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Meet The Digital Embalmers Helping Celebrities, Brands And Individuals Plan Their Digital Afterlives

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What happens when a company's CEO who's active on social media passes away? Does his family or the brand own what he said, tweeted, uploaded while he worked in the c-suite?  Can the CEO be brought back as a hologram for a shareholders meeting? While these questions might sound like sci-fi, they are looking more like sci-reality.

A new breed of professional is helping find a way for many to keep "living on" after death, and while many call them digital embalmers, a better term is keepers of our digital afterlife.  

Meet some of the professionals working with Hollywood heavyweights, top brands, and regular individuals to define digital legacy technology and safeguard digital presence in the future.

The Digital Likeness & Legacy Consultant

Kathleen Cohen is a digital likeness & legacy consultant and AR VR strategist, based in Los Angeles. She believes that in the next 25-years, the entertainment industry will change faster than it's ever had before, and there will be a land rush going on with respect to celebrities and executives and everyday people's likeness and legacy.

Cohen describes our current era as protopian, one of becoming, where the future will be better than the present, but it won't be perfect. While her likeness and legacy consulting business is just getting started, she's already helping clients discover, safeguard, and prepare their digital twin, a digital representation of a real-world entity or system. Cohen imagines how digital twins will transfer to the consumer side, especially within architecture, retail, hospitality, tourism, and location-based entertainment (LBE) industries.

Many people will live in smart cities and in time humans will live in a smart world. Every lamp post, house, and street sign will have a digital twin in the metaverse. In that metaverse, each person will have a digital twin who will be linked to themselves. Cohen says we have to decide now what our digital twins will look like while a person is alive and what they will look like after a person dies. 

Will diseases and mental conditions pass on to digital twins? Will gender and height? What if digital twins are a representation of our morals, emotion, and intent and less about our physical looks? Who owns your DNA, and who can bring you back in a digital or physical form in the future? As AI fills in the blanks of human behavior, digital likeness & legacy consultants like Cohen ask these questions to make sure digital twins are (or not) an accurate representation of their human counterparts and Hollywood heavyweights are knocking on her door to help them deal with the future that's already here.

The Agent to Hollywood's After Life

Travis Cloyd, CEO of Worldwide XR, has said, "influencers will come and go, but legends will never die." Can someone stay a legend if they're digitally recreated? Cloyd and his team at Worldwide XR hold and represent the rights for more than 400 celebrities, athletes, and sports teams. They plan to bring actors like James Dean back to the big screen with CGI and machine learning.

To some, it may seem a bit uncanny to digitally recreate a long-deceased actor for a new movie. However, with machine learning, AI, and people's love of avatars, a digital twin continuing on after one's death is a probable reality. People can state on their driver's licenses if they want to be organ donors. Why not also have a checkbox to be digitally recreated?

According to Cloyd, Worldwide XR's goal is to protect and expand the legacy of each celebrity icon we work with. They want to help their legacies extend past the history books, and placing them into immersive experiential media helps with that. They aim to give audiences more insights and empathy into their historical relevance, as well as providing educational tools. 

"You can't achieve what we are doing in textbooks, or through pictures or even passive video," said Cloyd. "With 5G we are entering a new wave of consumer technology, and old school means of storytelling are advancing. Utilizing new school game engine software allows for more interactive engagement. These experiences can be distributed through mobile or wearable hardware into school systems, or even into your living room."

He also adds that they have found a strong demand from brands that want to not only generate awareness but also want to tap into new technologies and associate themselves with prestigious celebrity brands that have a pre-existing audience.

The Professional Organizer that Backs Up Your Life

While backing up your brain isn't yet a service (probably being worked on in stealth), a company founded by Annette Adamska, brings a new twist to the idea of a professional organizing company.

Adamska created Back Up Your Life after her mother suffered a terrible accident, leaving her quadriplegic, and later passing away. Adamska soon realized her mother had left no plans, her documents weren't organized, and her passwords were nowhere to be found. 

Adamska also saw a business opportunity to help organize people's cluttered digital lives. She works with clients to back up everything from passports to passwords, memories to life documents, and help them create contingency plans for their current and digital afterlives. 

Her service seems especially pertinent as people's social media and digital identities aren't going anywhere. Adamska is making it happen and helping organize our digital lives to survive us.

The Future of Us: Creating the Next Age of Humanity 

Quantitative futurist, Amy Webb, calls this new era we are entering the Synthetic Decade. It's an era where she says there will be a deep push to develop synthetic versions of life, from digital twins to engineered DNA to plant-based pork sausages, and everything in between. 

In the synthetic years ahead, we will see digital legacy consultants and digital embalmers become a wider known profession. These new keepers of our digital afterlives are an example of how technology continues to change us as a society and even as a species. 

Now the question is, have we truly entered the age of digital immortality?

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