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When it comes to what your family eats and drinks, you know your choices matter.

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You're the expert because you know what fits your life.

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And getting it right starts with good information.

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That's why America's beverage companies are sharing more information about our ingredients at GoodToKnowFacts.org.

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No spin, no judgments, just the facts straight from the experts for more than 140 beverage ingredients.

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Visit GoodToKnowFacts.org.

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America leads the world in medicine development.

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It matters.

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We get new medicines first, nearly three years faster.

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Five million Americans go to work because we make medicines here at home.

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And not relying on other countries keeps us safe.

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But China is racing to overtake us.

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Will we let them?

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Or will we choose to stay ahead?

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When America leads, America cures.

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Let's tell Washington to keep us in the lead.

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Learn how at americacures.com.

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Pay for it by pharma.

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Welcome to Intelligence Squared.

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Where great minds meet.

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I'm producer Mia Sorrenti.

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These days, so much of our lives take place online.

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But what about our afterlives?

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A recent study by the Oxford Internet Institute predicts that the number of deceased Facebook

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users could outnumber the living by 2070.

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As AI advances, a debate is growing over digital remains and what should be done with the vast

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amounts of data we leave behind.

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In this episode, Karl Oman, author of The Afterlife of Data, explores the ethics, politics and futures of our digital identities.

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Oman is an assistant professor of political science at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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And his work spans several topics, including the politics and ethics of AI, deepfakes and digital remains.

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Today, he is joined in conversation by researcher and broadcaster Stephanie Hare to shed light on who truly owns our data after death and whether we should have a say in our digital legacy.

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Let's join Stephanie now with more.

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S… Speaker 4 (NSR3767373879)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared.

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I'm Stephanie Hare.

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Our guest today is Karl Oman.

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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Karl.

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So I'm desperate to hear a little bit about your research background and how this led to the book that you wrote that we're about to discuss.

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So I often describe myself as a kind of disciplinary orphan in academia.

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I started out in comparative literature and then I did a second, like a double major degree in sociology.

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And then I came to the UK and I started studying at Oxford at a place called the Oxford Internet Institute,

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which is this interdisciplinary environment where people from all around academia come together to study the internet.

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So the degree I got for my master's is literally called Master of the Social Science of the Internet, short-hand Master of the Internet.

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And then my PhD was in information communication and the social sciences.

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So interdisciplinary studies of the internet and digital technology, that would be my background.

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And when did you get interested in death to go right into the awkward?

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You know, death is something that, particularly given your time here in the UK, you will notice that we avoid talking about it as much as possible.

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It's awkward. It makes people feel uncomfortable. We really put it away.

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You go right to the heart of the matter. So how did you get interested in this?

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Surprisingly, perhaps, from comparative literature, when I was a literature student, I heard about, and this is back in like 2014,

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I heard about these AI applications where you could feed an entire corpus of text into this algorithm,

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and it would start reproducing text in the same style as the author.

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So you could hypothetically take all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels, and you would run them through the machine,

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and it would spit out another Dostoevsky novel.

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And that got me really interested in what would be the relationship between that new novel and what Dostoevsky produced during his life.

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And that, coupled with when I started studying the internet during my master's, I realized that,

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oh, hang on, this is not only possible for art and literature.

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What if there was an entire digital footprint of a person?

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Could this be done also with your social media data, with your search data, with every kind of digital trace that you're producing?

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So I became interested in what would be the relationship between a person and the data that they leave behind upon death.

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So I wish I could...

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I had a more like personal answer of like,

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oh, someone close to me died

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and that made me realize so-and-so.

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But I really came at this from a philosophical angle.

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It poked my interest as a scholar.

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And then I realized that, oh,

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there are so many layers to this.

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It's not only the ethics and the philosophy,

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but it's also the political economy

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of this entire phenomenon.

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Who owns that data

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and who decides what's going to happen to it and so on.

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I mean, I'm relieved that this wasn't inspired

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by some terrible tragedy close to you.

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It comes from a more philosophical and scholarly bent.

