Stayin’ alive, staying’ alive: Echoes of you will likely linger in a digital afterlife

Startups are already resurrecting the departed as chatbots. A digital you could end up ‘reading to’ a grandchild you never met.

There’s at least one kind of afterlife we can be certain of: the digital one.

We are all going to live on, in some form. What this means varies wildly, depending on whom one speaks to. For the average user of the internet, the idea of this afterlife is limited to search histories, social-media profiles, and possible memorial pages.

To the tech innovator, the answer is literally out of the dystopian near-future series Black Mirror. There, a person could be