My CLOUD Spirit

8 Feb 2011

Sometimes real world events spark up a thought process that has its roots in what we do as a business but the emphasis is firmly “vapourware”, one of these occurred today.

It’s my birthday and therefore I have been thinking about the future. Not in a morbid kinda way, more trying to rationalize what digital imprint I could leave behind after I am gone. I mean with Facebook, twitter and all the other digital baggage that we carry around and the obvious growth of our online digital presence, well it’s an interesting thought.

What really interested me though is how we could haunt people from the grave with this digital imprint – cool trick huh! I am gone but you can’t forget me 🙂

Then I got to thinking how much comfort our digital legacy can give to people still around!

A recent tragedy led to a young friends death so I have seen first-hand the comfort that has been gained from previous Facebook posts, online pictures, emails and other digital media such as YouTube, this has just confirmed the place that technology can play in helping friends and family come to terms with their loss.

So what’s the future got in store that will help us build up and maintain our digital personality or legacy? (on the basis that we had one when we were alive).

I guess as we store more of ourselves in the Cloud with more and more systems able to track our interactions there will be a greater opportunity for technology to piece together an accurate facsimile of our earthly being. Facebook posts, Tweets, emails, blog posts. What about the pages we view online and the comments we make on articles. How about all those contributions we make to our communities, personal as well as business, or the GPS locations tracked and shared as we go. Also how cool would it be if we could link seamlessly all of our photos into this life timeline.

Some things may be less attractive or welcome, tracking our true achievements and recording those things we would like to remain as digital skeletons in our cloud closet, such as our financial position (both highs and lows) or relationship decisions.

In time systems will become so much more advanced that our basic avatar will become an animated 3d hologram of ourselves at a point in time which we think represents our true self (yes we could decide what others get to see), Audio will be available to reproduce how we sound with further advancements enabling us to apply Artificial Intelligence so you could hold a conversation with someone who has been gone for many years. Imagine that as a genealogist might, wow! what a way to research your family tree or converse with great minds. What a way to fully appreciate human actions so we don’t forget how dumb we can be?

Maybe even what people hold on you in systems such as ours will have a small qualified part to play, who knows.

So My Cloud Spirit, good or bad, haunting or comforter, I guess there’s a lot to regulate before it becomes reality or perhaps we will just let it happen without regulation, how scary would that be? Imagine a digital personality hacker, someone who can help you discredit a competitor or worse!

Anyway, anyone want to purchase a Terabyte of disc storage to start themselves off?