BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Bredbury, and welcome to Matt's Blind this week. I know I sound a little bit better this week. I don't sound like I've been diving under water and my nose is all over the place.
I actually have a voice as well this week. But Matt, when you told me you wanted to go to uncharted territory this week, I thought you meant space, but it seems like we're talking about memory and loss today. Hey Rich, I know on this by earlier this week I kind of intimated that we'd be doing more kind of AI and future work type stuff, and that wasn't quite the case, but I thought if I talked this one up, people might decide not to tune in, which would kind of be a shame because, you know, I think it's quite an important topic. But before we go into it, I'm going to do that thing of asking you a question.
I mean, have you kind of fallen back into the habit of doomscrolling? Now, I want to say no, but if I'm being honest, yeah, a little bit, particularly at bedtime. Right, now that's the thing, because I kind of have as well, and I thought it was just me. And you know, for people who don't remember doomscrolling, it was that thing that happened early in the pandemic where you were just looking for all the doom and gloom that was coming into your feed.
And as you said, often late at night, just sort of staying awake and looking at all this stuff. But it does seem that doomscrolling has returned. You know, there's a lot of reasons for it. You know, there's the uncertain economic situations, there's war in Ukraine and Gaza, political instability across Africa, you know, all these empowered authoritarian leaders all over the place.
And there's this creeping sort of sense on all sides of the political spectrum that freedoms are being eroded, but that the other side is to blame. So it's kind of like the world had a collective stroke during COVID, and everyone has kind of lost their social filters. All right, I'll buy. Where are you going with this?
Well, I rained in the urge to say to infinity and beyond. So maybe I am getting better. No, I think it's that idea of mortality and that kind of constant push pull between technology and, you know, our physical lives, that the technology makes things better with one hand, but makes it worse with the other or at least, you know, that's how we feel about what it's doing. Now, we've done a bunch of shows on the topic of electronic record keeping, privacy, history, and we've covered a lot about, you know, how secure those records are, not necessarily in terms of the data privacy, because we know in terms of security and privacy, we know that most of the records aren't that secure, but more in terms of longevity and preservation, you know, will people in the future be able to access, read the files that we record every day?
And does that really even matter? You know, does my personal cache of cat photos contribute to the historical record of, you know, some future society? Yeah, but isn't that kind of the point though? We don't want, sorry that we don't know what future societies will deem important.
Well, yeah, exactly. So, you know, when we look at the kind of artifacts and the records that we have, from all of these various sources, we've been able to piece together, you know, things like what people ate at different points in history. Now, that might be from records of recipes going back as far as, you know, ancient Rome, the ancient Egyptians, it could be from the analysis of bones found in archaeological sites, which give an idea of what species of animals or birds or fish people were eating. We find things like remains of seeds and grains in the places that people cooked.
And that gives us insights, you know, not into just into what they were eating, but how healthy they were, how healthy their diets were, and what people in different economics try to ate. So, you know, we know, for example, roughly what people ate at a kind of citizen level in ancient Rome versus what sort of consoles ate. So, when you look at it from that point of view, you know, all of those food photos that we take every day might one day be useful to catalog diet in our own sort of society and civilizations. But I guess only those records are usable.
Yeah, now, and that's kind of the bigger point, you know, there are all these sort of various digital format preservation initiatives going on around the world. But preserving formats and preserving the knowledge of those formats isn't the same as being able to use them. John Norton in a recent Guardian piece titled Preserving Our Digital Content is Vital. He used this example of a meme.
I think it was NASA technicians and they're in a control room. And they're celebrating images from our probe that was sent out 30 years ago, starting to be beamed back to reach Earth. So, you know, everyone's celebrating. And then someone cuts in and says, who remembers how to install Windows 95?
Because, of course, that's the technology of the day. We know what Windows 95 is. We have knowledge of that information. But do we have any machines left that can actually run Windows 95?
Do we have to build emulators that will actually run that software? So, we have a real and contemporary problem with the past. So, previous generations obviously recorded everything in analog. So, it was in books.
It was on paper. It was on walls. It was in portraits, photographs, even in sheet music. And even though over time, you know, 90%, 99% of that information is lost or destroyed, enough of it remains for us to be able to get a really useful look at the past.
