Today we travel to a future where dying isn’t the end.

What if you could live on as a simulation? A bot that knows everything you’ve ever said, and can pretend to be you?

Guests:

• James Vlahos — journalist & author of Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think
• Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad — research scientist at KenSci, Inc, professor of computer science at University of Washington
• Anita Hannig — professor of anthropology at Brandeis University
• Joy Butler — attorney

Further Reading:

• Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child
• A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality
• How the dearly departed could come back to life – digitally
• Speak, Memory
• Goodbye for Now by Laurie Frankel
• Death-tech and the future of death – exploring what it means to live and die
• Years Ago, My Sister Vanished. I See Her Whenever I Want.
• Why Do 4-Year-Olds Love Talking About Death?
• Black Mirror Episode 4, ‘Be Right Back’: Death and the RealDoll
• A Creepy New Startup Wants To Create Living Avatars For Dead People
• These 2 tech founders lost their friends in tragic accidents. Now they’ve built AI chatbots to give people life after death
• This creepy AI will talk to loved ones when you die and preserve your digital footprint
• Why are people pretending to be dead on Instagram?
• #Funerals and Instagram: Death, Social Media and Platform Vernacular
• New Memory Cultures and Death: Existential Security in the Digital Memory Ecology
• Talking About Death in America: An Anthropologist’s View
• Living and Aging in the Land of Denial
• Death, memorialization, and social media: A platform perspective for personal archives
• In beloved memory of: Facebook, death and subjectivity
• Legal Issues for Avatars and Virtual Reality. Part One. The Right of Publicity.
• Legal Issues for Avatars and Virtual Reality. Part Two. Minimizing Risk.

Actors:

• Maria — Cara Rose de Fabio
• Gaby — Eler de Grey
• M — Xandra Ibarra
• John — Keith Houston (also check out his karaoke nights in San Francisco)

Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky.

Special thanks this episode to Adria Otte and Molly Monihan at the Women’s Audio Mission, where all the intro scenes were recorded this season. Check out their work and mission at womensaudiomission.org. Also huge thanks to all the actors who breathed life into the intros for this mini-season. Once again they are: Cara Rose de Fabio (Maria), Eler de Grey (Gaby), Rotimi Agbabiaka (Marquis), Xandra Ibarra (M) and Keith Houston (John).

If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at info@flashforwardpod.com. We love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool.

And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! Head to www.flashforwardpod.com/support for more about how to give. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.

That’s all for this future, come back next time and we’ll travel to a new one.

Flash Forward is a critically acclaimed podcast about the future.

In each episode, host Rose Eveleth takes on a possible (or not so possible) future scenario — everything from the existence of artificial wombs, to what would happen if space pirates dragged a second moon to Earth. What would the warranty on a sex robot look like? How would diplomacy work if we couldn’t lie? Could there ever be a black market for fecal transplants? (Complicated, it wouldn’t, and yes, respectively, in case you’re curious.) By combining audio drama and deep reporting, Flash Forward gives listeners an original and unique window into the future, how likely different scenarios might be, and how to prepare for what might come.