Reboot - Your Life on Tech
This is Your Life on Tech
Reboot Chapter 9: The Bytes of the Great Beyond
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Reboot Chapter 9: The Bytes of the Great Beyond

Three digital-death scholars walk into a bar...

What’s a ghostbot? Have you ever encountered a digital zombie, and could you become one?

Should there be a legally binding ‘do not bot me’ clause in your will? How about a digital do not reanimate me (DDNR) order?

When we mix the popularisation and accessibility of large language model (LLM) AI with ‘digital remains’, what happens?

Are we entering an era of dead labour, when the knowledge and the labour of the past can be concretised in the data that we leave behind, and exploited for profit?

Professor Elaine Kasket is author of Reboot: Reclaiming your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World and All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data. In this Reboot episode, she speaks to two close colleagues about why now is such an important moment to confront the reality of digital afterlives.

Dr Debra Bassett is the author of The Creation and Inheritance of Digital Afterlives: You Only Live Twice, a Visiting Fellow at the Open University, and a digital afterlife consultant.

Dr Edina Harbinja is Reader at Aston University Law School, has worked in ‘digital death’ or ‘digital immortality’ or ‘digital legacy’ for more than a decade, and is the author of Digital Death, Digital Assets and Post-mortem Privacy.

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Reboot - Your Life on Tech
This is Your Life on Tech
Elaine Kasket, a psychologist, coach, and an expert in mental health and technology across the life span, gives you weekly insights and tools to keep you grounded in an electric age.