But the thing is, is that the same case with digital technology? You know, what happens to all of those emails and photos and TikToks when we aren't around anymore? So, again, John Norton uses a great example. When Google's founders came up with the idea of scanning every single book in existence, they approached a large US library.
And the library enthusiastically agreed, yeah, of course, we want to be part of this. But one of the librarians asked Sergey Brin and whoever a question, what happens when Google doesn't exist anymore? And apparently, that flummoxed the founders so much because they'd obviously never thought about the company not existing. But that's not even the real question.
The real question is not will Google exist. It's why would it still exist? Most technology companies disappear relatively quickly. I think there's an average of something like about 20 years for most technology companies.
And we have examples right in front of us. I mean, Twitter's bonfire demise is literally unfolding in front of our eyes. Yeah, particularly if you watch anything on CNN lately, that was interesting kind of backwards and forwards. You see that just going off a little tangent.
Oh, no, I haven't actually. Oh, I'll leave that to you for you to watch during a... Well, you're gonna have to tell the listeners what it was. Okay, so essentially, Elon Musk was on a CNN show and he was asked about advertisers pulling out of his platform.
And in particular, an answer from CNN referred to Disney about how do you feel? And he basically said, how do you feel about advertisers pulling off your platform? And Elon's response was quite... It looks pretty, yes.
I didn't hear about that. I think it was during a fireside at the New York Times book conference or... That was it, yes. Yeah, and he basically said, well, they can go and explete themselves.
Yes, after just apologizing for swearing and making it a place that's difficult for advertisers, then just the advertisers. Twice. Twice. Now, anyway, obviously, we're talking about information, data, images, texts becoming obsolete or inaccessible for more practical reasons than technology moving on.
Well, yeah, of course. So this is something that people face every day. Unless you've shared your passwords with people, your digital world becomes basically a log box once you die, once you pass on. So some elements of it might be public facing.
So, obviously, those social media accounts where if your profile is open to the public, you can still see the information on those accounts. But what about all the information in your devices, in the cloud, the stuff that you haven't shared socially, the personal memories, the thoughts and communications? It's not like we're all politicians who can shed our identities and claim our phones have been wiped whenever they face a public inquiry. And of course, once those accounts aren't being accessed, how long before they're routinely wiped or recycled by the company that ultimately owns them?
So, we've had a couple of stories recently, Twitter eliminating dormant accounts and recycling and selling user names. And of course, the one that you brought up on BizBites this week about Google's plans to delete inactive accounts. And of course, in both of those instances, the issue of the deceased came up. What happens to accounts that belong to people who died?
Because it can be really hard to convince tech companies to give the beneficiaries, the estate access to those deceased persons' accounts. And sometimes it is physically impossible. We wouldn't be talking about this unless there was a solution. Well, yes, there is a solution, sort of.
There have been various companies, and I think hilariously, I covered one with Jeff on this show many, many years ago. And their business model was to convince millennials, then in their early 30s, to pay a monthly subscription every month for the next probably 60 to 80 years to preserve their digital legacy. Unsurprisingly, that company went out of business after just a few years, but that's the irony. As we said, most tech companies, they don't live longer than about 20 years.
The company died decades before the majority of its customers, its users would actually need to access its services. And that, you know, it proves that point about longevity. If a company can't outlive you, how can companies help to preserve your memories? This is where Chant GPT linked to a stone tablet carving app comes in, I guess.
That's actually not a bad idea. You should do that. You should market that. I think it's time to buy up some stone quarrying sites in Bajaang or something, and maybe put that on the market.
No, this is actually about automatic, which is the company that owns the blogging platform Wordpress. Now, earlier this year, they announced a 100-year plan. The idea was that your site, your WordPress site, or whatever you're doing on any of their platforms would stay live and active for the next century. So presumably, that would go up until after you die.
I can't imagine what you feel like if you've got a renewal notice on your 120th birthday, for example, saying your domain is about to expire. So on the face of it, this is a great idea to give people that security for the long term. The only problem was the price they announced. For some unknown reason, they calculated the price at $38,000 US dollars, all to be paid upfront.
Now, if you're talking about large companies, if you're talking about high net worth individuals, of course, they're already likely to have their own domains. They have the resources to arrange for sites to exist pretty much in perpetuity. But where is the constituency of everyday bloggers who can drop $38,000 to secure their legacy? The average WordPress content maker is probably totally unable to raise that kind of money.
