"We don't try to replace humans or give false hopes to people grieving." Romanian design consultant Marius Ursache, cofounder of

Eterni.me, needs to clear this up quickly. Because when you're building a fledgling artificial intelligence company that promises to bring back the dead -- or at least, their memories and character, as preserved in their digital footprint -- for virtual chats with loved ones, expect a lot of flack. "It is going to really suck -- think Cleverbot with weird out-of-place references to things from that person's life, masquerading as that person," wrote one Redditor on the thread "Become Virtually Immortal (In the creepiest way possible)", which immediately appeared after Eterni.me's launch was announced last week. Retorts ranged from the bemused -- "Now that is some scary f'd up s**t right there. WTF!?" -- to the amusing: "Imagine a world where drunk you has to reason with sober AI you before you're allowed to drunk dial every single person you ever dated or saw naked. So many awkward moments avoided." But the resounding consensus seems to be that everyone wants to know more.


Almost everybody we've interacted with truly believes this will be a reality someday Marius Ursache, Eterni.me

The site launched with the look of any other Silicon Valley internet startup, but a definitively new take on an old message.

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While social media companies want you to share and create the story of you while you're alive, and lifelogging company Memoto promises to capture "meaningful [and shareable] moments", Eterni.me wants to wrap that all up for those you leave behind into a cohesive AI they can chat with.

Three thousand people registered to the service within the first four days of the site going live, despite there being zero product to make use of (a beta version is slated for 2015). So with a year to ponder your own mortality, why the excitement for a technology that is, at this moment, merely a proof of concept? "We got very mixed reactions, from ecstatic congratulations to hate mail. And it's normal -- it's a very polarising topic. But one thing was constant: almost everybody we've interacted with truly believes this will be a reality someday. The only question is when it will be a reality and who will make it a reality," Ursache tells us.


Popular culture and the somewhat innate human need to believe we are impervious, has well prepared us for the concept. Ray Kurzweil wants us to upload our brains to computers and develop synthetic neocortexes, and AI has featured prominently on film and TV for decades, including in this month's Valentine's Day release of a human-virtual assistant love story. In series two of British future-focused drama Black Mirror Hayley Atwell reconnects with her diseased lover using a system comparable to what Eterni.me is trying to achieve -- though Ursache calls it a "creepier" version, and tells us "we're trying to stay away from that idea", the concept that it's a way for grieving loved ones to stall moving on.

Sigmund Freud called our relationship with the concept of immortality the "real secret of heroism" -- that we carry out heroic feats is only down to a perpetual and inherent belief that our consciousness is permanent. He writes in Reflections on War and Death: "We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality...

Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal."

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This is why Eterni.me is not just about loved ones signing up after the event, but individuals signing up to have their own character preserved, under their watchful eye while still alive.


We're trying to make it clear that it's not replacing a person, but trying to preserve as much of the information one generates Marius Ursache, Eterni.me

The company's motto is "it's like a Skype chat from the past," but it's still very much about crafting how the world sees you -- or remembers you, in this case -- just as you might pause and ponder on hitting Facebook's post button, wondering till the last if your spaghetti dinner photo/comment really gets the right message across. On its more troubling side, the site plays on the fear that you can no longer control your identity after you're gone; that you are in fact a mere mortal. "The moments and emotions in our lifetime define how we are seen by our family and friends.

All these slowly fade away after we die -- until one day... we are all forgotten," it says in its opening lines -- scroll down and it provides the answer to all your problems: "Simply Become Immortal". Part of the reason we might identify as being immortal -- at least unconsciously, as Freud describes it -- is because we craft a life we believe will be memorable, or have children we believe our legacy will live on in. Eterni.me's comment shatters that illusion and could be seen as opportunistic on the founders' part. The site also goes on to promise a "virtual YOU" that can "offer information and advice to your family and friends after you pass away", a comfort to anyone worried about leaving behind a spouse or children.

In contrast to this rather dramatic claim, Ursache says: "We're trying to make it clear that it's not replacing a person, but trying to preserve as much of the information one generates, and offering asynchronous access to it."

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For starters that will mean uploading data from "text-intensive social networks and environments" such as Facebook, Twitter and personal email, to the AI algorithms. But the team wants to eventually move on to photos, videos, audio and location data from personal devices. "People will also be able to fine-tune their avatar, by regularly interacting with it (think of a daily ten-minute chat where you talk and it picks up more information and refines already existing information, by 'making sense of it'".

