This question was sparked in my mind by our class discussion about augmented eternity and the potential to build a personality using technology that would outlast one’s lifetime. From this perspective, we are already building personalities that will remain on the internet well past our lifetimes; perhaps it’s morbid, but our Instagram posts and our tweets could be around for hundreds more years than we will. The whole idea reminded me of the scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (please bear with me for the purposes of the technological example if not for the fact that this is in the top three of all Marvel films) in which Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff discover that modern Hydra, the neo-Nazis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, had kept their original scientist during World War II “alive” using a supercomputer and would consult him on how to run the new Hydra and brainstorm ways to bring down Shield. Not only was it something that seemed completely futuristic to me four years ago, but now seems entirely plausible in a matter of ten years, it’s also an example of how technological advancements, especially within the realm of AI, can be used indiscriminately by humans to gain power, as there are few checks and balances on a technology that nobody really knows the extent of.
Hypothetically, if a large company were collecting our data and our entire history on the Internet and specific websites (let’s hypothetically call it Facebook for the sake of convenience), they would already be able to build a fairly reliable personality based on our data. The way we write posts on the Internet is generally less formal and much more similar to our speech patterns. Through our data, even if we hadn’t retweeted or tweeted about something, companies would know if we had found something funny or reprehensible or adorable or simply unworthy of comment. Perhaps most sinister, they’d know the result of every Buzzfeed personality quiz we’ve taken, our MBTI types, even our star signs, and could reconstruct a personality based on the profound yet vague descriptions from these results.
If your criticism of my pessimism (completely valid!) is that Buzzfeed quizzes aren’t entirely accurate to our personalities, I accept that. I also raise the question, would it not be impossible to further hone in on the kind of person you are by creating an algorithm that would know you and what kind of answers you would give on such a quiz? Would it not be impossible for such an algorithm to guess that you’d probably like lemon bars if you like key lime pie and are thus a person who loves the zest of life? Or, most simply, would it not be impossible to keep supplying a social media user with personality assessments to eventually develop an accurate enough construction of a personality? After acquiring all this data on one’s personality, interests, and disinterests, it would hardly be a challenge for companies to predict how you would feel about future issues based on your feelings about past issues.
Of course, that personality isn’t really you. But who’s to say that the personality doesn’t actually represent you properly after you’re dead? Your friends and family who are also now “living” as artificial personalities? What use does my great-great-grandchild who’s never met me have for my artificial personality? If we were to maintain a database of such personalities, it’s likely that all of the personalities would eventually remain stagnant and become unuseful, especially if all the personalities are built off of algorithms based on your previous likes that do not allow the personality to organically change the way a human would.
In the end, this topic is simply another branch of data privacy and how companies are using our data. It’s interesting to consider what the uses of our data will be after we pass on, and how far we will go to thwart intellectual death even if we can’t thwart physical death. To return to my opening example with Captain America, not only might we have the power to extrapolate personalities based on our online activity, but we could extend that technology to uploading an entire brain and personality to a computer. While these ideas are exhilarating from a technological standpoint, it’s important to consider the potential breaches of privacy and various consequences that could occur.