And they're probably using WordPress because it's the cheapest option, or one of the cheaper options. Exactly. That's the point. And we hear about this all the time.
Another example of out-of-touch behavior by another Silicon Valley bunch of millionaires. Genuinely, I don't know. I imagine that they've sat down and some kind of multiplier effect has been used. Someone has done some kind of forecasting on costs and dollar values and inflation over the next 100 years.
So that might be a genuinely reflective cost. But when you break it down, it equates to $380 a year. That is a lot more than most people spend to host their blogs on an annual basis. And of course, that number of people who operate blogs is of course diminishing.
But I think the more worrying aspect is what it says about the value of knowledge. Because this idea kind of promotes the idea that it's only the ideas, the information, the content of people who can afford it that deserves to be archived. It's a very strange way of assessing value. But how is that all that different from the past?
I mean, if you look, wealthy people would commission history as biographies, portraits, pyramids, stuff in Pompeii, what I'm talking about, to kind of chronicle and preserve their lives. We've seen this. We know that. Richard is actually planning a pyramid in his backyard.
Because of the foundations in already. I get it. I don't disagree with you. But of course, the drinking century, to a limited extent, saw a more egalitarian approach.
Some of those kind of cultural and income divides were reduced. But the 21st century seems to have catapulted us back to those kind of 19th century values. Hence, my reference to doom-scrolling at the start. But it's rather a kind of high-tech 19th century, rather than that kind of romantic vision of a steampunk, Victorian era that we have.
There's a lot of people, we have a lot more education now. And as a result, there will be a lot more ideas that have been ignored, overlooked, or simply not shared with people. It would be nice to know that, if not all, at least some of that content is saved. Even if most of it is just mundane and trivial.
Because history, in a lot of ways, is the science of the mundane. You know, sifting through the archaeological remains of somebody's campfire is mundane, but it's also extremely important. And perhaps there's kind of an outside chance that in the future, some kind of Douglas Adams level supercomputer might be able to look at all that content and present those ideas to future historians for analysis. And if that sounds a bit weird, it's really not that unusual.
I mean, just go to the website information is beautiful.net. They have a great list of scientists whose ideas were initially ignored or overlooked. And that includes people like Ohm, Pastor, Tesla, all of which are, of course, literal household names to us today. All right.
Okay. When we come back then, we're going to be continuing a theme with the controversial idea of a digital life after death. Stick around. This, of course, is my explain here on BFM 89.9, the Business Station.
BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Welcome back to Matt's explain. It's one thing to preserve your digital content after death, but does the same apply to digital avatars that use AI to recreate your appearance and personality and what happens when someone resurrects you after death without your permission? I have so many questions.
Yeah. I mean, we'll get through all of them, but we've covered GriefTech on the show before, but usually we've covered it in terms of individual acts, not in terms of their overall impact on the actual grieving process. So there are plenty of apps out there. And of course, they're rapidly developing in terms of ability and scope because they're integrating AI machine learning.
And those tools are progressing so rapidly. So you can get everything from a kind of generic chatbot to fully animated video avatars that can seemingly answer questions on the fly. So a lot of this information I sourced from a new scientist article called How AI Avatars of the Deceased Could Transform the Way We Grieve? Please, new scientist.
Your headlines. This is by a writer called April Reese. Now, the article uses the example of the mother of the founder of a company called Storyfile, which is a conversational AI company. She created an avatar to speak at her own funeral and answer questions from friends and relatives.
Now, Richard's head has just snapped up as I said. Now, I should point out Storyfile isn't specifically a company dedicated to Grief Technology. It positions the service more of a kind of, as you were saying, earlier, I think, off camera, you know, this idea of records photography and whatever sort of physical representation. So it positions itself more as a kind of audio-visual photo album that actually then records stories about people as well and has these kind of interactive components with the avatars.
It has a list of something like 75 questions that people can answer and you upload video clips, so it processes and creates an avatar around this. So if people ask questions within those 75, it will give you these kind of canned responses. But it's something that, of course, somebody actively chooses to do, they choose to answer those questions. They choose to upload those videos to actually create this kind of digital representation of themselves.
So it's a bit like having your portrait painted like we talked about earlier? Well, exactly that. As I said, we're kind of coming round full circle to the 19th century again. And now Storyfile's main business, it seems to be conversational video bots for companies.
