Augmented eternity: scientists aim to let us speak from beyond the grave

Advances in artificial intelligence could give us digital immortality, distilling a lifetime's worth of online presence into a deathless version of ourselves

Would you like a version of yourself to live on after death? A radical new concept called "augmented eternity" could make that fantasy a reality, creating a posthumous impression of our knowledge, opinions and even parts of our personality in digital form.

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Ryerson University in Toronto believe that by applying artificial intelligence to all the data we produce each day, we may be able to transfer our thoughts to a virtual entity that not only survives our physical demise but continues to learn as new information is plugged into it.