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And I think one of the things

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that your book prompted for me,

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I mean, so many questions,

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where to even start,

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was I was thinking that weirdly Elon Musk was warning

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just a couple of weeks ago

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that we're running out of data, right?

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There's this whole myth or argument rather in AI

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that we're running out of data

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and what is the answer to that?

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Is it synthetic data?

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Is that even true?

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And as an historian, I was like,

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there's, you know, what is he talking about?

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There's all sorts of data

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that has like not even been catalogued

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and structured properly,

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much less being used.

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There's data all over the world.

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We have not even begun to mine all the sources.

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You know, if you spend time in an archive,

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you also know this.

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And then your book made me take it

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to the next level of,

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okay, there's actually all the data

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of everyone who's ever existed on Earth

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that we have.

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There's a bunch of people

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who obviously have existed on Earth

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that we don't have their data for,

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but there's a bunch of people

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who've left their traces behind.

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And then what you were thinking about

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in your book of the future,

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that we can actually start to organize data,

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you know, from now going forward

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to build out a more sort of responsible,

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ethical, legal, mindful way

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of thinking about the data of the future dead.

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You know, I mean,

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you and I are having this conversation now in 2025.

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So imagine that we fast forward

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to a hundred years from now,

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between now and then,

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how many people will have died

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and left a huge digital footprint?

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It sounds like, oh, wow,

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the data is limitless,

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but at the same time,

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it isn't structured properly.

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So like, is it useful?

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So I wanted to just kind of

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tease that out with you a bit

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to think, how did you go

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from thinking about

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that question of,

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do we have enough data?

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What does it mean to think

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about the corpus of data,

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you know, the corpus of work and text

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to, you know, the corpse of human bodies,

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our physical data,

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but also our digital remains

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that we leave all over the internet?

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So one of the first things I realized

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when I started researching this topic

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for my PhD

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was this myth of

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the eternity of the internet.

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we tend to think about

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the internet

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as this kind of ephemeral space,

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this almost like immaterial space

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beyond the world

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where you can just dump data

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and it will just stay there

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somehow magically.

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And it's even to the extent

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like when the book

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was about to be released,

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the marketing team

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from my publisher

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suggested that the title

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would be Forever Online.

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And I was like,

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but my point is that

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nothing is forever online.

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It's only going to be there

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so long as somebody's paying for it.

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So when we get to the question of

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do we have enough data?

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Well, what kind of data

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would be my follow-up question?

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Because we are deleting

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heaps of data every day.

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We produce far, far more data

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than we can possibly manage.

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And this is only growing.

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So sooner or later

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someone's data

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is going to have to be deleted.

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And I think an illustrating case here

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is Facebook.

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So I led a study in 2019

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on where we predicted

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based on really good data

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the number of dead profiles on Facebook

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or how many profiles

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in each year of the 21st century

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are going to belong to

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dead people on Facebook.

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And it turns out

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that somewhere around

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the mid to late 2060s or 70s

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it's a fair chance

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that there are going to be

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more dead than alive users on Facebook.

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Why does this matter?

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Well, it matters

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because the entire business model

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of the platform

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is based on users clicking on ads.

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But dead people don't click on any ads.

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They are not consumers.

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Nevertheless,

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they take up a lot of server space

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and those data centers

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are going to have to be managed.

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To be clear,

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the problem here

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is actually not storage.

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Storage is cheap.

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The problem is accessibility

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of keeping the file formats updated

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and, uh...

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And, uh...

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And, uh...

