Eternime: Live forever

Humans have always been ambitious. Some people even attribute human “fall” from god’s grace to this characteristic zeal of ours. Anyways, we aren’t discussing God or lost Paradise here. Coming back to humans and human life; seems like our fellow men and women want to hold on to this life forever. Oh yes, we are aiming eternity.   In March, we shared how Dmitry Itskov's "2045 Initiative" wishes to achieve cybernetic immortality through a robotic body with human personality. Today, we would like to share another story about a Startup which can make you virtually immortal.

Eternime, a Silicon Valley company can let you store your memories and personality in a digital form which would then be fed into "chatbots" that will allow you to speak from the grave. The service suggests there’s a way for every human being to be remembered for as long as Eternime’s server bill is paid.

Marius Ursache, the co-founder, thinks of the service more as a library of material. “The avatar acts as a librarian, helping users make sense of the stored information,” he said. “We’re not trying to replace the person who died. We’re very aware we’re not creating a digital clone or anything creepy, but an interface for accessing memories.”

The company will store data from Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, photos, video, location information, and even Google Glass and Fitbit devices. While you are alive, you can curate and add to this material; you can also choose privacy settings and determine what information you want stored and made public. Eternime then allows you to create a list of people who will be contacted and given access to your account in the case of death, giving your descendants quick and easy access to that Instagram picture or the saved Snapchat picture of your coffee, or a complete history of your Facebook posts.

Susan Bluck, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, says “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 were born,”. “So it means that we could, in some way, forge relations with ancestors who lived and died well before our own lifetime.”

There are other companies also that offer relevant services like Legacy Locker that allow users to nominate an “executor” who will act out their digital wishes after death, including passing on account information to designated heirs. Life.Vu offers online memorial pages for loved ones who have passed away. But none of this is close to what Eterni.me is promising.

The website claims that 32,038 people have already signed up to have their identity uploaded into the cloud. That might not be a ton of potential customers, but it’s a pretty solid effort for a company offering a service that disrupts our received notions of how the end of our lives will play out.