Scientists at MIT are creating digital footprints of people to make them immortal

Computer scientists at MIT have started a new initiative titled ‘Augmented eternity’ with the purpose of creating digital footprints of people that can be used to re-create them even after their death.

Currently, the experiment includes 25 people spanning different professional interests and all walks of life. The project is led by Hossein Rahnama, an entrepreneur and researcher based at Ryerson University in Toronto, and a visiting faculty member at MIT’s Media Lab.

The idea first came to life as Rahnama was approached by a CEO of a major financial institution who expressed his desire to live forever. Rahnama took on the challenge and proposed developing a virtual avatar of the CEO that could outlive him and that could serve as a virtual ‘consultant’ even after the death of the CEO.

According to the creators of Augmented eternity, one’s digital avatar would be able to interact with people also without the presence of its source individual. The model relies heavily on our online presence and while it may pose difficulties for the elderly of today, it will be comparatively easy to gather all of the data on an individual who has joined social media from an early age.

According to the latest data, approximately 1.7 million Facebook users pass away every year. While some of the accounts are deleted by their close ones, some linger on forever. By feeding this data into an algorithm, Rahnama believes that it is possible to create sufficiently authentic digital versions of the real people.