Death is Optional With Futuristic Personality Storage Service

It’s been said in many different ways: the only sure things in life are death and taxes. But what if you didn’t have to die? What if the death of your physical body only meant that you would go on existing in another way entirely, and that your essence would never truly leave the Earth? That’s the goal of the Terasem Movement, the group that brought us the creepy AI robot head with a real woman’s personality. Another part of their endeavors is LifeNaut, a digital storage system that allows users to back up their personalities online. But just storing your personality would be boring. LifeNaut allows you to create a digital avatar of yourself that will communicate with your friends and family after you die.

After uploading your personality and picture, your likeness is animated into a copy of you that you can converse with so that it can learn from you. Once your physical body suffers the inevitability of death, the avatar can stay behind to act as a companion to your loved ones who miss talking to you. As if the idea of having a conversation with a dead relative isn’t creepy enough, LifeNaut offers an additional service which they call BioFile. For $1 a day, the company will place some of your cells into long-term storage in that hopes that one day, science will be able to grow you a new body from them. And when your new body is complete, the personality that you uploaded can be placed into it…making death a completely avoidable adventure, after all.

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See more in Cybernetics or under Technology. August, 2010.