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making sure that it's updated with the latest hardware and so on and in facing that question of

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okay so what do we do with these billions of accounts that are just laying around here and not

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really being economically productive facebook is going to have to face the question

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which accounts do we delete which profiles do we not consider to be worthy of preserving for

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posterity and for a for-profit company of course the answer to that question is which data can we

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make money on so when we talk about do we have enough data how are these data going to accumulate

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over the 21st century it's it's all about what a handful of companies are going to find worthwhile

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preserving for posterity and there's something very interesting in what you said there like the

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fragility of the internet and you know many of us who are of a certain age may have been online in

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the late 90s or even early 2000s and the sites that we were on as young people are gone so and everybody

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knows what that's like we're all of a sudden like a photo sharing site that maybe you used or for your

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your art or whatever is is down i have a personal website and you're right if i don't pay to keep

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that going it will just disappear i mean i guess there's things like the way back machine we could

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talk about that as well but it it's surprising how you know skype is about to disappear like we

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forget that these companies these companies are not like laws of physics there are things that could

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come and go uh it frequently will um by contrast when we think of things that many humans have left

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behind you can look at archaeology you can go to any museum or go to many sites around the world and

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those physical objects many of them still exist and that made me wonder about you know

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what are future historians and social scientists going to be able to learn about our time specifically

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because of what you just said that stuff disappears but also things are not necessarily translated into

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the latest format you might have had vinyl records and you moved to cds and tapes and now you're on you

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know spotify but when spotify goes like you know i mean it's all we're using stuff that we think is

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really convenient and flexible and it exists you know in the ether but it could also just all disappear

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so yeah what does that mean for for future historians and and social scientists who want to understand

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us now in this moment that we're living in so i mean that's that's a question with many answers

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but uh it's a real thing that archivists are talking about what they call a digital dark ages

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where we think about digital information as being so secure as you're pointing out but uh but the hard

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truth is that in only a couple of decades from now if we continue this very short-sighted

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uh style of data management it's not unlikely that we'll actually or that that generation will

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actually be quite oblivious about their their digital past i think that is that is true but there are

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even more scary aspects of that my biggest fear is not necessarily that we will lose historical archives

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but rather that um these archives will be dominated by a handful of tech giants who are going to use

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them for economic but also political gain so one of one of the examples that i bring up in the book

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where i talk about this this privatization of of our collective digital past through our digital remains

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is uh former former twitter now x and the me too campaign so the me too movement was arguably one of the

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most important events of uh early 21st century especially when it comes to women's rights and it's a global

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movement with millions of testimonies from women all around the world now of course future historians are

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going to want to study what happened how did it spread what kind of testimonies what were people

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witnessing it about now that access to this very important part of our history is going to be gate

14:29

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

kept by one individual and that individual is elon musk so elon musk is going to decide in the future

14:35

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

who gets to study our collective digital past and that's a very like even if elon musk was

14:42

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

a saint which he is not that would have been a very scary and an unstable development and i'm using

14:51

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

the me too movement as an example here but any major event from the arab spring to the black lives

15:00

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Matter movement to, you know, I keep listing these really important events. The history about these

15:07

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

events is privately owned by the Zuckerbergs and the Musks of the world. And that's a very dangerous

15:14

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

development because they are going to use it and they are going to restrain the kinds of usage of

15:20

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

that data. It reminds me also of YouTube taking down videos of human rights violations in certain

15:27

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

areas of the world where there's massive conflict because it was violating their terms and conditions.

15:32

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

People were saying, we're uploading these, we're bearing testimony to human rights abuses and war

15:37

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

crimes and genocide. And these could actually be like admitted in a court of law to hold people to

15:41

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

account. But you're taking them down and realizing that, you know, what you're talking about, the

15:45

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

sort of dominance of certain tech platforms, the lack of competition, really viable competition in

15:51

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

this space, and what it means to be resilient in this day and age about our data. So you maybe

15:59

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

don't want to have it all with, you know, the Magnificent Seven, you know, the American tech

16:04

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

giants. Are you going to want it with the Chinese tech giant? Probably not. They're like even worse

16:08

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

on censorship, right? So like, where is this third space? Is everybody having to have their own

16:13

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

sub stack or their, you know, again, American company, their own personal website? Is that a

16:18

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

scalable model for this? Should it be the state, right? Like, should it be, you know, a certain

16:23

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

country's government that does it, but then governments, particularly liberal democracies,

16:27

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

can elect authoritarians who decide to get rid of stuff anyhow, as is happening in the United States,

16:32

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

where we're deleting data sets massively, right, that were public. So as you're thinking about that

16:38

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

and watching it, are you seeing any paths forward to safeguard data and make us more resilient?

