"How to Become Virtually Immortal" by Laura Parker for The New Yorker (Illustration by Dadu Shin.)
"[Eterni.me] plans to store data from Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, photos, video, location information, and even Google Glass and Fitbit devices. While you are living, you can curate and add to this material; you can also choose privacy settings and determine what information you want stored and made public. Eterni.me then allows you to create a list of people who will be contacted and given access to your account in the case of death, giving your descendants quick and easy access to that Instagram pic of your latte or a detailed history of your Facebook pokes.
The service’s defining feature is a 3-D digital avatar, designed to look and sound like you, whose job will be to emulate your personality and dish out bits of information to friends and family taken from a database of stored information. A user will be encouraged to 'train' its avatar, through daily interactions, in order to improve its vocabulary and conversational skills. Eterni.me’s co-founder, Marius Ursache, thinks of it as a more advanced version of Siri, who, ten or fifteen years from now, will be able to 'respond to questions more naturally, and learn from every conversation you have with her.'"