Humans have always approached death with barely concealed horror, fear or piety. With the development of modern technologies, however, we are getting nearer to defeating death altogether. And it is not biohacking or cryonics that I promote as relevant methods of fighting against the physical decay.
Digital technologies, that have made possible creating chat bots based on digital histories of the dead and reprogramming social networks accounts for postmortem communication, allow the digital doubles of humans to not just endure in the memory of friends and relatives, but continue to actively interact with them. Is this a much-sought after and finally discovered way to eternity—or, rather, a dismal method of producing online zombies? Can we claim at all that the existent Internet profiles correspond to their owners’ real personalities strongly enough to keep on representing them after they die? And what kind of future is awaiting us if death ceases to be an absolute category.