16:44

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

So, I mean, there are plenty of promising solutions. Tim Berners-Lee, who, well, basically

16:52

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

invented what we understand to be the internet, but the World Wide Web, is working on some really

16:57

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

interesting solutions that lets individuals be in control of their data to a completely different

17:05

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

extent than they are today. And I'm all for these kinds of solutions, and they're good,

17:12

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

and worthy, but they are not the full answer. And they're especially not the answer when it comes to

17:23

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

the accumulated digital past and our digital remains. Because any solution that gives the

17:30

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

individual the power over their own data, sure, that's great, but there are already hundreds of

17:38

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

millions of dead internet users. What about them? And even if, even if you're trying to get one of

17:46

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

these savvy tech solutions where you own your own data through fiduciaries and so on, even if you

17:52

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

manage to get, let's say, a huge percentage of the population of the internet to adopt those,

18:00

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

let's say, even 20%. That's nothing on a global scale. I mean, nothing. And it will certainly not do

18:08

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

much for the accumulation of digital remains. So, whatever solution we settle upon for the management

18:16

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

of our digital past is going to have to be a collective solution. We're going to have to say,

18:22

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

okay, these are the principles by which the data of the dead are safeguarded. These are the kinds of

18:30

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

organizations and the principles that we think are good for the management of the digital past.

18:38

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And I'm not, in the book, I'm not promoting any single solution to that. I'm not saying that

18:45

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

there should be state ownership. I'm not saying that this or that UN body or organization is going to

18:52

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

assume control over the digital past, but rather that we need a plurality of principles and

18:59

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

organizations to manage our digital past. And a good comparison here would be information about

19:05

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

World War II. So, where is the information about World War II? It's everywhere. Thousands of museums

19:14

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

archives and archives and records and photos spread everywhere. So, there's no single actor who can

19:23

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

control the narrative of that event or series of events. Whereas when it comes to events that are

19:30

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

taking place today, it's almost the opposite. Sure, they can be journalists and media reportings

19:36

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

about something that happen. But that is nothing compared to hundreds of thousands of text messages

19:44

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

or geo data from phones or, you know, having direct access to exactly what kind of news an entire

19:51

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

population were consuming at a certain event and so on. So, the real valuable historical...

19:59

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Right.

20:00

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

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S… Speaker 5 (NSR3767373879)

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S… Speaker 5 (NSR3767373879)

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22:51

S… Speaker 6 (NSR3767373879)

This made me think, first of all, who is this book for? Are you writing this as an alarm,

22:57

S… Speaker 6 (NSR3767373879)

you know, to say this is a problem that you've spotted and you would like certain people to

23:02

S… Speaker 6 (NSR3767373879)

have this on their radar and start thinking about it? Do you want the public to be thinking about it,

23:05

S… Speaker 6 (NSR3767373879)

policymakers? Because I read it with great interest and I thought, you know, you're sketching out the

23:11

S… Speaker 6 (NSR3767373879)

problem and you're doing that so articulately here. Who would be your ideal readership and what

23:16

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

change are you hoping to see? The book is intended to be read really by anyone who has an interest

23:24

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

in these questions. I think it's by my former mentor, Luciano Floridi, who provided one of the

23:32

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

blurbs on the backside is saying that it will be of interest to any mortal with a digital presence,

23:38

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

which is like anyone. But it's a call for people to consider what happens to their data

23:46

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

when they die, not solely as consumers, but as citizens. So I commonly get this question from

23:54

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

journalists like, okay, so what can our listeners do to protect their digital legacy? And of course,

24:01

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

I have advice for that and that's also in the book. But I think my most important advice is to say

24:08

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

that try to think of this question, not only about, not only as a matter of your individual privacy,

24:14

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

but rather as a citizen leaving a certain kind of society behind. So when you leave your data

24:22

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

behind upon death and you may say like, I don't care what happens to it. Like I'm going to be dead

24:28

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

anyway. So who cares if someone goes through my, my WhatsApp messages or my search history or whatever.