So customer service, that kind of thing. This is just a consumer-facing bit that they do. But this isn't really about the apps and the websites and what features things have. I'd rather talk about the impact of this technology.
As you mentioned at start, is it beneficial? Is it harmful? Is it something that you should do without someone's permission? I know that there are Black Mirror episodes, there are plenty of sci-fi examples.
I think the movie Herr, for example, that cover or overlap with this area. So it's not a concept that's exactly new to people. What's new is, or are these advancements in the technology that make it much more accurate? Essentially what it is is an algorithm recreating someone from their voicemails, from videos from texts, it's copying their speech patterns, it's copying their written word patterns, their facial expressions from videos.
And it's the dead interacting with the living. It's kind of recreating an aspect of essentially someone's being. I did see a video recently of an Irishman, who this is not a joke, by the way, because it normally starts with an Irishman book. Anyway, he recorded a joke of himself being locked in his coffin that was to be broadcast on the day of his funeral.
Have you seen that video? No, I haven't. But I can imagine that being the kind of thing that I would do. It was hilarious.
But anyway, and this kind of gets me thinking about, before we do get any deeper into the ethical side of things, is this idea of grief tech something new? Well, no, I mean, we've already mentioned the portraits and the biographies. But people looked at photography as a form of grief technology in the Victorian era, because that was the first time that people had an accurate representation of a loved one on your wall, something to remind you of the person and something that you could actually talk to. Something wasn't just really rich people who could probably get not terribly accurate portraits done.
The middle classes could afford certainly the early photographs and prices dropped making it accessible to people across classes, not on a daily basis, but something you could do a family portrait once a year or once every few years. When you think about all those incredible pioneer era photos from the US, miners covered in dust and people going into saloons and there being this photography booth or whatever in there. We've always used or leveraged technology as part of our grieving process, as that technology develops. Yeah, but how does it change the dynamic once you move from a snatic image or set of memories on paper to a digital creation that can seemingly quote unquote interact?
Well, again, we have this technology gap. So technology comes out first and we can only sort of figure out its impact later on. So because grief tech has now been around for a few years, we are starting to get the results of research to sort of show what the impact is. So last year, psychologists at the Open University of Catalonia and the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, I love the idea of an autonomous university, by the way.
Think of those kind of automated diners from the 1920s. I can just imagine this kind of robot filled university anyway. Back to the point. So they compared interactive apps to the growing popularity of online memorials.
So people attending funerals virtually from a web streaming camera in the funeral home or the church or wherever. And they know that like any kind of social media, grief technology firms have an incentive to keep mourners hooked because they want you to use the service in the same way that Facebook wants you to keep coming back. So there is this concern that the compelling nature of these services of that content might actually disrupt and actively, in some cases, prolong the grieving process. Is this linked to the stages of grief?
Well, it more closely corresponds to evolutions of that thinking. So the popular idea has been that there are five successive stages of grief. So you start with denial, you end in acceptance, but that's kind of being transformed or kind of modified. Research from the grief loss and social stress lab at the University of Arizona suggests that grief is actually a kind of learning.
So at first, we expect that the person who's died is going to walk in and resume their normal life. You know, you look at the kitchen table and the empty seat. And our mind looks for proof of them doing that. And the argument is that this is an example of semantic and episodic memory clashing.
I mean, I'm not going to go into details about that. It's fairly self-explanatory. So learning to reconcile these two is part of that process of adapting to the loss. So those emotional rollercoaster moments that people go through while they're grieving are actually an essential part of that adaptation, you know, being incredibly happy one minute and side the next.
That's part of the process for one of the better term. But grief technology by creating this compulsion to see the deceased person has the potential to actually keep you in stasis to kind of maroon you in one place, because that person is still a click away. You know, you can in some ways fulfill that craving for the person to walk through the door and sit down as the table as it were. So of course, your mind doesn't have a need to progress.
So it's essentially stimulating the reward centers of the brain? Yeah. So the Arizona team notes that a small percentage of people experience prolonged grief. I think it's around 10% of people.
And MRI studies have shown that grief actually changes brain structure. So essentially the attention center of the brain becomes hyper focused. And that makes it very difficult to detach from those memories of the deceased, because essentially, you know, you're reprogramming your brain just to focus on those issues. So there's this risk that grief technology could push more of us into this kind of cycle of prolonged grief, because our reward centers are being activated.
