MIT Wants To Create A ‘Virtual You’, So You Can Live Forever

Imagine there was a program that could collect your memories, collect your digital footprint using social media, and then use a series of algorithms to recreate your personality in digital form. Now imagine that you’re not imagining. Imagine that thing is real.

A new project at MIT University in the states is attempting to do this. For real. A new project has been revealed that plans to collect information, use “complex artificial intelligence algorithms” to disseminate that information, and then use that information to create an experience that is being advertised as a “Skype chat from the past”.

The project is called ‘Eterni.me’.

“The idea behind Eterni.me is to build an alter-ego from your lifetime digital footprint and offer an immersive interaction with it during and after your life,” a spokesperson said. “[It is] your eternal interactive legacy for your descendants.”

It sounds eerily (and precisely) like an episode of Black Mirror. In that episode a woman’s significant other dies, and the woman orders a clone of her husband with an implanted version of his personality as accumulated by decades of social media use. Creepy.

But the folks behind Eterni.me claim this won’t be creepy.

“[W]e’re not creating a digital clone or anything creepy, but an interface for accessing memories,” the spokesperson claimed. “And we’re not even targeting the relatives of loved ones in the beginning, but people who want to preserve their digital memories for their family and for eternity.”

1500 people have signed up already.

New project will allow users to live forever as virtual avatar [ItProPortal]


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