24:34

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Sure. Sure. But you may care about the society that you leave behind. And if you don't do anything

24:41

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

about your digital legacy, you're basically giving a present, a free present to Musk and Zuckerberg,

24:49

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

provided you're using one of their platforms or to Google or whichever company owns all your data.

24:58

S… Speaker 7 (NSR3767373879)

So in.

25:00

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

That is a question that will have massive impact on your peers and potentially even on your immediate family.

25:07

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

So one of the examples that I'm drawing on in the book is bio data.

25:13

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Tens of millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, have uploaded their DNA to ancestry sites for genealogy research.

25:25

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And it's fun doing that. And you're like, oh, it turns out I'm like 7% Irish.

25:31

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

But the thing is, when you die, you will have zero rights over these data and you have no way to control where they go and what happens to them.

25:42

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And you may trust the company. Let's say that you uploaded your stuff to 23andMe or something like that.

25:49

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

But guess what? That company won't be around forever either.

25:52

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And what's going to happen when they go bust?

25:55

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Well, the same thing that happens when every company goes out of business.

26:00

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Their assets are going to be auctioned out to the highest bidder, which means that your data, both your social data, but also your genomic data,

26:11

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

may be auctioned out to the highest bidder who can do whatever they want with that data, by the way, because you're dead.

26:17

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

So you don't have any data privacy rights.

26:19

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And that can, of course, be used to draw inferences about your immediate family,

26:26

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

because that company may not have any information about them.

26:31

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

But if they own their dead parents and siblings and so on,

26:35

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

all of a sudden that can be used to make predictions about their health or what their credit score.

26:44

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And so you may not care about what happens to your data, but you should care about the society you live in and your immediate family and next of kin.

26:53

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

That was something that brought me up short while reading your book is, you know, the dead have no privacy rights.

26:58

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And I was like, my God, that's hardcore.

27:00

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And I didn't know that. And I thought, is that something that you'd like to see changed, first of all?

27:05

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Like, is one of the outcomes that you might hope from this book is a bunch of lawmakers read it and are like, my God, we've got to close this loophole.

27:13

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Let's actually pass some laws.

27:15

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

We have regulation on the book saying, yeah, you might have donated your donate or given your data to 23andMe.

27:22

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And if they go out of business, like they can't sell that data on, like it gets destroyed.

27:26

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And it also made me think, I don't know what, if it's good to put the onus on all of us individuals,

27:32

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

we have to go around and delete all of the data, have a digital will in place for everything that we've ever had online,

27:39

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

or if it should actually be on the onus of anyone who's storing people's data.

27:43

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And this is maybe a use for AI, if that data account becomes inactive over a period of time,

27:48

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

or if you're able to upload when somebody dies to a register that then goes out,

27:53

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

everyone, internet, this human being has left the earth, and everybody's got to nuke their data.

28:00

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Because I wouldn't even know where to start in nuking my data.

28:04

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And I'm one of these people that would love to leave no trace.

28:07

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Like, I don't care about being part of the collective vibe.

28:09

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Like, my work is my legacy, but my personal data, I would love that just to be gone.

28:14

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

But I thought, you know, how would I do that?

28:17

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And also, how do I check that they've done it?

28:19

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

I deleted my Facebook account back in 2016, after they were selling data and being really naughty with Cambridge Analytica.

28:26

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

They say that they've deleted it, but I can't audit that.

28:29

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

I don't know, you know?

28:30

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

So I was thinking, I was thinking as I was reading your book,

28:32

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

do you want this to be something that all of us have to add to our personal to-do list?

28:36

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Like, come up with a will and figure out all this stuff,

28:38

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

which, you know, we know is not going to happen, frankly.

28:40

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Even if people could do it, I think that just, that's a big friction point.

28:44

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Or do you want to see a legal requirement out there for organizations to do it?

28:51

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

I certainly want to see more legal requirements.