So there's that potential for the attention center to focus too deeply on that avatar on that digital recreation. So you don't experience that evolution of emotional processing. Now, obviously, that's a kind of simplistic version. You have to go and check out the article for a kind of full neurological breakdown.
But that's sort of an overview of what could happen. I'm wondering if there's like a counter example, you know, like the avatar at the funeral, where this kind of technology is beneficial? Sure. Research from a team at a number of universities across the UK, the US and Japan, including at my armamata, the University of Kent, they have found that grief tech can be beneficial, and especially in cases where the death was unexpected or left mourners with regret or anger, you know, that unfinished business, which does suggest that these bots can help with those feelings of anger and loss that people feel when relationships are kind of broken without warning.
Are there any guidelines around how this tech has been used? Right. So I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to make a case that, you know, grief apps, grief technology is a bad thing, or that the developers have bad intentions that they're trying to get you hooked on services. But as with, you know, a lot of technology surrounding or built on AI and machine learning, there is a lack of certainty and regulation.
So who owns that digital copy of the person, for example? So what happens if someone who is benefiting from using one of those apps is suddenly cut off from it, either because the startup closes down, as we mentioned earlier on, or if that person's financial circumstances change, and they can no longer afford to pay a subscription, you know, what are the ethics and morality in closing the door on the person, being able to talk to their partner, child, parent or friend, because they can no longer afford to. You know, if you market these products as a therapeutic tool, how do you ensure that people are going to have continued access to them? You know, for a grieving person to come to the realization that they're mother or father, or what passes for them in the living world, is the property of a private company?
That's quite a disquieting thought. Yeah. And there is also that flip side, you know, in the earlier example, the founders mum had chosen to create an avatar to appear at her funeral. What about the creation of these avatars without consent?
We're hearing about things happening without consent moving forward. Yeah. Well, I mean, imagine if it's kind of for private use, there'd be a strong case for it to be allowed. But, you know, it talks back to that example of Will Smith and Gemini Man where the studio owns the CGI version of him, and him in interviews struggling to get his head around that idea.
Now, he probably has a fairly watertight contract concerning, you know, use and exploitation of that model. But there's still that knowledge that there's a version of his face that a company physically owns, and it's not a photograph. It's a 3D render that can be animated. It can be made to talk.
It could be made to act. It can essentially do what he does on screen. What if someone has said that they don't want their friends or their family to recreate them post-mortem? You know, do we do we respect those wishes?
Again, you know, if it's for private use, you could argue someone who did it against the wishes of the person. That's that's fine if it helps them to grieve, I guess, go ahead. But what if that person chooses to share video sessions on social media? That could be very hurtful to other family members.
I mean, in the UK and in other places, we have the whole DNR law, you know, do not resuscitate. We'd have to implement something like do not reanimate, I guess. Well, yeah, I'll do not republish. Yeah, but something like this surely would be even more complicated when you've got friends involved.
Precisely, I mean, it could be seen as, you know, grossly insensitive and hurtful. Yeah. Just a very basic level. But imagine as well, it could give rise to multiple digital avatars of the deceased being created by different people.
You know, it'd be confusing enough that somebody is seemingly returning from the dead. But how would you cope with multiple different versions of that person appearing? All the slightly different personalities, because they're based on the information that those separate people have. Those different individuals have different members of course.
Yeah, exactly. So if I'm being honest, I do find the whole idea a little bit strange. But you know, the last few months, I've been talking to various people about memories and recall. And I am aware that my experience is different from a lot of people's that for a lot of people, you know, their mental image of people, their ability to recall faces starts to fade over time.
So I'm not dismissing these advances because they don't gel with the way that my mind works. But I do think that people should approach them with caution. And perhaps in the future, there will be more guidance from the mental health profession. You know, they'll be used alongside psychologists and treatment specialists.
And there will be guidelines and advice on how to use them, you know, without detriment. Thanks for that, Matt. That was really interesting. Yeah, I mean, when I read all this stuff, it is a bit hard to sort of get your head around.
But when you start unraveling it, you know, there's a lot of good there. But at the same time, I think the negatives haven't quite been considered sufficiently yet. Okay, folks, of course, that was this week's Matt's explain. If you did miss any part of the show, go on down on the podcast wherever you normally get it from.
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