Adam Ostrow: After your final status update

62,531 views ・ 2011-08-01

TED


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By the end of this year,
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there'll be nearly a billion people on this planet
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that actively use social networking sites.
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The one thing that all of them have in common
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is that they're going to die.
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While that might be a somewhat morbid thought,
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I think it has some really profound implications
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that are worth exploring.
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What first got me thinking about this
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was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller,
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who was a science and technology journalist
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who died of cancer.
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And what Miller did was have his family and friends write a post
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that went out shortly after he died.
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Here's what he wrote in starting that out.
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He said, "Here it is. I'm dead,
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and this is my last post to my blog.
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In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down
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from the punishments of my cancer,
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then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote --
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the first part of the process
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of turning this from an active website to an archive."
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Now, while as a journalist,
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Miller's archive may have been better written
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and more carefully curated than most,
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the fact of the matter is that all of us today
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are creating an archive
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that's something completely different
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than anything that's been created
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by any previous generation.
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Consider a few stats for a moment.
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Right now there are 48 hours of video
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being uploaded to YouTube every single minute.
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There are 200 million Tweets being posted every day.
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And the average Facebook user
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is creating 90 pieces of content each month.
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So when you think about your parents or your grandparents,
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at best they may have created
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some photos or home videos,
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or a diary that lives in a box somewhere.
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But today we're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive
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that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely,
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years after we're gone.
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And I think that's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities
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for technologists.
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Now to be clear, I'm a journalist and not a technologist,
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so what I'd like to do briefly
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is paint a picture
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of what the present and the future are going to look like.
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Now we're already seeing some services
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that are designed to let us decide
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what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts
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after we die.
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One of them actually, fittingly enough,
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found me when I checked into a deli
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at a restaurant in New York
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on foursquare.
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(Recording) Adam Ostrow: Hello.
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Death: Adam?
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AO: Yeah.
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Death: Death can catch you anywhere, anytime,
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even at the Organic.
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AO: Who is this?
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Death: Go to ifidie.net
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before it's too late.
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(Laughter)
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Adam Ostrow: Kind of creepy, right?
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So what that service does, quite simply,
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is let you create a message or a video
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that can be posted to Facebook after you die.
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Another service right now
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is called 1,000 Memories.
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And what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones,
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complete with photos and videos and stories
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that they can post after you die.
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But what I think comes next is far more interesting.
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Now a lot of you are probably familiar with Deb Roy
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who, back in March,
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demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video.
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I think as machines' ability
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to understand human language and process vast amounts of data
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continues to improve,
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it's going to become possible
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to analyze an entire life's worth of content --
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the Tweets, the photos, the videos, the blog posts --
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that we're producing in such massive numbers.
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And I think as that happens,
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it's going to become possible for our digital personas
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to continue to interact in the real world long after we're gone
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thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we're creating
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and technology's ability to make sense of it all.
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Now we're already starting to see some experiments here.
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One service called My Next Tweet
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analyzes your entire Twitter stream, everything you've posted onto Twitter,
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to make some predictions as to what you might say next.
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Well right now, as you can see,
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the results can be somewhat comical.
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You can imagine what something like this might look like
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five, 10 or 20 years from now
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as our technical capabilities improve.
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Taking it a step further,
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MIT's media lab is working on robots
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that can interact more like humans.
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But what if those robots were able to interact
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based on the unique characteristics of a specific person
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based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content
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that person produces in their lifetime?
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Finally, think back to this famous scene
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from election night 2008
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back in the United States,
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where CNN beamed a live hologram
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of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio
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for an interview with Anderson Cooper.
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What if we were able to use that same type of technology
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to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms --
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interacting in a very lifelike way
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based on all the content they created while they were alive?
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I think that's going to become completely possible
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as the amount of data we're producing
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and technology's ability to understand it
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both expand exponentially.
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Now in closing, I think what we all need to be thinking about
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is if we want that to become our reality --
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and if so,
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what it means for a definition of life and everything that comes after it.
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Thank you very much.
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05:19
(Applause)
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