Laura Parker explores the after-death services of the startup Eterni.me, which promises clients a kind of digital immortality:
The service’s defining feature is a 3-D digital avatar, designed to look and sound like you, whose job will be to emulate your personality and dish out bits of information to friends and family taken from a database of stored information. A user will be encouraged to “train” its avatar, through daily interactions, in order to improve its vocabulary and conversational skills. Eterni.me’s co-founder, Marius Ursache, thinks of it as a more advanced version of Siri, who, ten or fifteen years from now, will be able to “respond to questions more naturally, and learn from every conversation you have with her.” …
Developmental psychologists often talk about the importance of leaving a legacy—something tied to who we are that will outlive us. But this is usually something obvious, like having children or writing a novel. An avatar with an approximation of your voice and bone structure, who can tell your great-grandchildren how many Twitter followers you had, doesn’t feel like the same thing.
And what of the period of grief in the days, weeks, and months following a friend or relative’s death? “A post-death avatar goes against all we know about bereavement,” Joan Berzoff, the director of an end-of-life certificate program at the Smith College School for Social Work, in Northampton, Massachusetts, told me.
For the time being, it seems that Eterni.me’s appeal is more philosophical than practical. “A hundred years down the track you might not only be able to talk to your mom who died a year ago, but to your grandmother who died when you were sixteen, and your great-grandmother who died before you was born,” Susan Bluck, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, said. “So it means that we could, in some way, forge relations with ancestors who lived and died well before our own lifetime.”
The Dish 