This kind of ideal machine learning is a way off, but we're already seeing glimpses of it with natural language research such as that done by Nuance.

As well as hoping to cleverly mimic the deceased, the whole point is to allow anyone to maintain and curate their digital world after their death. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Geoffrey A Fowler delved into the world of digital privacy and revealed how one family fought to gain access to Toronto teenager Alison Atkins' social media and email accounts, to hold on to her memory, photos and more. He highlights how internet companies perceive user privacy as continuing after death and cites an instance where Facebook actually went to court to prevent a family compelling it to hand over data. The flipside is, what might a loved one find that their departed friend/family member never wanted them to know?

Fowler reports how Atkins' sister came across a password-protected Tumblr filled with posts about suicide and "dark" comments. Her mother said it made her sad but "there were no surprises", but this might not always be the case.

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When Wired.co.uk asked Ursache how the system would take into account information the deceased would not like to share -- secrets, affairs etc. -- he said "I don't have a clear answer on that at this stage. This is one of many sensitive issues related to collecting and exposing this data, that we really have to think through". Of course anyone signing up in advance could diligently go through their data backlog to check for inconsistences, but after death it will presumably be in the hands of family/friends.

Can you imagine how it would've been if you could preserve Socrates or Einstein? Marius Ursache, Eterni.me

"The short term vision is to help people preserve (and

own) their digital trail -- right now this is rather controversial with Facebook, Google and what they do once someone passes away -- then making it available through a simple interface that not only allows you to access that data, but learns more about you," explains Ursache. "Our long-term vision is to preserve as much as possible from what each person knows and is -- think of it as preserving everyone for the future generations. Can you imagine how it would've been if you could preserve Socrates or Einstein?

Unbelievable. Steve Jobs said in a 2001 interview that he would give up all technology in order to be able to spend only one afternoon with Socrates."

Just like on Facebook, you'll also be able to control your privacy settings. Ursache says: "There will be two layers -- public and private. The public avatar could be used by anyone, but the private one will only be accessible to you and, after your death, to designated family members and friends. And you could opt that everything becomes public after, let's say, 50 more years."

Unlike Facebook though, there is absolutely no supporting intellectual property or technology behind it that we know of. "You have to realise it is a challenging project, and the technology is still far from being effective, not to mention

'perfect'," Ursache says.

It begs the question then, what's the point in launching something like this now, with no real outline or technology to back it up. Eterni.me is the brainchild of a bunch of aspiring entrepreneurs from across the globe that took part in MIT's five-day-long Entrepreneurship Development Program. In fact, the whole team met there for the first time and a few days later launched the site. Ursache says the idea had been "dormant in my head" for a while, but meeting the team turned it into "something serious". "It's changed from its initial form due to contributions and feedback from the team, MIT coaches and VCs we've met during the past week." That team does seem to be heavy with experience from the business, management and marketing side, though there is one former engineer on board, one member with "experience in natural language search and artificial intelligence" and another with a history of "building social media management tools for leading brands". It's easy to think it's a publicity kick with little else behind it.

You need to start preserving this data as soon as possible Marius Ursache, Eterni.me

But Ursache's argument is that although we might not have all the tech necessary to make it a reality now (for instance to have the AI talk to the deceased's wife differently than to their children), we will one day. Eterni.me is prepping for that future. "Until then, we want to preserve as much as possible from the information someone generates -- and if you're 30 today, it's likely that by the time you're 45 or 50, the technology will be there. But you need to start preserving this data as soon as possible."


Until that tech is spot on, the uncanny valley effect would be pretty damaging in the context of grief. As Redditor Windex007 pointed out, "Talking to the bot is only going to make people who knew you unhappy to be dealing with such a horrible excuse for who you really were, and everyone who didn't know you is going to think you were a complete retard." Forgetting the unfortunate use of that final word, the point is if it's not spot on, the results will be horrendous.

For families like those of 16-year-old Toronto girl Atkins, though, it might mean holding on to something you've lost, and having access to it in a form that's user-friendly and comprehensible -- a kind of flipbook through the individual's best moments, filtering out the noise that would have been difficult for a family member to sift through while grieving. It also means trusting that AI to know what's important about you, and what's not though. More than that, it means trusting it to know what's important about you to your sister, your mother, your child -- everyone sees you differently and everyone will want to remember a different part of you.

The ultimate stumbling block might be, however, the something that's worse than the fear of being forgotten. Admitting you're going to die one day. It's a tough sell, to persuade someone to confess to the secret of their heroism.