A creepy post

 I am sure you all read one of those self-help books that ask you to think about the kind of speech you would want to hear on your funeral, and then advise you to live your life accordingly. Well, this Ted-talk will put that old commonplace into a new perspective. Adam Ostrow in his short speech reveals that now we are close to the moment when it becomes possible to create our ’live avatar’ after our death, based on our past social media presence: our posts, pictures and videos.

Now (the data is from 2011) there is 48 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute, 200 million tweets posted every day and an average user posts 90 pieces of content per month. The implication of this is that we are archiving our lives as no other generations before. At the same time, technology is improving faster than ever. Computer programs can now analyze insane amount of data and researchers at MIT are experimenting with robots who can interact like humans. Ostrow raises the logical question: what if we put this two together? We then can create robots who can act based on  the characteristics of a specific person with the help of the digital data she has provided during her lifetime.

So if ever in doubt about how to guide your online presence, just think about this prospect. If you feel you need a little help in seeing where you are heading, just go to http://yes.thatcan.be. The program (based on your past tweets) will show what your next tweet is likely to be. If you don’t like it, change your twitter ways, until it is not too lateJ