigued at your speculation that Wikipedia will likely still be around in 100 years. Clearly the internet phenomenon is important, becoming more important every day, yet still changing so fast that it's still in its infancy relatively speaking. Will it mature into something much more stable ? Is it like the automobile industry in 1920 or so, and Wikipedia, Google and Facebook are something like GM, Ford and Chrysler ? Maybe. On the other hand perhaps the rate of change is so great that its leading to something completely unrecognisable in 100 years, which none of today's players will feature in.
perhaps the rate of change is so great that its leading to something completely unrecognisable in 100 years
That seems to be the most likely scenario.
Proof: Hop into your time-machine and try to explain the internet to someone from 100 years ago.
Remember, the first computer (Z1) was invented only 76 years ago. The first commercial TV-sets became available 92 years ago. Our technology is evolving at a mind-bending pace.
I wouldn't be surprised if Star Trek style voice input was the norm by the time I bite the dust. I wonder if my grand-kids will still use keyboards or consider them a relic...
You need to work on your proofs. Counterexample: hop in your time machine, go back to 1550, kidnap someone, take them back to 1450, and have them explain the printing press. Easy peasy.
Second counterexample: Edison made his first big move redesigning stock tickers. I'm pretty sure Edison could grok the Internet.
I find it strangely unsettling that if I die, my Minecraft clan will never know what happened to me. I'll just vanish one day. They will spend some time trying to contact me but probably won't make a connection with anybody who can tell them what happened. And nobody who is sure to know about my death would know to contact them.
That's why you should write down some instructions for your family so they can let them know. It's probably a good idea to describe your relationship with your clan a littlebit, because they'd like to know, and so they can make better judgement on how to bring the news depending on how close you are with your clan members. Another good idea is to mention that "Uncle Joe probably knows how to log on to Minecraft and such" (/s/Joe/your favourite tech-savvy family member or friend/, of course)
I think he should have signed that text crytographically. (in case his site is hacked, or in case the server goes down and different people pretend to have conflicting versions of that text)
All of our digital ephemera (photos, blog posts, emails, reviews, tweets, code, and accounts) and so forth can theoretically last forever. In reality, disk drives and servers can die, domain registrations will expire, data formats will become outdated, and more.
Even if you have the bits and you can read them, you may be faced with a excavation job. Who has time to dig through someone else's email? Are we generating more data than we can process or appreciate? I just checked my family camera archive -- 279 GB, 135,042 files. When does this legacy turns in to a liability?
At some point, long-running sites will have to start making some interesting and difficult decisions. They can start to purge the seemingly dead members, they can have a way to flag a member as alive or dead, and they'll have to report their membership as 10 million live and active users, 20 million dead [and presumably inactive] users.
Maybe that's theoretically true - but so far, copyright wars aside, it's been moving in the other direction, as storage and bandwidth get ever cheaper. One person finds a Super-8 film when they renovate the attic, it gets transferred, they upload it to YouTube, and now it's permanently on the Internet.
You can now listen to the earliest recorded audio[1] (which was never heard or playable in its own time), read many of Isaac Newton's original manuscripts[2] (with plans to triple the archive this year), and google ["yeeees" guy] to watch a clip of Frank Nelson[3].
You don't have to excavate at all; you just have to make it searchable so that someday, someone will run across it. This is what we have with just text search. Now add in PhotoSynth (the original, Flickr-driven version[4] with every photo ever, not the watered-down panorama app), automatic audio transcription, content-aware image search, "hum that tune" (Shazam, SoundHound, etc.). Within a decade, we'll have "imagine that video and search for it".
"Movage" becomes less of a problem because while it's not worth it for you to individually convert various old files on your hard drive, Google has no problem re-encoding their entire library to add HTML5 codecs: Write the script once and wait a few years for it to finish. It's already in some master, readable format, so they don't have the "ten versions of Word .DOCs" problem (or if they do, they hide it very well).
If anything, we're entering an age where nothing goes out of print, and there are no lost films. Ever. Yes, we have to fight some copyright battles, but the outcome is inevitable; in 50 years, all laws will be written by people who grew up with BitTorrent, not the DuMont network.
Someone coined a great term for this new age of digital plenty, but I forgot it. In ten years, I'll be able to Google that thought and tell you what it was.
To make it right we, human beings, should be closer to one another. He is right about too complicated digital assets structure. And probably even few evenings will be not enough to explain all of it. I believe this communication should happen always, not only during last days... in ideal world.
Now, we are not in ideal world and probably never will be. Children often hate what parents love, significant others do not want to hear what their other part up to. This complicates things even more :)
I do not think anything really changes with digital age, same old issues in new light - that's it. Love your parents, encourage your children, genuinely ask what bothers your spouse at work.
The answer isn't adding a layer of complexity, your heirs don't want to deal with your Github account in all likelihood. The author's uncle probably cleaned out his garage before he invited everyone down. Doing the same digitally, should begin much earlier.
Donald Knuth probably can be credited for figuring out how to with this issue first.
Having done so is consistent with his place in the pantheon of programmers.
This got me wondering about how I could provide my passwords to people if something were to happen to me. Not even so much for Github or the like but for my online banking, credit cards, etc so it would be easier to wind down those affairs. I have online billing set up for those so it's not even like you could wait for the statements to come in the mail and settle them that way.
I can always just tell my wife my passwords, but what if something happens to the both of us?
I was almost tempted to start a document that would keep all that stuff, and share it in Dropbox with a few trusted people. It would be encrypted; I would keep the public key on my computer so I could continue to update it. The private key would be on a CD in a safe deposit box with instructions that those people could access it if I am incapacitated.
Sounds too complicated, though; that's why I haven't ever done it.
If it's not a really long GPG key or anything, it's probably easiest to just write it down on paper and store it at a secure place. Secure being, if you trust your cupboard to hold the binder with your bank statements, that would work fine.
Society overall and human mind in particular have a great tool that handles that situation: forgetting.
Stuff that is not in use is gradually getting forgotten. So if you do not update your project (because you abandoned it or because you are dead), then the project is getting useless and is gradually forgotten.
Yes, you can put some effort into maintaining your digital project after your death, but it worth the overhead only in a very rare cases. Most of the time it's better to spend the effort on creating new project, than on maintaining someone else's digital project.
Apparently my father agrees with you. He is doing fine, but last year he decided to share with me his account info from money-generating websites. (He gets about $300/month from a stock photo site.) I suppose it gave him comfort that if anything were to happen, the fruit of his labor (ie, income from his designs) would continue to benefit the family.
Also, hate to nitpick, but the phrase is "I couldn't care less," meaning your level of care is already at the minimum.
I'd love to see that as a free software daemon, or cronjob, which I can run on one of my website's servers.
However, storing very sensitive information at a central place - a place which aims to collect sensitive information from many other people? Well, that's an invitation to abuse! How could I ever trust my most sensitive data to such a system?
It would be great of "deadmansswitch.net" would just handle encrypted data without ever having a look at it. However, as it is desinged now, it's not me who encrypts my stuff, but they. There is absolutely no chance I could ever trust such a service.
But assume they would hand encryption over to their users. Then, their service would become pretty pointless, as they would be nothing more than yet another data storage service.
Either way, I don't see any sense in that service, except as a very well-desinged satire on the current everything-as-a-webservice hype.
It's probably over-engineered, but the alternatives seemed not secure enough to feel comfortable using.