One of the more thought provoking pieces I’ve read recently comes from Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, who sketches out a methodology for shaping a digital representation of ourselves:

Suppose you wanted to create your own digital ghost to live for eternity in the Internet and maybe do some haunting. What would that look like?

You’d start now, backing up everything that happens on your computer to the so-called cloud (storage on the Internet). You’d run a program in the background that monitors your Facebook changes and all of your email conversations. Together with your photos, your resume, and all of your shopping and entertainment preferences, the program running in the cloud could piece together an avatar of you. 

From your photos, the program in the cloud could create a 30-year old version of you that never ages. The program would know how you speak, based on your email and other writing. It would know all of your preferences, your passions, your hot buttons, your finances, the identities of your friends and family, and anything else that flows through your computer.

That’s all possible with current technology. Now let’s say we extend this to your phone. In the near future, every conversation you make could optionally be saved to the cloud too, as well as all of your GPS locations, your web searches on your phone, your pictures and more. From your saved voice conversations your avatar would get its voice. With today’s technology, your digital ghost would sound robotic. In time, as technology improves, your ghost’s voice would be indistinguishable from your living self.

The data trails we’re leaving around the web can seem vapid and ethereal, but they’re very real fragments of ourselves. Piecing them together into AI like ghosts isn’t all that far off. As Bradley Horowitz from Google notes, they’re already on it. With Android, Chrome, Maps, Voice, YouTube they’re able to track where we go, what we browse, what we watch, with whom we communicate, even what we sound like:

The opportunity here is for Google to start recognizing people. When we know who you are, your interests, and who you know—if you let us know that—we can transform all of your activities for the better.

From personalized search results to eternal life (sorry, Peter Thiel, it’s weirder than you thought) we’re just starting to scratch the surface for the types of applications that can be built on top of these piles of personal data. 

I’ve never really believed in ghosts before, but I think I do now.