28:53

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

I think that, like, in the GDPR, the GDPR explicitly states that your data protection rights cease upon death.

29:02

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And I think that it would be a good thing to include dead people.

29:08

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Like, not to grant dead people the exact same kinds of rights that the living are granted through the GDPR,

29:16

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

but analog rights, at least.

29:20

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

You know, some basic level of protection.

29:23

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Like, for me, it's crazy that, like, if a company goes bust,

29:27

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

even if they have hundreds of thousands or millions of dead people on their servers,

29:33

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

they can do whatever they want with it.

29:35

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And I'm like, how is that possible?

29:38

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And I often get that question from when I do media.

29:41

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

People are like, but why?

29:42

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Like, why don't the dead have any data privacy rights?

29:45

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And my answer is that, well, the dead don't have very strong lobbying groups in Brussels.

29:53

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And also, everybody's so uncomfortable talking about death.

29:56

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

You know, most people, how many people are walking around,

29:58

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

they don't even have a will for themselves much.

30:00

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Unless they're thinking about, how could my data be used?

30:02

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Does Mark Zuckerberg want to turn me into a slave on one of his metaverse farms in 20 years' time?

30:07

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Or every woman that's on the internet could just become an object of deep fake porn after their death

30:13

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

because there's literally no right, not that we have any rights now, by the way,

30:15

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

to take that stuff down while we're alive.

30:17

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

But there really would be no leg to stand on, so to speak.

30:20

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

If you're taking dead women's profiles, who's going to fight for that?

30:24

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

It's so gross.

30:25

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

So I loved your book for this because I was like, he's going there.

30:28

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

He's going to like, he's making us all go to the place that most of us don't want to think about.

30:35

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

We're in a bit of denial.

30:37

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Lawmakers don't want to because there's no voting rights in it, right?

30:40

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Everybody could just see business and be like, oh, this is like another cost for us.

30:44

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

But you talk about this in such a fascinating way.

30:49

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And it made me really think about also the role of archivists and librarians

30:54

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

and people who over time have had to, you know, they're constantly having to A, organize this ever-expanding corpus,

31:02

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

if you will, of information and keep up with all the formatting changes, etc.

31:08

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

Talk to me about the role of these like unsung heroes who keep our knowledge stewarded and accessible for all of us.

31:15

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

And like, can we draw on their expertise to help us out here?

31:17

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

I think your question highlights an interesting point about the entire tech discourse,

31:25

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

which is that it's either very short-term focused.

31:31

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

It's about like what's going to be the next blockchain breakthrough or, you know,

31:43

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

but what if AI in 100 years destroys humanity?

31:48

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

But the questions that are like two or three decades ahead of us tend to be forgotten.

31:55

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And I think there are two reasons for that.

31:57

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

The one is that the industry is not interested in things happening two or three decades from now

32:02

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

because it's vain to do any kind of investments that long term.

32:07

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And policymakers aren't really interested either because politics runs on a four or five-year cycle

32:14

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

where you want to be re-elected, so you're going to have to deliver results on a short horizon.

32:21

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

It's not like we're saying, oh, I'm going to vote for this party

32:24

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

because they made some really good choices 25 years ago that have paid off now.

32:30

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

So both the industry and politics run some of these very short-term cycles.

32:37

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Whereas librarians and archivists, they're concerned with the long term.

32:42

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And there are really good things happening from that community.

32:46

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

There's, of course, the Internet Archive who are doing a very, very important job.

32:51

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

The Wikimedia Foundation who are doing an amazing job in just preserving human knowledge

32:58

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

and expanding it to more and more languages.

33:01

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

UNESCO has a number of really interesting initiatives on software heritage

33:07

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

and trying to preserve software for the future.

33:12

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

But these are on the fringes.

33:17

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

They're not really part of the bigger battles about the really, really valuable data,

33:25

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

the personal data, the stuff that connects the private with the collective and the political.

33:32

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

So it's almost like we've surrendered the parts that tell the really interesting history about the past.

33:42

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Probably because there are really difficult lines of conflict here.

