Description:

As new technologies are bought forth into the world, they make a significant impact on our everyday lives but also on our deaths. Multiple articles in the press have highlighted the psychological challenges for families and friends dealing with the digital afterlives of relatives on social media. Emerging technologies such as digital twins are on the rise and are set to increase these complexities. For example, a recent Microsoft Copilot advertisement asks us to imagine ‘being in three meetings at once’, and the ’ghost-bot’ (AI created media content using images of the deceased) industry in China is already on the rise.

As societies, however, we are yet to consider the ethical implications of digital twin technologies. Echoes of the Living imagines a future world where AI and brain-computer interface technology has proliferated. Through speculative digital storytelling, the site provokes the audience to consider the ethics of emergent digital twin technologies, and provocatively asks us to contemplate whether we would like to meet our dead loved ones once again. We are asked to ponder the relationship between humans and technology, and to consider wherein lies the essence of humanity when super-intelligence arrives.

Echoes of the Living is set in a future world that was inspired by both current technological trends in artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces, and ancient rituals for death and remembering, such as Mexico’s Day of the Dead and China’s Qingming Festival. Drawing on these insights, a story was created that integrated new technologies into ancient rituals; that described the future world and its technologies, but that also retained all the emotion, memory and connection intrinsic to losing and remembering a loved one. In doing so, Echoes of the Living asks us to consider how we are different from a digital doppelganger composed of data? The story foregrounds the questions of what happens to our data, how we perceive it, who owns it, and how is it managed.

The design of the digital storytelling site is inspired by the juxtaposition of the ancient and the futuristic. The AI generated illustrations are contrasted with the hand drawn/created background features used in the site such as Chinese rice paper with ink effects and Chinese characters. The music was chosen and manually enhanced to echo the narrative of the story, with the first piece of music evoking an eerie yet somewhat uplifting sensation, and the second incorporating lyrics from a Chinese poem about the Qingming Festival.

Design futures projects frequently use utopian or dystopian tropes and can often be detached from everyday life and experience. Echoes of the Living intentionally combines the high tech, the ancient, and the spiritual, offering a more everyday vision of the future. By doing so, this enables the audience to authentically locate themselves in the future world and to realistically consider the ethical consequences of digital twin technologies.