What Does Social Media Mean for the Future of Mortality? [VIDEO]

MASHABLE

What Does Social Media Mean for the Future of Mortality? [VIDEO]

With 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, 200 million tweets being posted every day and the average Facebook user creating 90 pieces of content each month, this generation is publishing an unprecedented amount of data that will live in the cloud indefinitely — even after we’re gone.

Back in July at TED Global in Edinburgh, Scotland (which I also covered for Mashable), I gave a 5-minute talk about the implications that the social media boom will have on the future of mortality, and what might become possible as technology’s ability to understand and process the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content we’re creating in our lifetimes continues to grow exponentially.

In my talk, I discussed a number of services that are already emerging for figuring out what happens to ouronline identity and social media accounts after we die, as well as a couple of examples of how people are already planning their digital legacy. Ultimately, I hypothesize that technology will one day be able to recreate a realistic representation of us as a result of the plethora of content we’re creating converging with other advances in machine learning, robotics and large-scale data mining.

At the very least, the 1 billion or so people currently making use of social media will leave behind a legacy unlike anything created by any previous generation. At the most, we’ll soon have a number of philosophical questions to deal with about the nature of our existence and what comes after it.

Check out my talk in the video below and let me know what you think in the comments.