33:48

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

So, sure, we all recognize that an archive like Facebook has a massive historical value.

33:57

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Of course, imagine if we would have had access to that granularity of data on, say, Germany in the 30s.

34:06

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Like, the historical insights would have been massive.

34:10

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

Or if we could have read the WhatsApp messages from Napoleon and his conversations with his private conversations with the officers the night before battle.

34:21

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

I mean, that would have been an amazing, both on a collective level and individual level, an amazing historical asset.

34:29

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And it's not like that as it doesn't exist.

34:31

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And we realize that there are conflicts here between the privacy of the dead and the historical value.

34:38

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

But I don't think that is a sufficient reason to just completely capitulate these questions to big tech.

34:47

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

It's almost like, you know, oh, like as long as the state doesn't do it, it's fine.

34:53

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

And we have a good and healthy precaution for state dominance.

35:00

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

when it comes to control of the past we've all read george orwell's 1984 and we know that whoever

35:05

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

controls the past controls the future and so forth but when this discourse was born it's as if we

35:13

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

couldn't imagine a bigger data controller than a state where like a state is like the peak of

35:21

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

the data controller but now it's a different kind of organization that we got to keep an eye out for

35:28

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

which is not states but multinational tech corporations who vastly outsize states when it

35:36

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

comes to data control but we're still very focused on like oh let's make sure that the state doesn't

35:42

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

have too much data about its citizens let's outsource that to some companies that have that do not have

35:50

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

our best interests in mind nor any long-term incentives to to do the right things and to take

35:57

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

like a counter argument to everything we've just been discussing because there's a part in your book

36:01

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

it's on page 123 for those who would like to follow along you actually raised the idea that it could

36:07

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

potentially be more advantageous and i wondered if it might be even more ethical to do research

36:13

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

on the dead than people who are alive so when you're doing your market trends you're trying to

36:19

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

understand public health questions you know why do people take vaccines or not for example during the

36:24

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

pandemic i mean you can imagine the pandemic research that's going to need to be done as we

36:28

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

prepare for the next one etc it made me think about what what we already have as researchers uh with

36:37

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

ethical constraints people being comfortable etc is there a way of of flipping this entire problem on

36:45

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

its head and going actually there's a uh ethical advantage to using the dead as a as a dedicated

36:54

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

data set and i don't know if that would need to be at the national level so like here in the united

36:59

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

kingdom we have the national health service that's a massive massive potential data set again it's not

37:05

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

joined up nearly enough to fulfill that potential now but it could be it could be made that way and you

37:10

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

could then also match that with all the historical data of everybody who's been in the uk that we know

37:14

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

whatever we have so far and build it forward with that in mind that would be an incredible advantage

37:20

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

for the united kingdom that's one way of doing it on a national level you're right we could also even

37:26

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

take that up to a un level or a world health organization level etc is can you see any way that

37:35

S… Speaker 2 (NSR3767373879)

there's an ethical advantage to doing research on the dead in this way oh certainly like i uh i can see

37:41

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

many ethical advantages on that and i think that we even there's even an ethical imperative to study

37:48

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

the past uh and learn from the past uh and i think that previous generations should allow for that kind

37:56

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

of research on on their digital footprints but we must we must recognize that there are multiple forms of

38:05

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

value at play here there's of course the economic values that could come out of that sure you could

38:11

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

build better ai models based on the data of the dead you can do different kinds of uh uh market

38:20

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

research and so on you can do medical research on it but it also has a cultural value uh so like to

38:27

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

giving a give you an example economically north american users are way way more valuable than say

38:35

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

african users who only economically so economically they're like much much more valuable so it could not

38:44

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

like from a pure economic perspective it makes sense to preserve the digital heritage of north america and

38:52

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

and europe but basically just to destroy the african and south asian data but culturally and ethically

39:02

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

we realize that uh-uh we can't really do that because there's a value cultural value in diversity of our

39:11

S… Speaker 1 (NSR3767373879)

digital heritage and then you can add on like other layers on top of it's not just the cultural and

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